Lisa's Reviews > Scary Monsters

So, firstly, the title is apparently a reference to a song by David Bowie?  Well, I Googled the lyrics... and am none the wiser.

Secondly, the 'novel' is actually two novellas, tenuously linked.  One, 'the past' is set in 1980s Montpellier, France, and the other, 'the future' in a dystopian Melbourne.  It's packaged in an upside-down format so that the reader can choose whether to read 'cherry-side-up' first: the coming-of-age story of Lili in France; or alternatively cherry-blossom-side-up: the satirical story of Lyle in the future.  I can't see that this experiment in format makes much difference whichever one is read first, though perhaps Lili's story might put you in a better mood...

De Kretser explains the reasoning behind this upside-down format at the Guardian, i.e. her belief that migration turns lives upside-down, and she expresses her anxiety that publishing the book this way might be seen as gimmicky. Well, I'll leave that to others to judge, but I will comment on her idea that migrants are viewed as gimmicky citizens whose worth is constantly questioned.  FWIW The 'migrant as victim' is an offshoot of identity politics that I reject.  It's hard — of course migration is hard, change is always hard.  But unlike refugees, migrants choose it.  As a migrant myself I consider it a privilege to have been accepted as a migrant when there are millions of people around the world fruitlessly seeking a new homeland.

Anyway...

I started with the story of Lili.  She's a twenty-something teacher from Australia, settling into Montpellier in the south of France.  Through Nick, who teaches at the same school, she develops an intense friendship with his girlfriend, a young English artist called Minna. Minna teaches Lili to be more assertive with the landlord who takes advantage of her inexperience to deny her heating in winter.  She also encourages her to dress with the individuality of mismatched clothes because 'uglification' is a way of mocking the French preoccupation with appearance.  They have a lot of fun together, but Lili privately thinks that she would be a better soulmate for Nick because she knows more about French literature and culture than Minna does.  However, because Lili is a person of colour, she thinks that she can never be quite 'enough'.

Lili wants to be a Bold. Intelligent. Woman. like Simone de Beauvoir, and she enjoys posing for Minna's series of photos called 'Daring Audrey'.  (This reminded me of Kim Mahood's Position Doubtful in which Mahood's friend the photo-artist Pamela Lofts posed her in all kinds of ironic feminist critiques out in the Tanami Desert.) But despite having the courage to set off alone across the world for adventures in a different culture, Lili is more often hyper-alert for serial killers and she suspects that her creepy neighbour is plotting to attack her.  Reading this novella first without the brief allusion to it in Lyle's story makes it end somewhat inconclusively in 1983 two years after the election of the socialist president François Mitterand.

Lyle's story is a rather heavy-handed satire.  It is set in a surreal dystopian Melbourne where Islam is illegal and there are heavy penalties for mentioning climate change. Sydney has been abandoned because of coastal erosion and bushfires, and the government monitors communications to identify troublesome migrants for repatriation.  Migrants Lyle and his wife Chanel keep their heads down in the outer suburbs while their adult children Sydney and Mel bully them.  Mel is studying architecture in Chicago, but her YouTube channel is about the 'architecture of the face' and her speech is loaded with farcical Millennial jargon.  When Lyle demurs about the cost of an American college, Mel tells him she'll get a better job in Australia with an American degree and it's really patriarchal of him to destroy her career before it's even begun.  Mel demands three 'statement' dresses for forthcoming social events, and her grandmother Ivy is not to make them because that would be 'beyond tragic'. 

'Can't you wear the same dress?' asked Chanel.  'There'll be different people in those three places.'

Mel burst into tears.  'Oh my god, I can't believe it!' she gasped between sobs. 'Gaslighted by my own mother. Oh my god.' (p.75)

What she wears is monitored by everyone in the world on Instagram...

Millennials are such an easy target for mockery...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/10/20/s...