Evie Wyld’s previous novel, All the Birds, Singing, is one of my favourite books, so I’m both keen to read The Bass Rock and a little trepidatious. By the start of the second chapter I know I’m going to love it. Vivianne, one of three female protagonists, answers the door to a delivery guy in the middle of the day in her dressing gown. Her waste bin and recycling are overflowing. She’s 40. I don’t need protagonists to be relatable but it’s unusual to read about a character who’s over 35, lives alone, is neither a complete mess nor super competent. I like her. I feel seen. Vivianne lives in London but, throughout the novel, travels back and forth to North Berwick to sort out the personal items in her grandmother’s house, which is up for sale following her grandmother’s death.

The second protagonist is Ruth, recently married to Peter who has two boys from his first marriage. It’s post-World War II and Ruth’s negotiating how to be a wife to a man she doesn’t know very well, in a place far from her London roots, while also attempting to be a mum to two boys whose mother has died. The third woman is Sarah. It’s the 1700s and she’s on the run, having been accused of witchcraft. She’s sheltered by a family whose son narrates the story. All three women are linked by their proximity to Bass Rock, an island off the coastline, but also by the violence – physical and psychological – that is inflicted upon them by men. Wyld draws the links between these women through the structure of the chapters which move from Vivienne to Ruth to Sarah to Ruth and back to Vivienne. She also provides echoes between the years, both through actions and incidents that reoccur and through items passed between the generations.

Wyld’s purpose is to bear witness to the incidents of violence against women that have taken place for centuries. She makes this clear through the character of Maggie, a woman Vivienne meets in a supermarket in the opening chapter. It’s late at night and Maggie warns Vivienne there is a man creeping around by her car. They meet again in a later chapter where we discover that Maggie is homeless, considers herself a witch and sometimes undertakes sex work. Vivienne is wary of Maggie and, initially, so am I, until I realise that Wyld’s making me consider how we think about women who warn us about the behaviour of men. Of course they’re wild and weird and unpredictable, according to patriarchal societal conventions. Maggie’s the friend who, when you’re dismissing male behaviour that’s made you feel uncomfortable, reminds you yes, all men.

It’s an image that Maggie conjures that stays with me after I finish reading the book. She asks:

What if all the women that have been killed by men through history were visible to us, all at once? If we could see them lying there. What if you could project a hologram of the bodies in the places they were killed? […] We’re just breezing in and out of the death zone. Wading through the dead.

I think about all the places I’ve lived and wonder whether there’s a dead woman in each one. I think about the route I take from my flat into Sheffield city centre and wonder how many dead women lie along it. It’s been days and I’m still haunted by it.

The Bass Rock is a novel about women and time: women across generations of a family, across time periods in history, across planes in a geographical setting, across narrative points of view. Its thematic concerns are concentrated in the titular Bass Rock: an island in the East of Scotland that continually draws the female characters of this novel, almost exerting its own force of gravity in the narrative.

At the forefront of this novel is a kind of psychogeography: not so much an exploration of how a place can affect its inhabitants (though that's certainly present), as the term is traditionally used, but moreso the way that a place can absorb its inhabitants' lives and histories. (I'm about to whip out some literary theory that I'm absolutely not well-equipped to handle but here we go.) In literary theory, there's a term, "chronotope," that's used to examine how narratives approach their settings in both spatial and temporal ways. And really, I think that's the perfect term to use for Wyld's novel; the significance of the Bass Rock as a setting is right there in the title.

The Bass Rock is the sun around which the narratives of this novel orbit. Critically, and in line with a chronotope, it's two-pronged, its significance rooted in both time and space. The Bass Rock, as a place, is the common denominator of the three perspectives that comprise this novel. The Bass Rock means different things to each of the three principal characters in their respective time periods. In the 1950s it is a kind of anchor for Ruth, a wife who feels psychologically and physically adrift in a new environment. In the 1700s it is an ominous presence, bearing witness to the violence inflicted on a girl accused of being a witch. And finally, in the present-day it is a kind of reminder of an unknown history for Viv, who is sent to prepare her grandmother's house by the Bass Rock to sell. All three perspectives of the novel prominently feature and take place by the Bass Rock. Regardless of what the Bass Rock comes to mean for these characters, it is always there.

But more than just its recurrence as a geographical setting, the Bass Rock also transcends historical time in this story. It is a silent witness to a gendered violence that remains constant regardless of the time period, whether in the 1950s, the 1700s, or the present day. In particular, Wyld examines the ways in which violence against women doesn't lessen over time so much as it gets diverted into different channels, mutates forms. Indeed, it is a violence which becomes natural in a very literal sense: the blood of women having been absorbed into the water surrounding the Bass Rock, its shores, the very soil from which new life grows.

