Novel of the week Francesca Carington
‘In mathematics, lies are pointless. In stories, of course, it’s different. Lies are practically required.” Catherine Menon, who lives in London and has Malaysian roots, would know – she’s a lecturer in robotics as well as a novelist. Her charged debut, Fragile Monsters, set over 60 years in Malaysia, wears its slipperiness on its sleeve, stories and fairytales and lies colliding as a woman tries to pick apart where she comes from.
It’s 1985 in Pahang, and Durga, a maths lecturer, is staying for Diwali with her grandmother, Mary, a prickly old lady who’s full of secrets and loves to spin a tale. She raised Durga, whose teenage mother died after having her. Durga has only just come back to Malaysia from Canada. She feels out of place: “I’ve lost the rhythm of how I’m supposed to speak in Malaysia, how I’m supposed to imply and hint and keep my meaning for the spaces between words.” Stuck with her grandmother after a fire and a flood, Durga starts probing the holes in her past.
Related in parallel is Mary’s childhood in the 1920s, as the unloved daughter of an addict mother and English father obsessed with adding rooms to the house. Her story, which stretches across the Second World War and the Malayan Emergency, is shot through with elements of fantasy and doubt. Past and present overlap: teen pregnancies, madness, fire, dead and damaged girls. Durga can’t tell if it’s her dead friend Peony or her dead mother Francesca whose presence she feels: “She’s all the missing girls of Pahang rolled into one.”
Fragile Monsters is an impressive debut, atmospheric and unsettling. Durga pushes her stubborn grandmother for the truth, only for Mary to reply: “All this mathematics, isn’t it? Always wanting for it to be right, instead of true.”
The novel’s sticky fluidity hints at a gloomy reason for the mix-ups: for Pahang’s women, “the story’s the same however you slice it”.