Review - My Name is Monster by Katie Hale

My Name is Monster
Katie Hale
Canongate, 6 June 2019
HB, 320pp

I'm grateful to Canongate for a free advance e-copy of My Name is Monster via NetGalley.

In a ruined world, two hurt women try to find a way to live. The first is called - calls herself - "Monster". We never learn what other names she may have had. Monster was a scientist, working at the seed bank on the Arctic island of Svalbard. After a time of war and plague and the Last Fall, she makes her way south by boat, and reaches the coast of Scotland, which is where the book begins.

Monster starts to walk, avoiding towns - where the Sickness may still lurk - to find her home. Facing starvation, thirst, and packs of feral dogs, Monster visits her home, which seems to make little impression, and then eventually settles in a farmhouse near a city into which she forays for food and other necessities.

We gradually learn a great deal about Monster from her recollections - of her life as a child, her exasperated mother, her isolation at school and her job in repairing and rebuilding things. Monster thinks she doesn't care about other people and many of her memories of resting them - the girl who wanted to kiss her at school, the young woman who, Monster realised too late, had taken her on a date. There is also her reaction to her colleague on Svalbard, and the fact that, when her parents were dying of the Sickness, she ceased contact with them. But Monster isn't self-sufficient, happy at pushing everyone away. There is a history too all these relationships, which we only see hinted at, and we see especially that Monster was developing as a person in relation to other people  - a development that has been stopped now that she is alone, and is very conscious of being alone - she wonders long she can endure like that. Three months, she recalls having been told - underscoring that while there has been a slide to war and disease this isn't a far future post-apocalyptic story, rather the axe has only just fallen: those feral dogs would have been someone's pets or working animals a year or two ago.

Hale's storytelling here is very gentle, very allusive, very powerful. We don't find out exactly why Monster is like she is. She makes it clear that she is in some sense odd (or that she has been made to feel that she is odd) but it seems like an oddness that only exists in relation to other people. Now everyone else is gone, there are only questions of survival, practical matters about food and infections and whether water is safe to drink. The rest is set aside.

But then things change and we meet - Monster meets - another woman, a girl perhaps at that point, finding her starving and feral. She passes on to her the name Monster, deciding instead to become "Mother". She pronounces herself the young girl's creator, and starts to try to civilize her, driving out all the "wildness". And, yes, with all this stress on who is the monster and who is the creator, there are hints of Frankenstein (as well as in the journey from the Arctic, of course).

It's the relationship between Monster and Mother - Monster and Monster - that is at the heart of this book, of course, and it's one which Hale takes her time over, exploring Monster/ Mother's viewpoint first, then switching to the younger Monster. It's a testament to how convincing, how thorough, this depiction is that when we move on to that second part, a real sense of Mother's personality, of her wants and needs, her presence, hangs over the text. It's not always a comforting or welcome presence - Hale makes it clear that, despite being the only two people left in the world (or at least, in their locality) these women are not always good for one another: while Mother's earlier life is often dim, we can see something of the same pattern emerge here as existed between her and her own mother. But it's a pattern that the other Monster won't be drawn into easily. She has her own secrets, memories from before her "creation", and has been through a different trauma in the dying days of the human race. Accepting, at first, what she is told, she inevitably begins to question.

That eventually leads to an action on Monster's part - I'm not going to say exactly what because of spoilers - which supremely strains her relationship with Mother. By the time this happens, both characters have become so real that the rift between them - while anticipated - is as anxiety-inducing and involving as when your best friends fall out. You have to find out what happened/ what's going to happen. Which leads me to one of this book's great joys - it is wonderfully, entrancingly readable, compulsive, a book whose pages simply fly by. At times things come up - coincidences, items of knowledge - that might perhaps seem unlikely - but Hale tells her story with such verve and life that these hardly detract at all.

I really enjoyed this book, and I would happily have read it if it had been twice as long. One of the high points of my reading so far this year and I'd strongly recommend.