SCARY MONSTERS
By Michelle de Kretser
The reader of ‘Scary Monsters’, the eighth book by Australian author Michelle de Kretser, is faced with an unusual dilemma. In a formal experimental conceit that tilts its hat to BS Johnson and Ali Smith, this is a novel with two halves, back to back and printed upside down. De Kretser set 126 pages of the book in France in the early eighties; turn the book the other way and 126 pages are set in a dystopian Australia, several decades in the future. Where you start – with the story of Lili in France or Lyle in Australia – is up to you.
I’m terribly conventional, so I approached “Scary Monsters” in chronological order, starting with 22-year-old Lili in Montpellier. Lili teaches at a local lycée for a year before entering graduate school. She is of unspecified Asian descent but spent her adolescence in Australia. (De Kretser herself was born in Sri Lanka before emigrating to Australia at age 14; she also taught in Montpellier for a year.)
Lili’s best friend in Montpelier is Minna, a complicated character: English, of German-Jewish descent, she arrived in France with only a little French and the false sophistication that a few years at art school bestow. Her boyfriend, Nick, an aspiring writer, follows her. Minna creates artwork inspired by John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”; at one point she drags Lili to Sardinia to interview Berger’s mistress, who is not at home. Minna creates for Lili an alter ego, “Daring Audrey”, who carries a (gag) gun and is reckless and impulsive (though only as directed by Minna).
This is a novel about the immigrant experience, about how Lili, despite her academic achievements, is still subject to ‘immigrant fears’ that make her ‘crawl and pass unnoticed’. She feels a strange affinity with the North Africans who roam the city, harassed by the police and insulted by the locals. “At that time, I believed that the past could be left behind as a country,” says Lili, but the truth is that both seem inescapable. She is not only threatened by her downstairs neighbor, who may or may not stalk her, but also by Minna, who wants Lili as a friend, but only if she conforms to a particularly condescending and oriental view of herself. As the friendship between Minna and Lili comes under increasing strain, the streets of Montpelier erupt in celebration of the election of François Mitterrand’s socialists.
Lili says at one point that ‘when my family emigrated, it felt like we were being put on our heads. Events and their significance came at us from new angles.” I think this explains the unusual structure of the book. Leaving Lili in an uncertain future, we turn the book and jump forward to Lyle, a stuffed bureaucrat in mid-21st century Australia. Lyle lives in one of Melbourne’s most remote suburbs with his wife, Chanel, his mother, Ivy, and his children, Sydney and Mel(bourne). Islam is banned, forest fires are raging unchecked and even talking about global warming is considered incitement. Australia has pursued an isolationist policy, with a particular focus on combating immigration. This is a problem for Lyle, who has come from Asia to seek a better life for his family.
Early in this section, Lyle gives another hint about the book’s structure. “Which comes first, the future or the past?” he asks. “The past only reveals itself fully when we look back on it from now on.” It is an explicit signal to connect the two parts of this book, to see the horrific endgame of Minna’s apparently benign Orientalism. Lyle’s existence as a legal immigrant is as impossible within the system as it is outside the system. This is just another connection point between what, at first glance, appear to be two very different stories, but whose strength lies in the imaginative work the reader must do to connect them, to find clues to the future in the past. It is a brilliant use of negative space and adds to the staying power of this fine and stereoscopic consideration of the migrant experience.