BOOKS: Monster, 1959, David Maine (2008)

After three fine re-tellings of Biblical stories, Maine turns to more contemporary mythology with a re-imagining of a 1950s monster movie from the monster's point of view.

Well, sort of. Maine's monster -- known as "K." -- isn't really intellectually advanced enough to possess anything as sophisticated as "point of view." And Maine's narrative voice acknowledges the limited viewpoint of his central character in the opening paragraphs:

In his dream, K. flies.

Below him is the island: verdant and vertiginous, lunatic with creation, lush like a scrap of Eden discarded and forgotten in the ocean's endless tundra. Trees flash by, rainforest-dense, tropical growth shrouding the hills in overstuffed quilted folds. Flocks of birds glitter like refracting jewels, like op art on the wing, Vs and swarms and grand unruly mobs weaving from scarp to treetop to lakeside and up again into open sky. Toward K.

K. has no words for this. In fact K. has no words at all. The language center in his brain looks like a Jackson Pollack painting dropped from a great height. K. is preliterate, prelingual; in fact, pre-just about anything you can think of. His thoughts are the pictures he sees and the feelings they create. Sensation is his vocabulary: flavor, touch, sound, intuition, image. And smell most of all. In his dream, the heels-over-head feelings of floating, swooping, soaring are bereft of words to name them. The closest he can come is to grunt in his sleep, whimper and purr and coo and bleat. Slumbering high in his treetop nest, K. does just this. But in his dream, he flies.

Given the challenge of writing from so limited an intellectual perspective, it is remarkable how complete a character K. becomes, and how much personality and dimension Maine gives him.

The plot of Maine's story is borrowed roughly from King Kong. American visitors discover K. on a remote tropical island, take him back to the States, turn him into the centerpiece of a touring circus, and he escapes in New York City. K. himself, though, is a more elaborate creature than a large monkey; he's equal parts Kong, Godzilla, and Mothra, with a few other horrifying parts thrown in for good measure. There's the obligatory human love triangle (which is, of course, the proximate cause of K.'s destructive rampage), the monster's climb up a New York landmark (it's not the Empire State Building this time, but Maine's alternate choice is even more dramatically interesting), and the nearly operatic tragedy of K.'s death.

One of Maine's themes here is our tendency to tell only the most pleasant or interesting parts of the story, and the way in which those choices shape the reaction to the story. Certainly, the adventurers who capture K. and bring him to America aren't telling the entire truth about how he came to be there, or about how dangerous he really is. And as the story progresses through the late 1950s, Maine stops for periodic reminders of the real-world events -- wars, famines, disasters, tyrannies -- that were going on, things that are usually left out of escapist stories like these so that we can believe that imaginary monsters are the only ones we need to fear.

As always, Maine's writing is witty, irreverent, lively, and moving. I had found The Book of Samson to be a slight letdown from the level of Maine's first two novels, but Monster, 1959 is a fine return to form.