Taming Shelley’s monster
Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques and other stories ,by Vincent O’Sullivan (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35 ) Reviewed by Jack Remiel Cottrell for Kete books
Reading Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques and other stories is the literary equivalent of realising everyone around you has the same rich, complex internal life as you do. Vincent O’Sullivan then invites readers into those lives with stories that grow broader and more intriguing the harder you look.
The title novella, Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques, channels the melancholy strangeness of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a worthy sequel. Along with the eponymous creature, we follow the two officers of a ship that is a little way into circumnavigating the globe – picking up their guest in Arctic pack ice. Captain Sharpe is a Catholic, obsessed with following in the footsteps of James Cook. Lieutenant Jackson venerates the enlightenment but is equally obsessive about his dream of capturing a moa.
Much of the story unfolds in the claustrophobic officers’ quarters as both Sharpe and Jackson proceed to ‘‘civilise’’ Jean-Jacques – each according to his own values.
If you know your Frankenstein, you’ll enjoy the layered references to the novel. There is philosophy; there is Romanticism; there is examination of the nature of obsession and ambition; there are shifting perspectives – Jean-Jacques finally gets to own his story once he is again cast away from civilisation into Fiordland.
The story offers a sympathetic view of the creature, particularly the damage done to him in the name of civility – which mirrors the damage done by Captain Sharpe’s heroes as they sailed forth to ‘‘civilise’’ distant lands.
It should have felt heavy, all this in 100-odd pages of novella but I was guided enough to feel clever, while also feeling like there was still more to discover.
The other stories are just as dense – you could never accuse O’Sullivan of being an easy read – but the payoffs are always worth the effort. Almost every character gets at least a brief turn being the focus of the narrative (which I sometimes found wildly confusing). However, each offers a perspective that adds to the story making re-reading these stories feel like seeing a panorama of what I’d previously glimpsed through a keyhole.
If I have one criticism, it’s the order of the stories. The book opens with Good Form, which has the toughest narrative structure to follow.
It might have been given first billing because it is classic O’Sullivan – the depiction of rural New Zealand is spot-on – but feels more like a wall than a door into the collection. I’ll admit, I started reading the book from the middle.
In the title novella, Sharpe muses that a journal is ‘‘The space where one man is written into another’’. The same sentiment could be applied to this collection – each a space where one story is written into another and where, if you look hard, you will find the strangest occurrences cropping up in familiar places, the most shocking acts perpetrated by people you were sure you knew.