Call Me Evie is generating a lot of buzz; for me it was a disappointing read.
Kate is held in a house in New Zealand by a man. It’s not clear what her relationship is to the man who controls her movements. She is occasionally allowed out in public with him and told to call herself Evie and say he is her uncle. She is from Melbourne and longs to return there but the man claims she has done something terrible and would be arrested and publicly shamed if she returned. She doesn’t remember what the terrible thing was or her role in it.
Memory loss is consistently overused as a literary device and in this novel there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why the protagonist (Kate/Evie) has problems remembering the night in question, when her boyfriend was viciously assaulted. As a premise, it’s not quite credible that she doesn’t remember because she was drunk. She remembers everything else about that night. If it’s because she was hit over the head with a bottle some weeks earlier, then why she has maintained full recall of events after that injury? If it’s because she’s on medication provided to her by the man, why is it her memories of the night in question don’t return when she secretly stops taking the medication?
In any case, I generally find unreliable narrators to be reliably annoying and Evie/ Kate is no exception. She does completely ridiculous things like invite a young girl into her house -despite the young girl’s obvious discomfort- and lock her in the house, albeit briefly. She runs off barefoot from a house where a neighbour is attempting to help her, and voluntarily returns to the house where she feels herself imprisoned. And the novel is way, wayyyyyy too long. The word count could be halved to tighten the pace.
That said, Call Me Evie does create a viable sense of tension and dread, especially with regards to the relationship between the male character and Kate/Evie. Who is he and is he going to harm her? His occasional physical brutality and the limitations he places on her -locking her in her room, denying her internet access- suggests he may not have her best interests at heart, but then we’re never quite sure. You get to the end and sure, there’s a good reveal but you do kind of think, what was all that about then?
If you want a truly intense, intelligently plotted, mind-bending read, go for The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton instead.
