Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson

    Pardon the pun, but Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach covers a lot of ground for an average-length book. The story’s initial premise sees Lisa receiving a vision of crows intimating the death of her brother at sea before it flows in different directions: tangents, vignettes, and moments that form a collage of memory. The book is an ocean and its vignettes are its estuaries. As a result, the novel blurs the lines between Bildungsroman, modern Gothic, and horror story.

    After Lisa’s brother Jimmy is lost at sea, you might expect the novel to focus on her search for him—and in some ways it does—but each section of the book delves into memories of different family members and their loss. First, Robinson explores the relationship between Lisa and her boisterous activist uncle Mick. Next, Lisa and her grandmother deepen their bond and she learns a slower way of life. After the loss of these family members, Lisa experiences some other traumas that send her in a dark path where she drops out of school and runs away from home. The plot slowly shifts back to her brother Jimmy and his own disappointments; once an Olympic-hopeful for swimming, Jimmy injures himself and forever gives up his dreams for what is ostensibly more mundane: a relationship with Karaoke, a hanger-on derided by all the cool Indigenous kids. The ending of the book reveals the truth, at least partially, of what happens at sea before ending on an ambiguous note, allowing the book to remain rooted in its mysterious tone.

    For better or worse, one blurb on the back of the book has influenced my reading of the text. It posited Monkey Beach as an Indigenous Gothic novel, and the description is quite apt. When I think of Gothic novel tropes, I think about the dark, largely-absent figures in mysterious places. Consider, for example, Jane Eyre’s Rochester and Thornfield Hall, Dracula’s Castle Dracula, or even Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca. Here, Monkey Beach is that central location that draws the imagination.

    As for the dark figure of Monkey Beach, that’s up for debate. One reading is that Jimmy himself is the mysterious figure driving the novel. He’s largely absent from the story—a kind of Schrödinger’s cat for Lisa, potentially dead, potentially alive following his shipwreck. Moreover, there is a dark secret revealed at the end of the book that allows for a rereading of his character.

    Another reading might posit ghosts and other creatures are the bedrock of Monkey Beach’s more Gothic bent. Lisa has a gift, or a curse, where she has visions and dreams that intimate the future. For instance, she dreams of crows and understands that Jimmy is in danger. More notably, a small man visits her at night on the eve of deaths and disasters, such as in the lead-up to her uncle Mick’s death while fishing or her Ma-ma-oo’s death in a house fire. The way Lisa’s attitude toward the little man shifts throughout the book is compelling, particularly when she lashes out at him, demanding to know what good he is if he can’t actually prevent traumas from happening.

    Speaking of relationships, Robinson is absolutely masterful in this respect. The characters are richly developed and sincere. It’s hard to resist Mick’s charmingly brash approach to life, for example. The relationships between each member of Lisa’s family comes across so beautifully; Robinson captures their ebb and flow, the love amidst the tension, and so on. Since the story drifts in and out of memories, Robinson is able to offer perfect story beats that highlight the intimacy between characters. The characters felt so real, and when they shared happy moments together it felt wonderfully elevating. Your heart swells when they’re at peace and, even though the story gets dark, there’s an underlying optimism that emerges through the relationships between the characters.

    Stylistically, the book is beautiful and vivid in its descriptions. It’s difficult to find novels that so perfectly blend a poetic style with an accessible tone. The details Robinson includes for describing setting, for instance, are beautifully achieved. Sentence-by-sentence, Robinson’s turns of phrase are loaded with imagery. Oddly, though, Robinson never descends into the overly poetic style that alienates more traditional readers of fiction—as much as the writing is poetic, Robinson balances it against direct and precise phrasing. If nothing else, sections of dialogue interrupt the flowery language and drive the story forward.

    Robinson, at times, uses a collage-like style, juxtaposing different styles side-by-side. For example, in one chapter, she intersperses medical-sounding sections about why heart attacks happen while the core narrative progresses. Even the medical sections read poetically. These juxtapositions add a nice dimension for breaking up the core style, which leans heavily on Lisa’s internal monologue. 

    If I have one complaint about the book, it is this: Monkey Beach is disorientingly fast-and-slow. The book has rapid changes in time, offering some breakneck speeds (and their associated whiplash). Without careful reading, the time period of different vignettes can be difficult to follow; missing one sentence means you might not know a vignette is from three years earlier, or that we’re back in the present. At the same time, though, the book feels slow. Since the novel is so replete with vignettes, it feels like thing-after-thing happens without much progression to the central mystery established in the first pages of the book, and in turn it can feel like a slog. Perhaps it’s just that the central ‘promise’ of the book is to reveal whether Jimmy is alive or not and that there are basically three hundred pages in between before it’s resolved, but I found myself needing to take breaks before finishing the book.

    When Robinson develops on the ‘promise’ of the book, I have a mixed review. While Robinson does not completely reveal the mystery, I can make a compelling case for solving it. If you’re avoiding spoilers, I would skip ahead a little bit. At the end of the novel, Lisa is making blood sacrifices to strange voices in the woods to help protect her brother. She starts seeing the ghosts of her dead relatives before she awakes on the beach. I have two theories for why Jimmy is dead. One is that he shows up in these visions, and there’s only one other instance where Lisa has a vision of someone who is (probably?) alive. I think also, in terms of structure, the other chapters of the book culminate in the death of a relative. Given the pattern of building towards the death of a family member, it would be consistent if Jimmy were also to die here.

    In Monkey Beach, Eden Robinson captures magic. Of course, the blend of magic and realism throughout the book offers it a unique spin on the Buildungsroman. Lisa experiences her visions as a teenager, so amidst stories of drinking and partying and going off the rails, Robinson offers a unique twist on the genre. But Robinson also captures magic in terms of her character development and the relationships between them; they were all beautifully wrought in a way that’s hard to describe. Finally, the magic emerges in the linguistic prowess of Robinson’s style. Its individual passages are finely composed, even if the jumps in the greater narrative are disorienting.

    Even though I gripe about the disorienting nature of the book, it’s thematically consistent with Lisa’s experiences. First, the way the past reemerges to her in the form of ghosts mimics the way her narrative lapses into memory. Additionally, a traumatic event happens to Lisa partway through the book and she admits that that’s when the gaps in memory start to occur. Her own descent into alcoholism and drug use complicates the narrative thread, of course. Each of these experiences, in their own way, break time. The audience is placed alongside Lisa in this experience of lapses and gaps, deepening the uncertainty of the core details of the text.

    I often am given reading recommendations that take me months (or years…) to read. My friend Sam recommended this book to me at least five years ago, but Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach was worth the wait. It’s quite a unique book that I can see myself bringing into the classroom, if not in its entirety, at least in sections that serve as a masterclass in character and style.

    Happy reading, folks!