It’s a big ask, and Monsters offers no simple explanations. The writing is tangled with discourses and tangents that blend memoir, historiography, and philosophy. Croggon is our guide through literature, theory, and myth, through the guilty colonialist credentials of her own ancestors, the ‘middle-class or upper-class soldiers of empire’. She writes with angry clarity about her early years as a journalist in a misogynistic workplace and about the frustrations of being expected by her divorced parents to care for her younger siblings. Whenever she mentions her sister, her critical objectivity crumbles. The writing flickers with panic, resentment, humiliation, and rage. The pain is tangible and corrosive.

What is it about sisters? I know so many women who are agonised by their relationships with their sisters, by the weight of miscommunication, presumptions, and hurt. Many sisters feel like victims, doubly wounded because their own victimhood is not acknowledged. So it is in Monsters. The book follows the final breakdown between Croggon and her sister, after years of fragmentation. Both women perceive the other as deceitful and cruel, and each feels that they possess the real truth of the situation. Croggon rues the fact that in their relationship she is cast as the perpetual monster. This profoundly reductive thinking, she considers, is the legacy of British colonialism.

Alison Croggon at the Perth Festival Writers Week in 2019 (Wikimedia Commons)

The crux of Monsters is the notion that the lasting inheritance of empire is a violent lack of imagination. Its binaries of good/bad, male/female, black/white are the frame that forms our society, condemning us all – but women especially – to being desperately misunderstood. Croggon rails against this reductiveness, this diminishing of complexity. This is the force at the heart of this book: Croggon’s refusal to be reduced to a woman, a mother, a monster. As a piece of writing about colonialism, Monsters is less about how the British project treats the Other, and more about how it treats its own. For Croggon, the two are inescapably linked by the terror of complexity, of people who step outside their given roles and construct their own narratives. In the monomyth of colonialism, she suggests, one’s story is always written by others.

In a book full of hurt, this is the core pain for Croggon. Her sister wounds her deeply by not accepting Croggon’s version of their relationship. She denies Croggon’s narrative authority over her own story, and in so doing denies Croggon’s personhood. Croggon refuses to be diminished. Monsters is most powerful as an investigation of the psyche of a writer who rails against the notion of herself as simplistic. Describing writing poetry as a new mother, she notes, ‘This was when the I, the I that I know as myself, began.’ It is self-authorship that always gives Croggon her meaning.

Even while Croggon denies being guilty of the acts of spite and neglect of which her sister accuses her, she concedes that almost a decade of her life is essentially lost to her. She has no memory of it. Her late teens and early twenties exist only in flashes: caring for her sisters at too early an age, leaving an abusive relationship with young children in tow, abandoning a promising job to become a skint poet. There is a haze she cannot penetrate.

In his book Picture Theory (1994), W.J.T. Mitchell writes about the gaps that occur in the narratives we create for ourselves in the wake of trauma. While Croggon often rationalises (‘I hesitate to claim trauma’), her sense of victimhood hums through both the text and its shadows of forgetting. Mitchell frames the notion of memory as ‘public, intersubjective’. Croggon’s pain comes from the impossibility of collective recollection with her sister; their testimonies conflict too deeply. There is much that ripples in the dark of this writing, in its lacunae. It is testimony to the limits of narrative, the ways in which any telling is incomplete. This is true of colonial frameworks, and it is true for Croggon. There is much she cannot, or will not, recall.

Sometimes it is in the gulf between what we value and how we act that we are truly revealed. Croggon values Keats’s notion of ‘negative capability’: the capacity to exist in ‘uncertainties, mysterious, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Croggon cares deeply about this idea, of sitting with complexity. She returns to it often in Monsters. And yet, the book is, in its own way, a process of reaching desperately for certainty. In every piece of genealogical detective work, in every rereading of Nietzsche and his critics, in every scorching appraisal of hierarchy and patriarchy, there is a central thought: there must be some explanation. For Croggon, the rift with her sister feels hopeless. It is a narrative whose threads she traces back across generations. She has a fantasy writer’s obsession with causes and consequences. She writes about curses, about fault. She longs for the kind of resolution that stories bring, the cessation of the narrative, the stilling of change. She aches because resolution seems impossible. She bears the weight of the past and is crushed by it.

This is a backward-looking book. As a contribution to the literature of decolonisation, its focus is not on future possibilities but on the messy past. Where it does reach for the possibility of healing, it finds it in the power of self-authorship; in rejecting the expectations of others. For Croggon, the legacy of British colonialism is the notion that you can take someone’s story away from them. Monsters fights to reclaim the narrative.