A bunch of teenagers lounge about in a country house on a remote island. They form gangs, their leaders battling for supremacy, though, with nurses and teachers standing on the sidelines, it’s not quite Lord of the Flies. Drugs also help to maintain order, in the form of the nightly “vitamins” that the narrator, Toby, secretes in his bedpost, leaving him free to wander through the house while the others sleep. Although, when he witnesses one of the boys being taken at night to the top-floor sanatorium, he almost wishes he’d stayed in bed. Everyone knows why they’ve been wrenched from their families to live in the Death House yet, through a mixture of boredom, bravado and emotional distancing, they try to defend themselves against the truth. Blood tests have shown that their defective genes have been activated; the adults are merely keeping watch for the signs of their sickness to show.
Sarah Pinborough has constructed an intriguing story around one of the enigmas of the human condition, how we manage the knowledge that we will die. While the younger children conduct religious rituals, the older ones imagine a less spiritual kind of love. The hope of escape embraced by Toby and Clara was reminiscent of the young couple in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go. Yet initially it’s bully-boy Jake who seems most attuned to reality; only he is able to acknowledge they cannot save the owl with the broken wing.
I enjoyed this novel, but it took a while for it to approach the tension of Goodhouse, another novel about unfairly institutionalised adolescents, or the hope for the impossible of Bel Canto. In the final third, with some surprisingly satisfying twists and turns, Toby learns compassion, but I wondered, despite my satisfaction with other novels for adults with adolescent protagonists, if this one might actually be YA.
Thanks to Gollancz for my proof copy.
I enjoyed this novel, but it took a while for it to approach the tension of Goodhouse, another novel about unfairly institutionalised adolescents, or the hope for the impossible of Bel Canto. In the final third, with some surprisingly satisfying twists and turns, Toby learns compassion, but I wondered, despite my satisfaction with other novels for adults with adolescent protagonists, if this one might actually be YA.
Thanks to Gollancz for my proof copy.
Two separate narratives, or extended letters, to the same son: a soldier more acquainted with the varying types of sand than the enemy; a mother spied upon when she ventures outside the home, or else she’s suffering from an extreme case of paranoia. Since the terrorist attack that killed her father when she was twelve, Lorna’s life has become bleaker, alcohol her only retreat until she meets Danny. At the time, Danny is about to complete the last of his assessments for joining the army; they barely have time to get to know each other before she’s losing him to a world of machismo overseas. Yet now, with most of his unit murdered in an ambush at the dead of night, Danny is lost in the desert. Although the landscapes are vastly different, there are echoes of Cormac James’ The Surfacing in their predicament with the readers’ hope that, against all odds, they will survive.
Although the countries involved are never named, and the narrative differs in places from the recent history with which we are all familiar, Real Monsters picks up from where Before, During, After leaves off. For a while, I wasn’t sure if the narrators’ reference to the enemy as monsters was intended to be taken metaphorically, until Danny tells us (p78):
You see, son when they first sent us out here no one really had any idea about the kind of threats we faced. Still don’t. Of course the papers go on about people getting eaten and shit, but the truth is that even after all this time we still don’t have a goddammed clue what these Monsters are capable of. Might they shoot laser beams out of their eyes? Or fireballs out of their arseholes? Honestly we don’t know.
When he and his friends open fire on three locals off to market with a couple of camels (p91), mistaking them for the most hideous monster their drug-fuelled minds can dream up, I finally caught up with the author’s intention. This is a novel about what philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists call othering and psychoanalysts projection and how wars arise from our attempts to externalise and control the monsters that reside within us all. It’s an ambitious premise and, although a bit too unsubtle for my liking, I applaud the author for tackling it for his debut novel and Legend Press for publishing it.
Although the countries involved are never named, and the narrative differs in places from the recent history with which we are all familiar, Real Monsters picks up from where Before, During, After leaves off. For a while, I wasn’t sure if the narrators’ reference to the enemy as monsters was intended to be taken metaphorically, until Danny tells us (p78):
You see, son when they first sent us out here no one really had any idea about the kind of threats we faced. Still don’t. Of course the papers go on about people getting eaten and shit, but the truth is that even after all this time we still don’t have a goddammed clue what these Monsters are capable of. Might they shoot laser beams out of their eyes? Or fireballs out of their arseholes? Honestly we don’t know.
When he and his friends open fire on three locals off to market with a couple of camels (p91), mistaking them for the most hideous monster their drug-fuelled minds can dream up, I finally caught up with the author’s intention. This is a novel about what philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists call othering and psychoanalysts projection and how wars arise from our attempts to externalise and control the monsters that reside within us all. It’s an ambitious premise and, although a bit too unsubtle for my liking, I applaud the author for tackling it for his debut novel and Legend Press for publishing it.
As this is my last post for this month, I leave you with a visual reminder of my February reviews. Do click the link for any you might have missed and join me again early next week for a dissection of the clinical psychologist in Pat Barker’s Border Crossing along with a river flash and a quiz.
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