MICHELLE DE KRETSER Scary Monsters. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Miles Franklin-winner Michelle de Kretser offers unsettling possibilities and questions to ponder in her latest fiction.

Scary Monsters is really two novels in one book. The publishers decided to print each novel so that it starts from the opposite end of the book. You can choose which to read first, then flip the book over and start the second. It is a gimmick but the advertising blurb suggests that it represents the upheaval migrants experience when they move to live in an unfamiliar culture, and both novels are voiced by migrants.

Lili and Lyle have both lived in Australia for many years and have learned how to assimilate themselves to the cultural differences. Lily, however, has now taken a seven-month teaching job in France and is experiencing yet another culture.

Lyle and his family, who migrated to Australia from Asia, have made great efforts to be ‘Australian’. ‘People like us,’ says Lyle, ‘will never be invisible so we have to make a stupendous effort to fit in.’ His wife, Chanel, chose new names for them when they first arrived and told him not to look back, because ‘That’s not the Australian way. It’s a modern country that looks to the future.’

Lyle’s account of his life in Melbourne is funny but worrying. It quickly becomes apparent that his story is set in the near future when everything that is happening now in Australia has become more extreme. Fires frequently blanket the city in smoke; ‘Severe Weather Events’ are common, and Sydneysiders who ‘had it sweet before their homes fell into the sea’ are all moving to Melbourne; deadly viral infections constantly crop up and mask-wearing is a normal part of daily life. Islam is banned and Muslims are repatriated. So, too, is any immigrant who transgresses the many new laws. Lyle comments sardonically that:

Our prime minister is a strategic genius. Since seventy-five percent of the population have a grandparent born overseas, his repatriation policy had an immediate effect on dissent.

Dissent or protest in any form, be it about ecology, Aboriginal rights, government policies or other critical issues, is punished. ‘The Department’, where Lyle works, keeps records of everything. Lyle, who has access to some records because his boss (who is often away from the office for dubious ‘family reasons’) finds it convenient to let him know his secure password, becomes dangerously involved in doctoring his brother-in-law’s tax record when it is highlighted for ‘potential investigation’.

‘The Amendment’, too, has changed the right-to-die legislation and made the process ‘entirely straightforward’ and easier to implement.

Once the service fee is paid you receive a PDF called ‘Moving On Emotionally’, along with e-vouchers for discounted bunting and champagne. Then it’s a matter of setting the date … That’s not the only benefit it’s brought: the economy is perking up as inheritances are spent, the housing shortfall has been alleviated.

This throws Lyle into a quandary when his elderly mother (who lives with his family) becomes ill with suspected bowel cancer but refuses all medical investigation. At the same time, he and Chanel have the chance to invest in an exciting new ‘once in a lifetime’ housing development, but must sign up quickly before others buy all the units. It is clear that his mother must make a decision, and the chance of a farewell party with all her friends and family, where she will be the centre of attention, will be attractive to her, but no-one wants to be the one to discuss it with her.

Lyle and Chanel have been able to afford a good education for their two children. They are proud of their daughter, Mel, who is now studying architecture in Chicago. However, she has declined their offer to pay for her to come home for Christmas, because she has let her friends think she grew up in New Zealand and ‘Being Australian is so, like, shameful. Everyone just assumes you’re a racist, Islamophobic climate vandal and coffee snob.’

Sydney, their son, is more of a worry. He has ‘taken leave of absence’ from the final year of his PhD and joined a ‘Green’ community called ‘Shaking the Grass’. This is too close to dissent and activism for Lyle’s comfort.

There is one non-binary character in the book. The exotic Lyric has ‘half his hair shaved off, and the rest might be blue with orange spots’; he also changes his eye colour frequently. Lyric’s chosen pronoun is ‘they’, which caused me some confusion when I read that Lyle had been called to a meeting and ‘they got to the huddle space first’. ‘They’ and ‘huddle’ made me assume, wrongly, that the huddle space held a group of people until it become clear that Lyric was the only other person present.

