Books
Monsters, inc
by Charlotte Grimshaw
Preparing to read Jan Topolski’s Monster Love, noting its grim title and unpleasant subject, I thought, ruggedly, never mind, I can handle this. I’ve seen murder files, visited prisons. I once sat in on an interview with a youth accused of raping and murdering a grandmother. (Fascinating. His eyes were like a bird’s. Round. Empty. Pitiless.)
The monstrous love of the title exists between Brendan and Sherilyn Gutteridge, an affluent, middle-class Manchester couple. The Gutteridges have a nice house, an expensive car and designer clothes. They have a little daughter called Samantha, whom they keep in a box upstairs. After torturing and neglecting her, they eventually leave her to starve to death in the cage.
Here is the sort of thing they get up to: We burned the girl a few times round about then when she played up … The first time was when the girl had messed herself and we were so angry that stubbing a fag out on her arm was just a reflex action. It made a strange smell, but no worse than her shit, so we sluiced her down in the sink and stuck her back in The Box.
The Gutteridges are evil. They really don’t have anything going for them. When they’re arrested, they continue to behave very badly. In an extreme case of folie à deux, they believe that Samantha came between them, that she spoilt their perfect love.
As they are brought to court, a succession of first-person narrators tell their stories, witnesses to the crime and its aftermath.
Jurors are upset: “I rush to the bogs and I chuck up. Twice.” Police are traumatised, the Gutteridges glow with mad love. Their back story contains an extremely graphic scene of a man having sex with a child: “Come and sit on Daddy’s lap, pet.” They continue to blaze with monstrousness until the end, where, in a series of spooky prison sequences, they psychically merge. They are no longer Brendan and Sherilyn: “I love. I am loved. I am Brendalyn.”
At this point, the reader might begin to wonder who the author is And what exactly is she trying to do?
Topolski is a psychoanalytic therapist. She has worked as a film censor and probation officer. One day, while climbing Mt Kilimanjaro, she decided to write a novel. She wanted her book “to challenge the usual simple-minded responses to child abuse”. One wonders how, when the Gutteridges are so entirely, freakishly nasty. If she had endowed them with just a few recognisable human qualities, wouldn’t she have more effectively challenged the usual simple-minded response?
Interviewed about her time as a film censor, Topolski cited The Exorcist as a “splendid” movie. As the mother of a teenage daughter in the 80s, she saw the film as “a really excellent portrayal of adolescence. When you have a teenager, quite often, even if you don’t say it, you think, ‘what the devil’s got into you?’”
This is amusing, yet somehow trite – more assertion, perhaps, than true observation. It’s hard not to suspect there’s an element of bravado in the laying on of horrors in Monster Love. Topolski can tough it out – can we? And her thoughts on The Exorcist are a gauge of her sensibility. You could come up with any number of subtle stories about teenagers. Topolski likes the camp, gory hysteria of The Exorcist. Why go for subtlety when you can lay it on with a shovel?
MONSTER LOVE, by Carol Topolski (Penguin/Fig Tree, $35).