Having said all that, this is not a bleak novel, necessarily, nor is it exclusively preoccupied with thematic concerns at the expense of its characters. To the contrary, despite the many points of view that she had to juggle in this narrative, Wyld treats them and their arcs with care and attention. Certainly there were certain perspectives given more time than others, but I never felt like any of them were underdeveloped. Considering, also, how much these perspectives intersected with and informed one another, it's quite impressive what Wyld has managed to pull off here.

The Bass Rock is an absolutely absorbing novel that deftly handles multiple perspectives and explores some complex, compelling themes. For those who enjoyed All the Birds, Singing, The Bass Rock is leaps and bounds better; for those who didn't (i.e. me), The Bass Rock might just change your mind about Evie Wyld.

Based mostly in North Berwick, Wyld’s new novel is set across three interlinked timelines and protagonists and moves between first and third person. I love searching for clues as to how people fit together in multi-narrator works like this, but I’ll admit that I couldn’t quite fit the third narrative (which is set furthest in the past) into the others, except that the box with the teeth features in it too. Each timeline illustrates how women have been abused by men, physically and mentally, throughout history but this isn’t a particularly depressing novel; the strong female characters and what they’ll do for each other make it uplifting, as well as devastating. With the gothic fairytale elements of witches and wolves that run through it, The Bass Rock would pair very well with Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, which also takes domestic abuse as its focus.

'She sat down on the still and collected herself. It wouldn't do to become actually mad.'

The Bass Rock follows the three narratives of three different women living in North Berwick in different periods of time.

First of all, I found the narratives very distinct, which was a very big bonus; usually I struggle to distinguish characters with books with a similar format. It did take me a while to settle into the story, but once I had, I really enjoyed it. I cared for the characters and was eager to see where the connection between them would lead.

The Bass Rock is a well written and, at times, heartbreaking novel. The constant abuse of women throughout is both awful and frustrating. It is displayed in many different forms, psychological and physical, and shows what women have had to - and still have to - suffer at the hands of men.

I'm still not entirely sure what to make of this novel, but the writing was strong and the characters vivid, so 4 stars seems fitting even if I maybe didn't enjoy the actual story as much as I could have.

Dealing with a lot of unpleasant subject matter the novel seems to be asking what has actually changed from the times when women were burned as witches and how does the evil of the past manifest itself in a place. Big ideas that perhaps explain why I didn't find the ending particularly cathartic - opening up such huge topics means that there isn't an easy solution that Wyld can offer.

Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock was probably my most eagerly anticipated title of the last couple of years. Her second novel, All The Birds, Singing, with its insanely clever backwards structure, was one of my top ten books of the decade; I put The Bass Rock on my4.5 star challenge before it even had a cover because I was so sure I was going to love it. So, perhaps it could never have lived up to such high expectations, and yet I do feel a little disappointed. Before I go any further, I should say that The Bass Rock is absolutely a good novel, and it was utterly cheated by not making the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist (especially given the dubious quality of many of the titles that were longlisted). Wyld is an incredible writer, and, line-by-line, there is nothing about this book that is a letdown. However, it’s made me reflect on what I want from a novel that is really going to blow me away: and I guess I’ve concluded that I put a higher premium on originality – both in terms of structure, and content – than perhaps other readers do. Quite apart from the brilliant structural tricks that Wyld played in All The Birds, I loved its unusual setting – the protagonist, a woman called Jake, spends a good chunk of the novel as a sheep-shearer in the Australian outback – and the way that Wyld experiments with horror tropes. Nevertheless, The Bass Rock totally succeeds in everything that it sets out to do, and it is a bit unfair to be cross at it simply because it isn’t All The Birds.

The Bass Rock, like its predecessor, also takes a slightly experimental structure; the vast majority of the novel is divided between three narratives, linked by place rather than by person. Viv, in the present day, is house-sitting in the shadow of the Bass Rock, a looming presence off the Scottish coast. Ruth, in the 1950s, has just moved into the same house, navigating her relationship with Peter and his two teenage sons, who are having a turbulent time at boarding school. Finally, in the early 1700s, a woman flees for her life into the surrounding woods after she is accused of being a witch. Usually, novels that use dual or triple narratives tie them together tightly – a common trope (much disliked by me) is the person researching their family history – but, although certain links emerge, Wyld is brave enough to let these three strands stand in parallel. While I thought this aspect of the novel worked, I still found that I was constantly wishing to return to Ruth’s story, which felt by far the strongest of the three. I hate to say it, but aimless millennial narrators like Viv are starting to irritate me; she’s an old millennial, but she still fits into a groove that I feel has become increasingly worn. Meanwhile, the early modern witch-hunt felt flat and familiar.

