From Here On, Monsters

From Here On, Monsters was a recommendation from someone in the Chat 10, Looks 3 Facebook group -- not recommended to me, but to another Chatter looking for books about translation. From Here On, Monsters is partly about translation, but it's also about so much more, and I'm astonished that I haven't heard of it since its publication in 2019.

From Here On, Monsters is a clever and unsettling novel. The narrator, Cameron, is working in a second hand bookshop in an anonymous city (which sounds very much like Melbourne) when she lands a weird job for a controversial artist doing 'words.' It transpires that Cameron is coming up with the kind of bureaucratic non-speak that we have all become very used to over the past few years, like referring to refugees as 'illicit maritime arrivals,' stripping them of their personhood. Although there is an edge of satire to this part of the story, we shouldn't forget that it probably is someone's actual job to come up with this bland, inhuman language, just as it was someone's job to come up with the cruel abomination of the robodebt scheme.

From Here On, Monsters also encompasses ideas about doubles and mirror images, translated texts, art and plaigarism, colonisation and invasion, the transmission of ideas, and the complicity of silence. It slides into the territory of magic realism with the presence of a ravening monster on the roof of Cameron's building, one which feeds on the homeless refugees sheltering there (an allegory for depressive suicide?), and at the end of the story, the project Cameron is working on ('Excising Our Hearts') becomes so successful that people, including Cameron herself, become literally unable to see the displaced people that they no longer possess words to describe.

This is a short but chilling read, drawing on elements of fantasy and 1984-style dystopian fiction to make a harrowing point about lack of compassion for asylum seekers. It reminded me a bit of Piranesi in its adventurous approach. Some readers have found the very end of the novel confusing (I would have appreciated a little more clarity, too) but don't let that put you off -- this is an extraordinary and thought-provoking novel, which I suspect will haunt me for a long time.