De Kretser makes Lyle’s life, his family, his worries and the world he lives in quite like our own. We recognise the pitfalls in some of the choices he makes, even if he does not. The ending of the book, however, leaves major events unresolved and offers, instead, a cryptic story, remembered by Lyle, which left me baffled.

Lili’s story, at the other end of the book, is very different and set in the recent past. She looks back on her life as a twenty-two year old who arrived in Montpellier to teach English at a French high school for seven months. She speaks French fluently, having studied it as part of her degree, but it is textbook French: asking the way or opening a bank account. ‘I’d listen to myself reproducing sentences from grammar books. I relished the strangeness of it.’ French novels have provided her with a wide vocabulary, but unlike her friend Minna’s boyfriend, Nick, who had spent holidays in France, she did not ‘know the name of the leader of the Communist Party, or that “une clope” was slang for “une cigarette“.’

Lili first met Nick and Minna at a colleague’s party, and she and Minna had ‘plunged into friendship’ like ‘addicts immersing ourselves in a drug’. They spent their free afternoons listening to music, smoking, snacking on chocolate and sugary biscuits, and scanning the fashion magazines that Minna used as inspiration for her own unconventional style.

Minna’s favourite shirt was bubblegum pink with orange leaves. ‘I love this shade of pink,’ she told me. ‘It goes with everything. Neon colours are modern joy.’

Her aim, she tells Lili, is the ‘uglification of clothes’.

One of the first things Lili notices about the French is what she calls a ‘flick-flick’ – ‘the lightning, down-and-up glance’ with which they ‘assessed, classified and dismissed her’.

The flick-flick grew frenzied around Minna. She stirred a special mix of horror and pity in the breasts of French men. They wished to save her, but how? They might have been watching a mountaineer step wilfully off an alp – it was tragic, and there was nothing to be done. Whenever the sight of Minna induced that look of appalled bewilderment, we’d cry, ‘Goal!’, wet a finger and mark a strike on the air.

Lili’s own dark skin colour, inherited from her Armenian grandmother, often causes a problem when the gendarmes swarm into the flea market where she likes to browse. They start checking people’s papers, looking for illegal North African immigrants, and they always ask for her ID, but when she shows her own Australian passport she is deemed ‘not ang-ter-es-sung’.

Lili finds furnished accommodation in an ancient apartment building in the historic centre of Montpellier. ‘Furnished,’ she concludes, is ‘only a label used to evict tenants without fuss.’ The furnishing is adequate, but the toilet is up a flight of steps at the top of the building and the lights on the stairs have an automatic timer which usually times out before she is ready to walk back down to her rooms. She has recurring fears about murderers (scary monsters) lurking on the dark stairs and these fears begin to focus on Rinaldi, a man who lives on the floor below hers and has taken to lurking about so he can speak to her.

Apart from these fears, Lili’s life is calm. She makes new, interesting friends, settles into the French way of life and has fun with Minna, but without ‘the scaffolding of study’, which had come down when she graduated, ‘things felt makeshift’:

Being young and clever and streaked with unfocused ambition, I was given to panic. Life was a bridge strung across a ravine: I was moving over it fast, and it was collapsing behind me like a scene in a film … My days were pure suspension neither before nor after, a tireless now.

Michele de Kretser draws the reader easily into the lives of people whose thoughts and actions provide insight into their characters. In many ways their worries, ambitions, joys and fears are like our own and the world is much as we know it but with subtle differences. Lyle’s world reflects that of any hard-working man trying to do the best for his family, his migrant status is apparent and adds to his feelings of insecurity but it is just part of his worries. Lili, too, is occasionally made aware that her skin colour is different to that of those around her, but this is not a major theme in her story. De Kretser is too good an author to dwell on any of the barely-concealed issues which prevail in their worlds and ours. Instead, she creates lives which are interesting, stories which are humorous and enjoyable and, at the same time, leave the reader with some unsettling facts, possibilities, and questions to ponder.

Michelle de Kretser Scary Monsters Allen & Unwin 2021 PB 320pp $32.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Australian fiction, Australian women writers, dystopia, euthanasia, Michelle | de Kretser, Paris