It’s when we’re spending time with Ruth that the book really shines; the way that it traces the quotidian trauma of male violence, and how easily it can become an everyday experience. While all three stories are, of course, concerned with patriarchal power, its threads are seen most clearly in the mundane horrors of Ruth’s world; the predatory local vicar, the boys’ abusive boarding school, how Ruth’s own husband quietly oppresses her, the silencings and smothering of other girls and women. Somehow, Wyld manages to nail not just how violence works but how we come to take it for granted. She doesn’t allow us to judge these characters from outside (of course he’s an abuser; of course that’s rape) but forces us to enter into their heads and understand how difficult it is for them to see things clearly. Her take on this theme is one of the best that I’ve ever seen in fiction, and that alone makes The Bass Rock worth reading.

Set on the Scottish border, and weaving together three different time periods, The Bass Rock is an intriguing, complex, heartbreaking novel about what it's like to be a woman. It is not an easy book to describe, but in essence the story follows three main strands:
In the 18th century, Sarah is a young woman accused of being a witch, on the run and desperate.
In the 1940s, Ruth is lost and alone. She is a new wife, a new stepmother, and is also on the run, this time from the truth.
In the present day, Vivian is struggling to survive, drifting through life, and becomes the accidental conduit through which the past is remembered. There are witches (both past and present), ghosts and madness (both past and present), love and death and everything in between.. Darkly unsettling, deeply disturbing in places, The Bass Rock is also strangely compulsive and beautifully, beautifully written. I was desperate to discover the fates of the women in the different, yet interconnected, eras.

The Bass Rock is central to the story of the three women's lives which are linked and interwoven.

In the 18th Century, Sarah taken for a witch flees with her Priest and his son while in the aftermath of WWII Ruth marries widower, Peter and takes on his two sons. The house, at North Berwick is too big for her when he's working in London and the boys are at school. She befriends Betty, the cook/housekeeper, not particularly wishing to throw herself into village life and still sorely missing her brother.. The Vicar is a strange man who likes to pry into others lives.

In the present day Viviane is getting over her beloved father's death and is tasked with cataloguing Ruth's belongings before the house is put up for sale. She has her secrets, one of which is tearing her relationship with her sister Katherine apart.

The story is beautifully drawn and atmospheric and which touches on mental health issues, physical and sexual abuse, domestic violence, friendship and the strengths of these three special women. Would highly recommend.

Evie Wyld’s new novel, The Bass Rock, is a remarkable piece of work. It’s a long time since I’ve read a novel that has engaged me so thoroughly and moved me to the extremes of this book. Set over three different time periods, the present day, post-World War II and the seventeenth century, the narrative focuses primarily on the lives of three different women, all linked by location and by the looming presence of the Bass Rock.  Just as the rock stands immovable, dark and brooding over the landscape, so too does the question of male sexual violence darken the lives not only of Viviane, Ruth and Sarah but also of the nameless, beaten women whose stories punctuate the seven segments into which Wyld organises her book.

In each of the main storylines the focus rests upon a woman whose relationship with both herself and those around her is to some extent dictated by the men in her life. In the present day, Viviane, commuting between London and Scotland, where she has been tasked with the job of closing down the old family home of her recently dead father, is wracked with guilt at having slept with her sister, Katherine’s, husband, Dom, while at the same time beginning a tentative relationship with Vincent, a man she meets in a queue. In the post war period the narrative centres around Ruth, second wife of the widowed Peter, whose younger son, Michael, is Viviane’s father. Very aware that in the eyes of many she does not live up to the expectations associated with the ‘Lady of the Big House’ and often lonely given the boys absence at school and Peter’s frequent expeditions to London for work, Ruth makes friends with Betty, their cook cum housekeeper and through her begins to understand what motivates the disturbing undercurrents she finds in the society around her. The final strand, set in 1600s, centres on Sarah, proclaimed a witch and forced to flee with a family who, to all intents and purposes, are running not only to protect her but also themselves. These segments are perhaps less well worked than those relating to Viviane and Ruth, but the menace felt by Sarah, the constant danger that she is in simply because she is a woman, is much more directly communicated. And, between each of the seven major segments there is the story of a series of unnamed women, united by the violence that they suffer at the hands of men.  The universality of the theme that Wyld is exploring is given explicit voice quite late in the book:

