Monster Island

I’ll be honest and admit that Monster Island wasn’t the most enjoyable read for me. Part of it was simply because of the unedited nature of the prose. I did find a lot of it interesting; I liked a lot of the concepts behind Gary, such as the way he preserved his intelligence into death and the “network” of the dead. However, other aspects felt poorly thought out and not very believable, such as the character of Mael Mag Och and the mummies. I understand that they were preserved corpses, but how did Mael Mag Och retain his intelligence? After going through the trouble to explain how Gary could preserve his brain, the druid didn’t make any sense. His brain would have ceased functioning, right? And why were the mummies so strong? I wouldn’t nitpick if it was meant to be an unbelievable fantasy, but the attempts to add scientific explanations seemed half hearted.

I was also put off by the constant use of the term “Western,” especially the way it was mostly used to mean “civilized.” Here are some excerpts;

“The civilized countries, the ones with bicameral governments and honest police forces and good infrastructure and the rule of law and wealth and privilege, the entire West…”

“It was understandable, of course—Ayaan had probably never seen real women’s fashions before. She had spent most of her life in a uniform and the lure of Western dress must—“

"I didn’t think I really wanted that kind of responsibility though as a Westerner it was a relief to not have anyone else barking orders at me."

The last one especially confuses me. As a “Westerner?” Would an “Easterner” not be relieved to not be ordered around? It could have simply been “it was a relief,” or “as a non-soldier”. What does being Western have to do with it? I am still unsure as to whether the author intended Dekalb to come off as a culturalist asshole or if the author really thinks that way himself.

This brings me to what I consider to be the overall theme of the novel; Otherism, or rather, a sense of “us” versus “them.”  There’s the living vs. the non-living, West vs. East (a divide made more pronounced by the “western” characters being mostly adult males while most of the others are young females) and so on. It ends up being a culture war with cannibalistic genocide.