My Name Is Monster by Katie Hale Reviews
K atie Hale'due south debut novel is a post-apocalyptic tale narrated by two female characters, both called Monster. The first Monster is an adult woman who, by her own account, is monstrous because she is a natural solitary, fascinated past how machines and bodies work but hostile to all man contact. She is estranged from her parents, has no sexual desires and wants no friends. When the apocalypse comes, at offset she experiences it equally freedom: "The three Warhammer geeks I live with have already scuttled domicile. I spread myself through their empty rooms. I am enormous. I am bigger than the city." Her female parent pleads: "You have nobody – come home." Monster replies: "I accept myself."
When the book opens, these events are in the past, and Monster is trekking through a depopulated England scarred by ash pits where the dead have been incinerated. y shunning other people, she'southward avoided the things that killed them, only all she'south gained is that she's left to struggle alone. She tries to see her solitude equally liberty, reflecting that "history is just a set of lies agreed upon. Now nobody needs to agree on anything. At present all of it is mine." But ultimately she begins to struggle not only with starvation but insanity. By the time she encounters the second Monster – a ragged adolescent, and so feral she has lost her language – she's desperate for human being contact and ready to dearest for the first time.
In the first half, the volume feels like a narrative about the threat often made to lonely people that they will become painfully, irreversibly isolated and volition run across, at the 11th hour, that they need others to survive. Once Monster #ii enters the picture, information technology turns into something else: a post-apocalyptic Adam and Eve story, where the new parents of humankind are both women, and their relationship is not romantic; where the forbidden fruit that threatens paradise is adolescent rebellion.
These ideas are fresh and powerful, and Hale often takes them in unexpected directions. She is a poet, and her writing is bodacious and can be strikingly beautiful. The female parent-daughter human relationship that develops between the Monsters feels at some times achingly familiar, at others beguilingly baroque. Most of all, the volume has a groovy generosity and empathy for monsterdom, and refreshingly allows its characters to find happiness without becoming more ordinary.
Simply it'south rare for a debut novel not to have some problem that squanders much of its potential. Here, the effect is that Unhurt uses the tools of fiction mistrustfully and fumblingly. She has a reflex of avoiding or aborting scenes in which annihilation really happens. Even after Monster #two recovers the ability to speak, the characters never have a proper conversation; instead, when ane of them speaks, the other clams upwardly with inarticulate emotion. The few activeness scenes are either rushed through unceremoniously or skipped altogether. Virtually of the novel consists of passages in which the characters think about their feelings, or just drib hints about their feelings as they walk through a landscape that never comes into focus. Unhurt likes her characters to be in a state of semi-consciousness; there'south a lot of "I drift betwixt fog and oblivion". The second Monster has a total amnesia that leaves her only a handful of fuzzy glimpses of her traumatic past. The upshot is countless passages similar this: "I exercise not know how long I stand in that location, watching the twenty-four hour period come up into being. How many days have I seen brainstorm? Each one nudging me imperceptibly here. Standing in the doorway of an one-time subcontract on the outskirts of a metropolis. Solitary."
Some choices feel suspiciously like the outcome of negligence. At the beginning, Monster is starving in the wood, surrounded past the sounds of wild animals, but information technology never crosses her mind that she could chase for food. She's survived the apocalypse considering she was working at the isolated Seed Vault in Svalbard, a potentially fascinating setting that Hale describes in a few generic sentences, and which has no significance to the plot. The apocalypse itself is left vague. Its events are named generically "the Sickness" and "the War". The characters take no direct retentivity of them, no threat from them remains, and we never learn annihilation nearly these horrors.
Hale is certainly a adept writer with a compelling voice, and her ideas are bold and promising. But in this showtime outing as a fiction writer, she'due south using well-nigh of her talent and free energy to avoid her story. One hopes the strengths of this book will exist enough to give her a second gamble at a novel, i that isn't working so hard non to be a novel at all.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/18/my-name-is-monster-katie-hale-review
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