Layered over Lyle’s Orwellian terrors, de Kretser paints a burlesque – a comedy with a rictus face. What might the couple be willing to sacrifice in order to live in inconspicuous prosperity? While Lili longs to be seen, Lyle strives for competent invisibility. In his “Colgate-white” kit home on the outskirts of Melbourne, nestled on Spumante Court and around the corner from Cold Duck Parade, Lyle craves the safety of middle-management anonymity. In this Australia, the only way forward is forgetting. Yet it’s illegal to speak of what’s been lost, or to campaign against inequity. Year-round bushfires fug the air, summer temperatures are in the high 50s, and the Great Barrier Reef is a blanched mausoleum. Islam is outlawed, and law and order policy relies on punitive repatriation (“one immigrant grandparent in four is enough”). After the pandemic, our federation has become a police state, a realm of hyper-corporatised compliance. Meanwhile, in a palpably near future, Lyle is an unassuming bureaucrat in a sinister government entity – The Department – eyes also fixed on the future (“don’t look back. Every page of her story feels charged, like an open circuit waiting for its switch a lurking wallop. “It was the beginning for me of thinking about why some people had history, and other people had lives,” Lili explains. Lili watches as north African immigrants are rounded up and removed from the city centre – the precious le centre historique – while French schoolchildren proudly read about Camus’s L’Étranger killing an Arab, and treat it all as existential metaphor. It’s a red world of lipstick stains, blood clots and ripe-swollen cherries of horror-movie jitters. The European papers are full of blood-spattered tales of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Lili’s downstairs neighbour is creepily attentive. Lili’s tale promises nostalgia – dappled light and hopeful youth – but her memories are laced with menace. But is it a bond of mutual affection, or just another costume in wealthy Minna’s moral wardrobe, a friendship she wears for show? When she meets the flamboyant, punkish Minna – a girl alive with subversive art projects and grand aesthetic theories – a friendship flares into life. She’s tired of living tentatively, cowed by that unspoken Australian pressure “to creep and pass unnoticed” – to be a model immigrant. “In those days I believed the past could be left behind like a country,” she remembers.Īlone in her student rental, with its rationed heat, Lili yearns for some kind of kindred recognition, to be seen. It’s the closing months of 1980 and the French election looms, with the possibility of an era-defining progressive swerve. She’s young and clever and “streaked with unfocused ambition”. Lili is teaching English to high-schoolers in the south of France, waiting to hear if she has been accepted to postgraduate study at Oxford. This novel reminds that memory is a kind of poltergeist – its own scary monster.Īnd so we begin with Lili (past) or Lyle (future): two immigrant Australians, both of Asian heritage. Is there a question lurking in the first story that the second might answer? Is it the same question that would emerge if they were reversed? We cannot truly know, for what we encounter in the first half of Scary Monsters will haunt the second. And knowing that we’re responsible for the shape this book takes makes us all the more attentive – alert to wormholes and echoes, and de Kretser’s briar wit. There’s a whiff of gimmick about it, but also that rarest of high-literary delights: play.
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