Denis never bit me. He didn’t care what I looked like. He loved me for me and taught me to do the same. I became confident, funny and charismatic, just like Denis. He had a self-deprecating humour, too. He often misjudged the height of the kitchen worktop and would come tumbling down. He would style it out with a cheeky look, as if to say: “I meant to do that.” Because of him, I survived secondary school and beyond. His confidence, charm and mischievousness helped me understand that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
Bonded by physical pain, by water, by stillness, the narrator feels like she’s on a pendulum between two different selves, never certain which will prevail. The feeling is at times unsettling. “In a practical sense another’s physical pain can never be ours.” Pain is something woven tight to the self.
This is a novel of layers, starting with the name. The Echoes is the name of a place in the novel, but also reflects the echoes of life that stay with us even when we want to leave them behind. It examines the idea of an afterlife as another kind of echo that reverberates and never leaves the last place its life form inhabited. It feels starkly different from other novels that revolve around life after death in the way it examines death’s impact as well as the secrets that stay with us unbidden.
One of the book’s most beautiful qualities is its unusual mapping of interior landscapes as also ecological ones. The inner and outer are inextricably bound, she intimates; our actions shape what endures of the environment, but ecological absences shape our psyches and bodies, too.