Michelle de Kretser

This book consists of two seemingly unrelated stories, which, given the subtitle of the book, are meant to form a consistent whole. I just can't see how they go together, although I could force some similar or overlapping themes (i.e. immigration).

In the first, Lili, a 20 something Australian whose family had emigrated to Australia when she was a teenager, is now working a temporary teaching job in the south of France. She befriends an English artist, Mina, and several other ex-pats, and they do the sorts of things 20-somethings do, somewhat oblivious of consequences and of how their actions might be affecting others. Nothing serious though. Along the way Lili occasionally observes discrimination against North African immigrants. This whole story just didn't interest me.

In the second story, we are in near future dystopian Australia with another Asian emigrant family, father Lyle, mother Chanel (assumed names), their two kids, and Lyle's mother Ivy. They do everything they can to fit in, including gettin a pet dog and playing the popular on-line game Whack-a-Muslim. There was some very clever world-building here, and the dystopian aspects were extremely plausible. Obviously, a big theme is the fear of immigrants, but there is also an ageism theme going with assisted suicide being encouraged for older people (Ivy). As a stand alone this would have been a competent novella.

As I said, I can't see how these go together.

ETA: Amazon blurb says the "scary monsters' referred to by the title are racism, misogyny, and ageism. And that one of the stories is meant to refer to/represent the past, the other the future, and that you can read them in any order. Enlightened? Not me.

2 stars… (more)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/scary-monsters-by-michelle-de-kretser-brief-note...

Interestingly in the old double format; literally a book of two halves. I liked the non-sf bit more than the sf bit; young lust in France in 1980 vs fascist near-future Australia. The Australia bits seemed to me more about the setting than the plot.… (more)

Michelle de Kretser's Miles Franklin winning novel uses travel as a lens to look at two drastically different protagonists: Laura, a footloose middle-class Australia; and Ravi, a Sri Lankan caught up in that country's brutal civil war. The book follows their life journeys, which ultimately intersect at a travel publishing firm (where else?).

The first third of the novel mainly deals with the interminably boring Laura and her mundane roaming around the usual tourist spots of Asia and Europe. Just as the reader is about to nod off, de Kretser hits you with a head-snapping plot twist that transforms this novel into something very different. The pace and tension pick up from there but unfortunately de Kretser cannot sustain it. The story she tells of Ravi's experiences is emotional, nuanced and topical. However Laura's story is cliched and bathetic, unable to be saved by a surprise ending.

The questions of the title are posed through the key characters' stories. One is "what am I doing here?". Another is "why does everybody have to leave in the end?", immediately followed by "when will it be my turn to leave?'. These deep questions are a great theme for the novel, but could have been much more tellingly explored by cutting Laura's character to the bare minimum and placing the focus on Ravi's more compelling odyssey. In the process, a good editor could have cut 150 pages from an unnecessarily long novel.… (more)