by Adrian D’Ambra
Michelle de Kretser’s double-handed novel, Scary Monsters, occupies or emanates from so many different binary contexts: leftist progressivism and rightist authoritarianism; the remembered and therefore reconstructed twentieth century and the imagined and therefore speculative twenty-first century; a female narrator breaking down taboos about women’s sexuality and menstruation and a conformist male narrator who is so complicit in the authoritarian social and political structures of Australia in the near future that he rationalises his own self-interest as social conscience; whiteness and skin colour; expatriate travel and immigration; inclusivity and assimilation; old world Europe and new world Australia; colonial domination and postcolonial hybridity.
A context that interests me greatly is the way in which the novel fits itself into the as yet incomplete and unresolved twentieth century civil war between socialism and fascism. Lili’s story, for example, concludes with the 1981 celebration of the election victory of socialist candidate for the French presidency, Francois Mitterrand. Hands, arms and voices are linked in solidarity in the cobblestoned streets of Montpellier as comrades and sympathisers spontaneously break into renditions of ‘L’Internationale’. Bodies are embraced and entwined in an erotic corollary in Lili’s tiny bedsit. Apart from the shadow of the psycho killer and his ghostly white female accomplice in a van, Lili’s narrative concludes on this unashamedly nostalgic and emotionally charged evocation of the victory of progress and reason over tyranny and racism. It is as if the ghosts of the Resistance fighters who had been tortured and executed by the Nazis have finally been laid to rest and a new world of democratic socialism can arise from the defeat of the old.
That was what the world looked like when I was twenty-two. We chanted, ‘They shall not pass!’ and believed that the monsters had been put to rout. All around me, people were striking matches and flicking on lighters that they raised high, hundreds of dithering little flames. ‘L’Internationale’ started up. Lucio sang in Italian, grandly off key. In the distance, tiny lights pinpricked a massive façade – the prisoners in Le Château were holding up matches at their windows. When I saw all those shaky lights answering one another across the dark, I thought of an orchard breathed into new life by white blossom.
Meanwhile and simultaneously, Lyle’s story gullibly outlines the development of an increasingly dictatorial and intolerant system of post-truth, post-trumpian governance in Australia. The religion of Islam has been outlawed and Muslims have been forcefully converted to Christianity, their obligatory attendance at Sunday church monitored via a compulsory app. Voluntary euthanasia is being transformed into a compulsory culling of the over seventy-fives as a means of addressing the housing shortage and promoting the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity. Significant portions of Sydney have been abandoned to environmental collapse, vast swathes of the countryside have become Permanent Fire Zones and Melbourne is almost permanently blanketed in smoke, ash and cinders but it is illegal to discuss the PFZs or to criticise the federal government’s ‘no-climate policy’. Anyone convicted of a criminal offence can be ‘repatriated’ to the country of their birth or their parents’ or grandparents’ countries of birth, thus securing the compliance of the overwhelming majority of the Australian population. Migrants are not only expected to adopt Australian norms and mores such as our obsessions with real estate and consumerism and our valorisation of aspirational greed in every aspect of our lives from education and social mobility to workplace ruthlessness and individual self-improvement, they are also required to abandon their languages, beliefs and cultural practices.
Immigration breaks people. We try to reconstitute ourselves in our new countries, but pieces of us have disappeared. Immigrants are people with missing pieces.
The light-hearted humour of de Kretser’s social satire of academic and literary life in Australia in The Life to Come (2017) has been eclipsed by the darker political satire of Scary Monsters. In terms of that unfinished twentieth century civil war between socialism and fascism that I mentioned earlier, it seems to me that de Kretser has done more than roll the dice in a piece of speculative fiction. Like the aging mother, Ivy, who is being sacrificed to her son and her daughter-in-law’s greed so that they can secure their ‘forever home’ and climb the corporate and social ladders, de Kretser has read the cards and seen who is winning and just where we might be heading in this country. The monsters have not been put to rout. They’ve been working in classrooms, government departments and corporate boardrooms across the land. They’ve been in public service and private practice, administering and abiding by fully legal regulations. They’ve been turning back boats and incarcerating refugees, filibustering any progress on climate change and human rights. And, most importantly, they’ve been collecting and analysing the data on every single aspect of our lives as well as addicting us to the uses and abuses of that data.
Postscript 2024: A companion novel? Hanya Yanagihara’s post-pandemic speculative fiction To Paradise.
english literature teacher 