posted on 24 Jul 2020

 

The Monsters We Deserve by Marcus Sedgwick

British-born writer Marcus Sedgwick has had a diverse career as bookseller, publisher, illustrator and successful writer for young adults, specialising in exciting historical fiction. However, for this book you need to set all that aside because it’s a book that’s almost impossible to classify.

In the past I bet this book would have been called ‘experimental’ but other writers have pushed the boundaries of that term so far that its probably no longer a helpful or meaningful label. But in many ways, it’s the word best suited to this book which tries, not always successfully, to build a work of imagination that unpeels its layers of meaning like the rings of an onion.

The narrative is conducted wholly inside the head of a writer who has taken residence in a remote Alpine cabin as autumn is turning to winter. He is seeking isolation to work on a book that is proving hard to write – he has had one major successful horror novel to his name but is finding it hard to repeat the trick and is now finding himself full of doubts and fears.

Slowly the doubts in his mind start to manifest themselves as possibly outward manifestations of his inner terrors. He has a strange obsessive love/hate relationship with Mary Shelley and her greatest creation, Frankenstein, which he claims to deep sense of loathing for its success which he believes is unwarranted and unjust. But he also can’t stop himself identifying with the author and with her creation ( the fictional writer shares initials [M.S.] with Mary but also with the real-life author, Marcus Sedgwick).

And this really gives us the key to other layers of this book. At one level we are sharing a unique point of view narrative inside the head of a troubled writer; at another level we’re being invited to think about the role of the author and the creative process; then again, we’re posed the question of whether an author is responsible for the creatures he/she creates. When a monster is created can it ever stay inside the confines of a book and, if not, does the author have moral responsibility for the havoc and terror that can be created?

In what is quite a spare storyline, Sedgwick manages to cram in a whole range of meta-fictional questions that some readers looking for a conventional narrative may well find it quite hard to stay with. I’m not entirely certain what audience the author had in mind when he wrote the book but I suspect this would leave his young adult audience scratching their heads. However, having said that, he’s no slouch when it comes to writing an effective scene that will bring a chill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck – but it’s not something that happens often enough and the overheated visceral critique of Frankenstein all feels a little contrived for my taste.

So ‘experimental’ feels like the right word because there’s no expectation that all experiments should work perfectly but it’s important they happen as a way of laying a pathway for future writing. In that respect I think that this book could well be a precursor to something a little bit special if the author wants to continue down that path.

The book is published by Zephyr Books and a word or two of praise should be devoted to the production values they’ve brought to the printing of this artefact. It a lovely thing, copiously illustrated by the author himself and printed on lovely heavy paper in a luminescent black and white. There is a paperback available now but, honestly, the hardback is so much better and costs only a few pounds more so why not get the best?

 

Terry Potter

July 2020