Late bloomer
Charles
Lambert’s Little Monsters is a first novel which
is more than just a ‘promising debut’; it breaks through
promise and into solid achievement. Admittedly the author is not
your traditional debutante (at age 54), and when a new kid on
the block is not a kick in the arse off Paul Torday’s late-starter
age, we might expect good things. I was not disappointed.
The book rings with an impressive assurance, and
the aplomb with which Lambert handles his explicit themes put
me in mind of Peter Ho Davies’s The Welsh Girl,
one of my favourites of last year. It’s a traditional novel
but knotty enough for modern sensibilities; and like Davies’s
novel, it takes a girl as its central character and creates an
affecting parable of belonging and escape.
Carol opens her story with an attention-grabbing
line:
When I was thirteen, my father killed my
mother.
and if that seems a touch showy, then be warned
that Lambert does at times prefer to depict clearly what the reader
might prefer to work out for themselves. Within these limitations,
however, the characters are strongly drawn and smoothly defined.
Carol goes to stay with her aunt Margot, who appears not to have
felt any particular loss, to say the least, with the murder of
her sister (”your mother was a whore”). She has a
son, Nicholas, who is not much more welcoming than Margot is,
and then there is Uncle Joey, who is not aunt Margot’s partner
or lover but a Polish refugee called Jozef. They run a pub:
None of us had a home. We lived and ate and
slept around the borders of a public space that influenced everything
we did; our lives were peripheral to its needs, its hours. It
always puzzles me to read about pubs or hotels with a family
atmosphere. How do they manage it? What do they know what we
didn’t? What we had was the opposite: a family with the
atmosphere of a pub.
All this is being recalled in retrospect by Carol:
now, fortysomething years later, she has made a life with Jozef,
who is twenty years her senior. The frisson this knowledge gives
us - what happened there exactly? - adds greatly to the atmosphere
of darkness under the surface of the story. In the present day,
Carol and Jozef are living in Italy and become involved with an
Albanian refugee girl called Kakuna: her sullen violence seems
to Carol a cry for help, she remembers her own difficulty in fitting
in, and so the parallels between past and present are established.
This neatness and completeness is something which
runs through Little Monsters: the title is echoed in
several aspects, the themes of flight and family secrets, bullying
and belonging, precisely set out on the page. Secondary characters
like Carol’s schoolfriend Patricia are well drawn, and there
are dramatic endings to both concurrent storylines. Only a last-page
revelation by Jozef seemed to upset this, and to leave much more
to be said. By then, however, I was satisfied, and looking forward
to what Lambert does next.
Just don’t wait another 54 years for us to
find out, Mr L.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
