How and by whom monsters are made

American author Maria Dahvana Headley known her young adult and fantasy works wrties her novel The Mere Wife, takes on the Old English epic spins a rich web of associations, echoes and re-configurations.

Beowulf is a story in three battles  – first Beowulf slays the monster Grendel, who has been plaguing the Danes of Heorot. Then he hunts down  Grendel’s vengeful mother, who wreaking havoc on Heorot as revenge for her son’s murder, slaughtering her in her lair beneath a mere. Beowulf, then meets his own end fighting a dragon.

Headley’s story of picture-perfect suburbia turned into battle ground  ablaze with fear and recrimination, a tale of social inequality, anxieties of otherness and violence born of ignorance.

Heorot Hall is an affluenct gated community burrowed at the bottom of the mountain, a modern day fortress guarded by surveillance cameras and motion-activated lights.

The story of a “Toddler Empire”, every little boy “born with Nobel Prize potential “ where the women are their menfolk’s warrior – like protectors. The matriarchs have spent their lives overseeing their domain.

“ We are always at war, Our husbands spent their lives in comfortable chairs. Have we ever sat in comfortable chair? No. Yoga balls, haunches tensed.”

King and Queen are Roger and Willa Heorot. Roger spends his days at work in the city, the bored, beautiful  Willa is at home “ making “ their seven-year-old son Dylan (Dil) into a “miniature man”.

Dil has secretly found a new playmate, a little boy called Gren who roams the mountainside after dark. Gren’s mother Dana is former soldier and prisoner of war 

 In the Old English original, Grendel is simple malignancy, a grotesque “other” who stalks Heorot Hall and  savages its inhabitants; when Beowulf kills him, his mother returns for vengeance.

Violence is always underneath the surface, and the mere wife Willa defined by her marriage to Roger – is set against the mere ( lake) wife Dana, who hides in the watery underground beneath the mountain. Headley’s characters are victims of circumstances, some far worse than others.

 

The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley, scribe £12.99, 320 pages.