Review: Real Monsters - Liam Brown

Liam Brown’s debut novel Real Monsters is a short, sharp satire on the War on Terror which manages to hit most of its targets with a minimum of fuss. Opening with reports of a spectacular terrorist attack, Brown tells a story of alienation, deceit and betrayal, through the experiences of Lorna and Danny, a young married couple who are thrown together in the aftermath of the bombing. As the novel progresses, both go on voyages of discovery which take them into the dark heart of the war, revealing the horror which lies beneath the media presentation of the conflict.

The details of the attack will be recognisable to everyone: on an apparently ordinary day, the television is suddenly filled with ‘videos of skyscrapers reduced to rubble. Whole neighbourhoods engulfed in flames. People screaming. Blood. Smoke'. For Lorna, the meaning is immediately clear: 'it was about survival now. About Us versus Them. We were under attack. I was twelve years old'. More disconcerting is the news about the enemy behind this outrage: we soon learn that the attackers were less than human: 'These freaks weren't people in the conventional sense, but deformed savages; things who despised us for our wholesomeness and democracy and prayed daily to their heathen gods for nothing short of our total annihilation'.

Brown’s decision to use ‘real monsters’ as the perpetrators of the attack allows him to investigate the way in which the Western media creates images of ‘The Other’ to sell a pro-war narrative. Although these monsters are remarkably elusive, we hear rumours of green blood, of nations full of ‘hideous, bloodthirsty Monsters just baying to tear us limb-from-limb'. Politicians are quick to join in, declaring that the West in under attack from a ‘Pivot of Poison’. The sense of heightened outrage doesn’t allow for any discussion of motivation: the Monsters are 'apparently provoked by little more than our on-going existence'.

Danny signs up to fight the Monsters and is soon deployed to the front line, but the war proves deeply disappointing: nothing but ‘six months walkin in circles’. Desperate to put his training into practice, he is especially bitter at memos from cost-conscious politicians asking soldiers to ‘consider the financial burden of ammunition'. At the end of the tour, Danny and his comrades are ordered to march across the desert to an air base. On the first night, they are ambushed: left with minimal supplies and equipment, the small group begins to fray, and it soon becomes apparent that most will not make it to the base alive.

Lorna, meanwhile, is equally bored at home. After losing her father in the initial attack, she finds comfort in a range of anaesthetics: sex, pills, pot, poetry. At her lowest ebb, she encounters Danny, who initially helps her to stabilise her life. After his departure, Lorna begins working at a charity shop, where she meets Dustin, a hipster with links to a Wikileaks style organisation called Project Clearwater. Lorna is sceptical at first, but, longing for companionship, she allows herself to be dragged along to an anti-war march. Soon, Dustin is leading her deeper into the movement. At a clandestine meeting, she sees footage of atrocities carried out by the army, and begins to question the whole basis of the war.

The narrative switches between Danny and Lorna, allowing the reader to gradually build up a fuller picture of the relationship. Danny’s side of the story is told in the form of diary entries addressed to his child. Punctuated by more ‘ha’s and ‘nah’s than a Mark E Smith lyric sheet, these sections are vivid and raw, but the reader also suspects that this account is highly subjective. Lorna’s, by contrast, appears far more lucid, even as she describes her heavy drinking and experimental drug use in the aftermath of her father’s death. As she comes to know Danny better, his moods and his attempts at gallows humour (referring to their wedding reception as ‘the wake’, for example) become increasingly sinister, as if they are hiding a dark secret.

This uneasy relationship between civilian and soldier is a microcosm of the wider disjunction between the people fighting the war and those staying at home. Brown captures the dehumanising effect the conflict has on everyone it touches. Danny’s initial army training drives a wedge between him and Lorna, as he is thrust into an overly macho environment designed to turn him into a machine. Friends, too, are divided by arguments about who the ‘real monsters’ are, and this plays out on a wider scale as millions of anti-war protesters take to the streets, creating a crisis which threatens to topple the government.

The satire isn’t solely directed in one direction, though. The leaders of the anti-war lobby are also targets by virtue of their self-importance: 'sat down in his ridiculous candlelit cavern with his co-conspirators, like bloody Guy Fawkes. It was all just so irretrievably... naff'. Brown captures the sensation of protest marches well, through Lorna’s cynical commentary (‘the stink rose as people tumbled into one another while the police stood impotently aside, outnumbered, outgunned… the protestors all stared blissfully skywards, glowing with a collective confidence that they were in the right, that they could make a difference, just by being here, together'), and manages to puncture the well-meaning pomposity of the ‘Not in my Name’ slogan.

While the descriptions of anti-war marches may draw comparisons with Ian McEwan’s Saturday (minus the interminable descriptions of squash matches, fortunately), there is a hint of Ben Myers to the prose, and even a nod to The English Patient at one point, as Danny recuperates in the desert following a close shave with an IED. There are flaws: at times, the chronology between the two stories can be a little confusing, and it’s sometimes hard to tell whether we are in America or the UK. Overall, though, Brown manages the tension well, building up to a thrilling and unexpected climax. Real Monsters is a brave, contemporary novel which doesn’t pull its punches.