Scary Monsters
Michelle de Kretser is a two-time Miles Franklin winner but we at Dulwich Hill just know her as a Dully local (and dog minder). Michelle kindly participated in an email exchange about her brilliant new novel, Scary Monsters.
Scary Monsters is two stories—one about Lili in the 1980s and one about Lyle in the not-too-distant future. The physical book is very striking in that it has two (beautiful) covers and can be read from the ‘front’ or the ‘back’. Why?
One reason is that this is a novel told by migrant voices, and migration turns lives upside down. The flip format allows readers to experience—fleetingly and on a micro level—that sense of disorientation, and to ask themselves the question that all migrants must find their way to answering: How do I make sense of this new story?
On first reading, the two stories might seem unrelated. So, why is this a novel and not two novellas?
Another reason for the format—I have a few!—is that a novel is, as you point out, traditionally conceived of as a single continuous narrative. Two radically different, discontinuous narratives with some thematic common ground is my modest shot at upending the novel as a form. There’s a potential blink-and-you’ll-miss-it plot connection that concerns the fate of an important character. Why potential and not clear-cut? Because literature is one of the few places in which ambiguity can be both unsettling and satisfying; it leaves room for interpretation and the exercise of autonomy. I’d like the outcome that’s suggested to haunt the reader as a monstrous possibility, rather than as a certainty.
How does the past (Lili) inform the future (Lyle) and vice versa?
Migration is like modernity in the sense that they both involve loss of the past. When you migrate, the past is no longer a reliable guide to understanding and negotiating your new world. You describe the Lili narrative as the past and Lyle as the future because of their respective time periods; but for the reader who reads Lyle first, that narrative is the past and Lili is the future. And no matter which order you read the novel in, the part you read first will offer no certainty about what will happen in the part you read second. So once again, the flip format embodies the meaning of the novel.
You’ve rarely written in the first person. What made you choose to do so in Scary Monsters and how different was the experience to writing in the third person?
One reason for wanting to try sustained first-person narrative was because it was something new for me. Sticking to what you know you can do is a shortcut to growing stale. It felt awkward, weird and terrifyingly bad when I began. But writing is always a matter of keeping going. Once I’d settled into the first person, I enjoyed it immensely. In third-person narration—even close third-person—the writer is always a voice in the text. The first person enabled me to disappear into my characters, to speak them from the inside, and I found it wonderfully liberating. I had feared that the first person would make me more visible because it’s so closely associated with autobiography. But the opposite happened: I became invisible. In creative terms, the process was hugely satisfying, and I think—hope—that it enabled me to speak directly and intimately to readers.
The Lyle story is a radical departure for you. Not to say your other books haven’t had their funny moments, but the Lyle story is laugh-out-loud funny, while also being a very bleak vision of the future. How did you find that balance?
I’ve always been drawn to dark comedy—all the way from Ruthless Rhymes to Swift to Anna Burns. I slightly exaggerated both the comedy and the horror in the Lyle narrative, trying to nudge it towards the fantastic while keeping it grounded in realism through the use of precise socio-cultural detail. But the funny-bleak push-pull was done instinctively really, and I’m rationalising it in retrospect.
This is your most political novel yet, dealing with racism, ageism and misogyny. What do you hope the reader will take from it?
What I hope they would feel after reading any one of my books: that they’ve engaged with art.
See you on D’Hill (Covid allowing)—
let’s hope the coming Summer is more fun than this Winter, Morgan