Evie Wyld is a prize-winning author, listed on Granta’s most recent Best of Young British Novelists list. She is also fascinated with and terrified by sharks. Or at least she was, during a childhood spent between Peckham, where it was “necessary to wear both socks and shoes”, and coastal Australia, where the risk of selachimorphic death is admittedly higher. So much so, in fact, that her new graphic memoir, Everything Is Teeth, is almost entirely devoted to shark-like things.
Illustrated by Joe Sumner, the book charts Wyld’s life, from hearing Aussie fishermen stories aged six to her grown adult self. From the moment her brother is brought the jaws of a bronze whaler by Father Christmas, Wyld becomes preoccupied with sharks. The captivation is not helped when she discovers a book on shark attacks and falls in love with Rodney Fox‘s “salty eyes” and look which said “the whole thing was just fine”.
Back in London Wyld finds obsession continuing, scouring the Sydenham library for shark books while plagued by a fear which makes baths difficult and forces her to sit with all appendages safely on-board the sofa. An ill-advised viewing of Jaws cements her mindset before the family return to Australia and encounter more sharks in a variety of situations (imaginary and otherwise).
What this simplification of the plot leaves out are the small details of familial life squeezed into both the writing and illustration, the astute observations and interactions from Wyld’s juvenile viewpoint which reveal what the book is really about. Wyld’s father, the pale Englishman, often cuts a lone figure, isolated in London by work and wine and in Australia by layers of clothing and high-factor sun-cream, while her mother floats with Wyld in the pool at night because “she is awake anyway”. When Wyld’s older brother begins “linger[ing] in doorways with a blank look on his face”, and returning home cut and bruised, the home is loaded with tension yet remains cryptic to Wyld, and by extension, us. Be they adolescent anxieties, genuine enduring depressions or just good old fashioned existential ennui, the emotions of the adults remain alien, unknowable and for the most part hidden, present only as dark, lingering shapes and ominous choppy wake.
Indeed, this sharks-as-emotions allegory can be extended further than sadness. From her father’s well-meaning day trip to ‘Vic Hislop’s Killer Shark Show’, to her encounter with an uncomfortably comic doctor, pretty much all of Wyld’s interactions are surrounded by the unseen forces of love and loss. Sumner’s artwork highlights this paradoxically by adding photo-realistic sharks and wounds to his otherwise simple drawings, beasts which often stalk Wyld when, consciously or otherwise, she is considering losing a loved one. Although she doesn’t quite understand it yet, she is thinking about love through its most illuminating prism – the loss of it. She is thinking about death.
While this morbid idea is true and central to the plot, it would be naive and unfair to dwell on it without noticing that, amongst it all, life not only goes on but flourishes. Wyld is never caught by the shark, nor is her brother or mother or father. She might have felt ill examining the colossal White Pointer at Vic Hislop’s museum but the next day she was braver in the sea. Our relationship with sharks is changing, with The Discovery Channel and National Geographic and the seemingly monthly event of ‘Shark Week’ beaming out pro-shark propaganda in which deep-tanned marine biologists preach education and understanding and love. Similarly, the message from Wyld seems not so much ‘LOOK OUT LIFE WANTS TO EAT YOU!’ but rather ‘life could eat you, sure, but such occurrences are exceedingly rare and even then you can poke it in the eye and escape to the hands of kind strangers who prod your guts back into your body’. In other words, learning to accept the atavistic, bone-level violence and pain as something natural, unaware and worthy of careful respect. Its strikes are few and far between, and even then, it’s nothing personal.
Everything Is Teeth is out now on Jonathan Cape/Random House.
As per usual, we’ve made you a playlist of songs that are related to the book. Nothing too subtle this time, I’m afraid, just plenty of teeth and blood sprinkled with Australians and capped off with the definitive garage-rock anthem for sharks.
Tracklisting:
1. The Race – Oh Pep
2. Teeth – Bowerbirds
3. Drawn to the Blood – Sufjan Stevens
4. Swim – Surfer Blood
5. I Want Blood – Water Liars
6. Ocean’s Nerves – Songs:Ohia
7. Jaws of Life – Wintersleep
8. Find Me In The Ocean – Will Samson
9. Blood Song – Stupid Loser
10. Everywhere I Go Smells Like Fish – Donovan Woods
11. King Fish – Sun Kil Moon
12. Lurk Underneath – Trouble Books
13. Blood – The Middle East
14. Shark? – Shark?