I can see that there are people in the kitchen with us, there are children and women, all holding hands like us, and I wonder, is this the ghost everyone sees, is it in fact a hundred thousand different ghosts? It’s only possible to focus on one at a time. They spill out of the doorway, and I see through the wall that they fill the house top to bottom, they are locked in wardrobes, they are under the floorboards, they crowd out of the back door into the garden, they are on the golf course and on the beach and their heads bob out of the sea, and when we walk, we are walking right through them. The birds on the Bass Rock, they fill it, they are replaced by more, their numbers do not diminish with time, they nest on the bones of the dead.
Apparently, Wyld was in the middle of writing the novel when the #MeToo movement began and it is clear to see that she is exploring many of the issues relating to violence towards women which that brought to light. However, it would be to diminish this book  to suggest that it is nothing more than a feminist tract. There are good men in the book, especially Christopher, Michael‘s elder brother, and, by implication, Michael himself. Both of them, as boys, have suffered at the hands of predatory men and equally both of them have suffered as a result of a conspiracy on the part of other men who have power over them, to refute any complaint that they might make. Both of them appear to grow up to be decent human beings. It is also the case that to some extent society has conditioned women to be instrumental in their own suffering. We see this in the way in which the post war women readily take part in a traditional picnic that ends in a rite which has obvious sexual overtones and it is there in the attitude of Ruth‘s mother who has no sympathy for Judith‘s loss of a daughter, she had lost her only son after all, which was surely worse than losing a daughter. And, there is also the suggestion that when faced with violence, women don’t always act in their own best interest, almost as if accepting that such treatment is inevitable. When Viviane and Katherine are threatened by an angry Dom on both occasions their response is to freeze rather than to assert their right to safety.

The Bass Rock is a powerful and most beautifully written novel and I was gripped by it from beginning to end. My only question is this: can somebody please explain to me why such an excellent book is not on the long list for the Women’s Prize this year?

With thanks to Random House UK, Vintage Publishing Jonathan Cape and NetGalley for a review copy.

The Bass Rock is an inescapable presence in the Firth of Forth, its shadow threatening and looming those suffering in its shadow. It is dark, it is uninhabited, it is inevitable. It represents the past events that the women can never escape and the constant presence and threat of male violence that each one has, to some extent, accepted as an inevitable part of their lives.

The book follows three women whose stories intersect in North Berwick. There is Viviane, a contemporary woman struggling with life and grief who is cataloguing the contents of a family home after a recent death. There is Ruth, recently arrived with her husband in the 1950s, and struggling to live in the shadow of his first, dead wife and forge a bond with his two young sons while trying to exorcise the ghost of her brother, lost in the war. And long ago in the eighteenth century there is Sarah, accused of witchcraft by men who blame her for their circumstances and their own desire for her. Interspersed between these arcs are the tragic nameless women, victims of violence and never revealed further. It's a complex but tightly controlled structure that produces an elegant and powerful narrative.

Each woman is finding her way in a world that places her second, and in which she has learned to do the same. Gaslighting appears again and again as the men in the story question the motivations and experiences of the women, Reacting with doubt, mockery or anger when they are challenged and twisting realities. Sometimes this is a deliberate tactic to change the subject or avoid the consequences of their actions. Perhaps, more disturbing is when it happens as an unthinking reflex that makes the men automatically dismiss women's voices, when they genuinely believe in every circumstance that their own interpretation is more reliable. The sanatorium and the psychiatric ward are presences in the lives of both Viviane and Ruth and the ability of others to take their freedom and their mental stability is a constant threat.

The toxic masculinity on show isn't wholly reserved for women. By giving Peter young sons boarding away at a private school Wyld also reveals how attitudes and behaviours are transmitted to new generations. The treatment of Ruth's stepsons, Christopher and Michael, and the way that it is dismissed as a necessary evil for “making men” terrible. The silence that surrounds it is reinforced by the fact that, in contrast to unflinching description of women's suffering (mental as often as it is physical), Wyld only glances at it askance and offers mysterious hints. It's part and parcel of the masculine impulse that inspires many of the male characters to “rescue” the women, even against their will. An impulse that is more about possession than protection and which often turns violent when rebuffed.

The narrative themes that tie the whole story together are beautifully done. Episodes of tickling encompass witchcraft, a picnic with Ruth that has unsettling Wicker Man-esque undertones and disputed consent for Viviane. The imagery is full of wolves and foxes, predatory and threatening. The writing itself is delicate for such subject-matter with a welcome black humour. It's full of fury and frustration and it's pitch-perfect.

There is also a Gothic, fairy-tale current that runs throughout. Wolfmen, witches, spirits, foxes wolves and other shadowy predators. It's a haunted story and in haunts in its turn.