France in the past or Dystopian Australian future

Sri-Lankan-born Michelle de Krester’s seventh novel, Scary Monsters, just as migration has upended her characters’ lives. Lyle works for a sinister government department in near-future Australia. An Asian migrant, he fears repatriation and embraces “Australian values”. Scary Monster is a two-headed creature with two stories and front covers, tells a realist tale of the early 1980s, and the other conjures a gruesome and plausible vision of Australia’s near future.

The story beings with Lili (past) working as an assistant language teacher in Montepellier and earns to be “bold, intelligent, woman” or Lyle (future) two immigrant Australians, both of Asian heritage. Lili is waiting to hear if she has been accepted to postgraduate study at Oxford. She’s young and clever. As the closing month of 1980 and the French election looms, an era-defining progressive swerves.

Alone in her student rental, with its rationed hear, Lili yearns for kindred recognition. She’s tired of living tentatively, by that unspoken Australian pressure “ to creep and pass unnoticed” to be a model immigrant.

During Lilli’s year in Montpellier, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser murders his wife, while in England the Yorkshire Ripper terrorises women and they march to Reclaim the Night.

She meets flamboyant Minna- a girl alive with subversive art projects – a friendship flares into life.

Lili’s downstairs neighbour Rinaldi is creepily attentive to a red world of lipstick stains, blood clots, and ripe-swollen cherries of horror-movie jitters, as she watches north African immigrants are rounded up and removed from the city centre – while French school children proudly read about Camus’s L’Etranger Killing an Arab. Every page of her story feels charged, like an open circuit waiting for its switch.

The casual racism and treatment of migrants Lili witnesses in France serve as a prosecutor to de Krester’s terrifying vision of a surveillance state in Australia that detains asylum seekers  “on an offshore island forever”.

Lyle is an unassuming bureaucrat in a sinister government entity – The Department – eyes also fixed on the future. After the pandemic, our federation has become a police state, a realm of hyper-corporatized compliance. Islam is outlawed, and law and order policy relies on punitive repatriation. The Great Barrier Reef is a blanched mausoleum, but it is illegal to speak of what’s been lost or to campaign against inequality.

Lyle carves the safety of middle-management anonymity and competent invisibility. But his wife, Chanel is ambitious. De Krester conjures a future where children are called Ikea and Prada, and commuters play Whack-a-Mullah on their phones. There are also some gags Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina candle, and Justin Bieber tribute albums.

Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser, Allen  & Unwin  £16.99, 320 pages.