Writing Fragile Monsters

In one sense, Fragile Monsters took two years to write. In another, it took three generations. 

Fragile Monsters is the story of an Indian-Malaysian family living through the Japanese invasion of Malaya in WW2 and the subsequent Malayan Emergency. It explores this traumatic and politically turbulent time through the fractured relationship between a granddaughter and her grandmother.

Durga is a mathematician, an academic lecturer with a preference for all things logical. Her grandmother Mary is a storyteller, a woman who keeps her secrets close to her chest and tells whatever version of the truth she fancies. When Durga returns to Mary’s house in rural Malaysia for a visit, she begins to question the stories Mary has told throughout her childhood. Gradually, she uncovers a confronting new reality, in which her own long-dead mother plays a horrifying role.

Fragile Monsters is based on my own father’s childhood in Pahang, Malaysia. When I was small he used to tell me bedtime stories about his experiences in Kuala Lipis, which sounded so different to my own life in Australia. It was only as an adult that I realised the darker significance of some of these stories: Kuala Lipis was the headquarters of the Japanese army in Pahang, following the invasion of Malaya. 

When I was older, I began reading memoirs and recollections of other Indian-Malaysian families who’d lived through this same time period. Several of the events my father had described were echoed in these narratives, and I became interested in the different ways each story interpreted history. In the end, the most fascinating thing turned out not to be the narratives themselves but the omissions from them: the spaces in between the words. 

The worst atrocities were always uniformly described as occurring to a neighbour, to an acquaintance, to the next village over. The authors of these narratives were keeping tragedy at a distance. They were creating a fresh truth together from the past, just as we all do with our most traumatic memories.

I’ve always loved the slipperiness of stories, the way they can turn the truth into something eerily unfamiliar. By the time I was studying at university, though, reading had become something of a guilty pleasure. I was supposed to be a scientist and a mathematician; not someone who spent her time escaping into fictional worlds.

Throughout my maths PhD I would spend the days poring over category theory proofs, and then “waste” my evenings reading novels. Of course, that turned out to be a waste at all! As I discovered when I began an evening writing class ten years later, the process of coming up with a mathematical proof feels exactly the same, in terms of creativity, as coming up with a story. 

Enrolling in that creative writing class was a crucial step for me. By then I’d moved to London and was working full-time as a software consultant. Having some time formally set aside for writing felt like giving myself permission to explore stories again. I found myself being drawn back repeatedly to the tales from my childhood. I began visiting the British Library to hunt down more memoirs of WW2 in Malaya and to find out more about the Malayan Emergency. When I began my creative writing MA at City University, I already knew what the novel was that I wanted to write.

I was incredibly lucky, I think, to be able to fit my writing around my day job. I found myself getting up at 5am, spending far too much money on notebooks – I write longhand for first drafts – and immersing myself in these half-remembered tales that had been handed down from my grandmother, to my father, and to me. I went on research trips to Malaysia, and learnt how to look at it with fresh eyes. It became more than just the place where my family lived; it became the place where my family history – and the history of so many others – had been written. 

I was also very lucky to have a relatively smooth journey to publication. Of course there were rejections, but my dream agent (Zoë Waldie, of RCW) saw the potential in the story from an early stage. I always felt that we had a shared vision for the book, which was vitally important through the subsequent rounds of editing. By the time the book went out on submission (it was bought within a few days by Mary Mount, of Viking) the manuscript had taken on its own vital life. It no longer felt like a story that I was writing; it felt like a story that was getting itself told.

Of course, the characters in Fragile Monsters are fictional. Still, when I look through early drafts I find myself recognising phrases my grandmother used, or turns of expression familiar from my childhood. In writing Fragile Monsters, I feel as though I’ve drawn not only on my personal history, but on the history of Malaysia and its people. It’s been an immense privilege to write this book, and I’m so pleased to finally be able to share it with readers.

Fragile Monsters by Catherine Menon (Viking) 

FRAGILE MONSTERS

Supple, artful, skilful storytelling – it takes an immediate grip on the reader’s imagination and doesn’t let go’ HILARY MANTEL
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A SPELLBINDING DEBUT NOVEL SET BETWEEN WW2 AND CONTEMPORARY MALAYSIA

Mary is a difficult grandmother for Durga to love. She is sharp-tongued and ferocious, with more demons than there are lines on her palms. When Durga visits her in rural Malaysia, she only wants to endure Mary, and the dark memories home brings, for as long as it takes to escape.

But a reckoning is coming. Stuck together in the rising heat, both women must untangle the truth from the myth of their family’s past. What happened to Durga’s mother after she gave birth? Why did so many of their family members disappear during the war? And who is to blame for the childhood tragedy that haunts her to this day?

In her stunning debut novel Catherine Menon traces one family’s story from 1920 to the present, unravelling a thrilling tale of love, betrayal and redemption against the backdrop of natural disasters and fallen empires. Written in vivid technicolour, with an electric daughter-grandmother relationship at its heart, Fragile Monsters explores what happens when secrets fester through the generations.

Website: https://cgmenon.com/

Twitter: @cg_menon

Instagram: @catherine.menon

Catherine Menon is Australian-British, has Malaysian heritage and lives in London. She is a University lecturer in robotics and has both a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in Creative Writing. Fragile Monsters is her debut novel.

 

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Category: On Writing