Monster Love by Carol Topolski

A good friend of mine lent me this book, saying he thought it was a bit ‘Jennish’. I trust his opinions and so I read it right away, letting it push its way to the front of my always growing beside-brown-reading-chair pile. I finished it during a day I spent in bed recovering from a little bump in the car, and as soon as I’d reached the end, I turned back to the chapters I liked the best and read them again. It’s not often I do that; there are always so many other books waiting for me.

By ‘Jennish’, I suppose he meant dark: it’s about a strange, too-perfect career couple, a couple so wrapped up in each other that anything else is an unwanted intrusion. Told in the voices of Brandon and Sherilyn’s neighbours, families and work colleagues, the novel narrates what happens when a couple who only need each other are faced with the arrival of a child. It won’t be giving away too much of the plot to say the later chapters of the book, narrating the consequences of their unwanted arrival, are narrated by police officers, social workers, judge, juror and prison officers.

Some of the voices in the novel stood out: Charlotte, the nosy neighbour who calls in the NSPC because she doesn’t see little Samantha playing in her parents’ perfectly landscaped, not-suitable-for-children garden. Xandra, the prison officer who sees more of Sherilyn than she understands, and Alun, the police officer who is the first to discover how Sherilyn and Brandon solved the problem of Samantha, in an abandoned, locked room in the back of their Homes and Gardens, picture perfect house.

From Charlotte’s first chapter, where she talks about the icily polite couple who move into the street and describes the early childhood of their almost invisible daughter, there is a sense of pace and suspense that continues until the second third of the book, when Alun describes exactly what happened to Samantha. This is the ‘Jennish’ part, I suppose – something dark and gory and frightening nestled in a middle class suburb. But it’s over and done with before we’re half-way through.

I made a vow to myself that I wouldn’t go on the internet and talk crap about other people’s writing, because writing is hard, and if I didn’t like a book I would just keep my mouth shut. And I also think people who talk crap about other people are mainly trying to big themselves up in some way. So the next bit is a reluctant bit.

Mainly I read as a writer, paying attention to the way the thing is put together, and the structure of this one – short chapters told in many different voices, jigsawing together as a whole, didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

The second third of the novel lulls, and is filled with the uninteresting and often clichéd family background of the pair, narrated by their stereotypically working-class families. This section works backwards and destroys the pace of the novel. The back-story contains more ‘issues’ than Brookside, and describe dead mothers, sexual abuse, alcoholic step-mothers, domestic violence and self-harm. The book jacket promises ‘indescribable nightmare’ and yet Topolski clutters the narrative with exposition we could have done without. With such profusion of misery, clarity and plausibility is sacrificed. Perhaps this is a matter of taste: I like an economical book. Or perhaps it is because Topolski is a psychotherapist when she’s not writing and the demands of her profession have led her to psychoanalyse her protagonists and give us potted case histories that we did not need.

Topolski also missed the chance to take advantage of the ironic potential the structure of her novel allowed. With a chorus of voices at her disposal I would have expected conflicting viewpoints, unreliability and ambiguity but Topolski’s narrators are as unanimous in their verdicts as her jury: the word ‘monster’ occurs in every chapter – a dismissive repetition that denies us the chance to dwell on Brandon and Sherilyn’s own chilling estimation of events.

Still, the novel picks up its narrative again and recovers slightly in the last third, when the plot finally moves forward with accounts of the couple’s trial and time in remand. Even so, as we know from very early on in the novel that the couple are found guilty of their crime there is little suspense and even less character development. Sherilyn and Brandon speak in their own voices of their telepathic connection and their simultaneous masturbatory fantasies but their final ending is as implausible and predictable as their stilted, show-home voices.

I’m going to give this book a six out of ten. Which means I am glad I read it and I mainly enjoyed it and even the bits I didn’t like made me think a bit more about how to put books together and how interesting ideas and good writing can be let down by a poor handling of structure. But when Topolski brings out a new one I will still probably get it out from the library and give it a try.

Monster Love by Carol Topolski. Fig Tree. 272 pages. Hardcover £16.99.

ISBN10 : 1905490267 ISBN13 : 978-1905490264