This New Aussie Novel Will Keep You Up At Night
Australian author Michelle de Kretser talks to Ute Junker about the anger that fuelled her latest novel Scary Monsters.
You won’t pick up another book quite like Michelle de Kretser’s new novel, Scary Monsters, for quite a while. There is a number of reasons for that, but the first one is that it has two front covers. One is imprinted with a delicate images of blossoms; the other, a darker, more dramatic cover, features a cherry on its stem.
The two covers reflect the fact that this is actually two separate tales, printed back-to-back. You read one, then flip the book over and read the other. At first glance, there seems to be little connecting the two stories, which can be read in either order.
One is set in 1980s France, where young Asian-Australian Lili is trying on a new life in a country that seems poised to emerge into a new socialist golden age. The other tells the story of another immigrant finding his way in a strange land. Lyle and his wife Chanel have emigrated to Australia in the near future – it’s an Australia that is almost unrecognisable, and yet, if you squint, it looks familiar. The air is choked with smoke from the Permanent Fire Zone, and the elderly, including Lyle’s mother, are encouraged to choose to be euthanised, to free up the property market.
It's a vision of the future so nightmarish, it literally kept me awake at night. The most terrifying part is that it feels entirely plausible. Michelle says that part of the book, written while the 2019/20 bushfires raged, was written from anger.
“I was just so angry at the government, the lack of concern over environmental issues and climate change on the part of government,” she remembers.
The novel also channels her anger at the lack of respect given to older people today. “It’s as if people need someone to despise,” she says, noting that it is common across the political spectrum. “You even see it on the Left, from people who would never make a racist remark or a misogynistic thought, but they have no problem talking about the old in a dismissive and derogatory way.
“On a governmental level, Australia’s ageing population coincides with the crisis in housing, the crisis in work, the crisis in employment, the crisis in climate. They tie in to each other and build on each other, and the dismissal and contempt for the old can feed into all of these things. And then of course when the pandemic came, we saw the right wing taking it up, commentators saying the old should be left to die.”
These are all symptoms of a society which has a growing inability to imagine what the lives of other people are like. That lack of empathy, reflected in a whole range of political decisions, sees us taking overly-simplistic views of other people.
“People are always 3D and complex, and whether we vilify people or sentimentalise people, both those things do symbolic violence,” Michelle says. “We really need to be consuming novels and films and television shows by all different kinds of people, trying to understand people’s histories, trying to see the reality of them.”
““I have a lower tolerance for bullshit … in situations where I would once have swallowed things, I’m now speaking my mind more directly, including in fiction. It’s that thing of zero fucks given.””
Issues such as racism and ageism – the scary monsters of the title – recur throughout Michelle’s work, but in this book they seem particularly vivid. In Montpellier, Lilli repeatedly finds herself butting up against the reality that she is different to those around her: as a woman, as Asian, as a poor person. Drifting through the city on yet another lonely Sunday while the locals are all enjoying lunch with their families, the only other people Lilli encounters are North African immigrants – also poor, also looked down on, also lonely. Yet far from bringing a sense of solidarity, they add to Lilli’s distress, harassing her as she sits quietly on a bench.
“We were the same colour, the North Africans and I, and that counted for a lot, but it didn’t count for enough,” Lilli says in the book.
“All these different realities, racism, misogyny, ageism, they tangle with each other and complicate everything,” Michelle says. “Lilli should feel some sympathy for them – like her, they are not white in a white society – but on the other hand, she is pissed off that she can’t sit on a bench without one of these men harassing her.”
Michelle’s work often looks at the lives of the underprivileged, the misunderstood, the people left out of other narratives, but she says that as she gets older, she is becoming more outspoken.
“I have a lower tolerance for bullshit,” says the 63-year-old, noting that it’s a trait that many women in their 50s or older will recognise. “In my case it was especially after 60 – I’m a slow learner, it took me longer. Perhaps it is hormonal, perhaps it is about taking stock of our own lives, but in situations where I would once have swallowed things, I’m now speaking my mind more directly, including in fiction. It’s that thing of zero fucks given.”
Nonetheless, Michelle has no illusions about the limitations of literature to effect real change. “I’m cautious of making large claims for it,” she says. “A novel may offer a cathartic experience, but you can close and it put it down and move on to something else. There is always the possibility that literature can help create a better world, and one writes for that possibility, but it is novelistic hubris to believe that one follows the other as night follows day.”
If readers do take something from the novel, Michelle hopes it is the idea that we still have time to create the future we want. As she points out, one of the purposes of a monster is to act as a warning. “The word ‘monster’ comes from the Latin and is related to “demonstrate”, showing something as a warning. We could still be working towards a different future. We don’t know where we will end up. We’re not there yet.”