Tension escalates when Lyle’s moral blandness faces corruption and the Amendment,a law that enables “voluntary” euthanasia. Will his rationalisation that killing their old dog was “for Alan’s sake” also apply to his mother,Ivy?
Ivy is the novel’s lynchpin,the subtle link between past and present,old country and new,and the two halves of the book. A passing mention of her cousin,Lilian,is the one clue to how Lyle’s story connects with Lili’s and yet it contains misinformation – the past becomes fiction,fiction becomes memory – as you will learn,or already know if you’ve read that section first.
Lili tells her story as the memory of a time in 1981 when she was 22 years old and living in the south of France. A brown-skinned Asian-Australian,she teaches languages in Montpellier and mixes with a cosmopolitan group of young people,but feels out of place,a disorientated double-migrant.
History is ever-present in France,haunting daily life with the ghosts of totalitarian power and colonialism as well as beauty. Lili reads Simone de Beauvoir’sL’Invitée,aspiring to be a “Bold,Sexy,Modern and Intelligent Woman”. She reads Albert Camus,upset by the murder of the nameless Arab inL’Étranger,but too self-absorbed to understand the hardship of her neighbours. For she is,by comparison,an educated middle-class woman who will leave at the end of summer for Oxford University.
With her artist friend Minna,Lili travels to Sardinia to meet a woman known only as “John Berger’s mistress”. This interlude of mishaps and unplanned meetings (not least with a dog called Gina Lollobrigida) is a gem. Berger,the art critic and author of Ways of Seeing,is another of the novel’s intellectual presences. Though not quoted,he wrote:“The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.”
In a related but more oblique tribute to the style of novelist Shirley Hazzard,de Kretser has her characters crucially misunderstand what they see. And deliciously,she has Lili finish a line of poetry that her friend Nick has forgotten,an echo of the way Hazzard began her friendship with Graham Greene.
This is the other side of de Kretser:the sleek prose textured with cultural allusions,the reflective tone spiced with danger. With the Yorkshire Ripper at large in England,Lili starts to fear her creepy neighbour. Crime-novel noir pervades her mind despite the vivid friendships,political idealism and punk fashions.Scary Monsters is both the David Bowie album they dance to and entrenched human cruelty,a spiked cocktail of nostalgia.
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De Kretser invites us to be active participants in completing a narrative structure that might sound gimmicky but succeeds if the reader is as meticulous as the author. I wondered briefly if I should have read the book in the more chronological order but Lyle’s ghastly future loomed as a warning that the monsters of the past still roam our complacent Earth. Each story is a shapely and engrossing if unresolved novella. Together,however you read them,they form a rich,resonant whole.
In yet another masterful work,de Kretser has pulled out her recipe book and remixed her ingredients into a strong,hallucinatory brew that might make us taste fear and anger before it’s too late. If Lili were alive now,in her 60s,she would be shaken up too.