THE STRANGERS
NAOMI ALDERMAN
Little Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: They came from nowhere, and now they are everywhere.
A few months after her mother dies, the novelist Naomi Alderman sets up a wildlife camera in the back garden of her parents’ home. It captures the first image of a strange new animal. Low to the ground, about the size of a badger, flat face, long, trunk-like nose. Suddenly these “mimmoths” are as common as foxes or dogs. And no one knows where they’ve come from.
As Alderman negotiates the territory of grief—a place with its own logic and rhythms – the mimmoths spread. From the UK east and west, to the United States, to Russia, to India. They seem harmless, but oddly intelligent. They cannot be captured, they will not take food from humans, they have their own purposes.
Alderman cannot shake the feeling that she has a particular connection to the creatures. Or is she just succumbing to ‘mimmoth psychosis’? As the impact of the mimmoths increases, she is pulled into the cross currents of conspiracy theories and global power struggles. Have her deeply personal forms of mourning lent recent events a surreal air, or is our reality changing drastically and irrevocably?
From the award-winning author of the international bestseller, The Power, The Strangers is a thrillingly original and devastatingly moving novel that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, inviting us to reconsider what it means to be human. It’s like nothing you’ll have read before.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Grief does very weird things to a person. I'll hold up my hand and admit I've hallucinated (officially) the sound of my thirty-five ears gone belovèd's voice more than once over the years. That one, however, is nothing compared to the mimmoths.
Shared, collective grief powers the mimmoths, of course; no way are fun-sized mammoth-y entities that just...appear...as Naomi Alderman's mother dies, her father's decline speeds up, the planet's climate and civilization's bad-crazy frag-grenade era heat up, just totally unrelated. There is plenty of evidence that Naomi Alderman is not the only one seeing them!
Mass psychosis? Permaybehaps...the mimmoths being widely seen hasn't meant they're easily, or even at all, interacted with, no feedings by humans, no captures (just killings) by humans, nothing tangible except ubiquity. Oh, and lots of (potentially) related effects stemming from being in the vicinity of the mimmoths, healing or spontaneous abortion or death, but SOMEthing momentous occurs to some people (Naomi Alderman included), so of course the conspiracy-theory areas of society have new fodder for old conspiracies and material to make new ones.
Book-Naomi Alderman and Author Naomi Alderman are entwined narratively and intertwined emotionally, as the genesis of the story in mother-loss is real world; the mimmoths and their effects, well...the effects are real, and while I haven't seen a mimmoth I'd love to. What led to Author Naomi Alderman creating this lovely, odd, off-kilter sci-fi memoir is the awfulness of needing a way to work through the random events in a world where the god you thought was yours turns out not to exist and nothing you've thought was real is, in fact, enduringly persistently real, the stuff that god should prevent/ameliorate isn't getting better, and love does not conquer all...but Love persists, endures."Everyone knows the saying: Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
But it's not true. Some things don't kill you but just leave you permanently weaker," as Naomi Alderman muses.
A better way to present the fragmented sensation of living on after the death of a love object but not the love is hard for me to conjure. A mimmoth is real, if not tangible; it affects the world but has no effect on it, like a past, like a dead love; and comes from a silent nowhere without explanation like the Orthodox Jewish god that Naomi Alderman has lost.
It is in blurring the lines separating Author Naomi Alderman's terrible emotional, psychic blows, and the consensus-reality immiseration of end-stage capitalism, that this story's impact is most powerful. Creating, summoning the mimmoths, endowing them with potency of emotional and practical sorts...affect and effect...Author Naomi Alderman makes this a story to be reckoned with. As Author Naomi Alderman processes the profundity of her loss (mostly the loss of possibility, a different, better future) after her mother's death, Naomi Alderman reckons with the world's losses and the loss of the world through her semidivine, partly malign living-but-not mimmoths.
Like every other grief considered I've ever read, this is not a story for its own sake or an entertainment to be enjoyed for a while then largely forgotten. It's not tidy enough for that. Manicured Versailles gardens are not the analogues here, but the designed and controlled wildernesses of Capability Brown. Visibly as different as it's possible to be, yet each is a planned, designed, shaped, undergirded and attention-directing space to be within. Moving through The Strangers will give you the feels a great piece of writing is so good at delivering. Don't expect Versailles, enjoy the wilder, less trammeled world of Capability Brown, and I expect you'll feel amply rewarded.
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