Review: 'Mrs Caliban' (Faber Editions) by Rachel Ingalls

 As I mentioned in my post on Friday, Mrs Caliban has been on my reading list ever since I found out it was a major inspiration for Guillermo del Toro's film The Shape of Water, which I adored. Faber's re-release was the perfect opportunity for me to read it, even if I did get to it a little later than I had hoped. Thank you to Faber & Faber and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 8/5/2021
Publisher: Faber and Faber

With a new foreword by Irenosen Okojie

Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs. Her infant son, unborn child and dog have all just died; her husband is unfaithful, and they are too unhappy to get a divorce.

One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen.

Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic and excellent at housework, Larry the frogman is a revelation – and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams . . .

Reissued with a new foreword by Irenosen Okojie, Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs Caliban is an amphibious cult classic – a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale – as magical today as it was four decades ago.

The Faber Edition has a new introduction by Irenosen Okojie, which beautifully analyses Ingall's story. While I did initially skip it, wanting to go into Mrs Caliban as unspoiled as possible, I majorly enjoyed it once I had finished the novel. Her comments on Ingalls' sharp tone, on the novel's wider impact, on its uniqueness, are truly insightful and really enhanced my reading experience. I do have a few gripes with the blurb above however. I feel like it on the one hand oversells the drama, or the "sexiness" of the novel, and on the other hand almost undermines its quiet fervour. Because Mrs Caliban, in its best moments, blazes. Don't go into this book expecting steamy monster-sex, that's what the Venom movies are for. Don't go into this book if you're looking for shock and awe only. It goes much deeper than that, which sounds cliché but is true. Mrs Caliban is called that way because of the link, I assume, to Shakespeare's character Caliban. He was a human/monster hybrid, treated like a slave, like something lesser, full of impulses for which he has no adequate release. Even his "redemption" takes the shape of having to be forever looked after like a burden. While it may seem at first glance that this would refer to frogman, the book title is 'Mrs', not 'Mr'. Dorothy is the one who is lost, looking for a freedom she can't even quite picture.

Horrible and weird things simply happen in Mrs Caliban. Whether it is death, an escaped "frogman", or late night ambushes, these things simply occur in Dorothy's life and yet they are not the horrible thing we imagine. There is no build-up, there is no "silence before the storm". Rather it is the humdrum of normal life, the invasive family, the dinner with friends you don't really like, the continuous cleaning, in short, the everyday that becomes almost horrific in its weight and its endless repetition. Even though Dorothy is housing a dangerous non-human, she still has to polish the silver, she still has to cook, she still has to remember when the gardener is visiting. And all of that becomes so heavy through Ingalls precise and cold prose that it is truly no wonder Dorothy fully embraces the absurd and allows Larry to live with her. It is a remarkable feat, however, that we as the reader completely join her in that embrace, however. Even for us, Larry is a marvelous surprise, a constant source of delight. With his endless curiosity about human habits and behaviours, he poses questions to Dorothy that even we find hard to answer. 

I've already said quite a bit about Ingalls' writing in the two paragraphs above. There is a quiet fury but also a determined contemplation to her writing that makes Mrs Caliban a very interesting reading experience. I found myself laughing at times. But I was also very sad for Dorothy. I was also super intrigued by Larry. I was very mad at her husband. All of these emotions are called forth by prose which in and of itself gives nothing away. The harshest truths are stated in calm, precise sentences. Yet those moments still deeply echo. There are two or three scenes, or even sentences, that are deeply engraved in my mind, and while I don't want to discuss them in detail for fear of spoilers, that strike so true about friendship, love, misery, and also joy. While Mrs Caliban may have the oddest of set-ups, it also holds true to the most important tenet of fairy tales, which is revealing the ordinary through the extraordinary. I can't wait to read more by Rachel Ingalls, now that I have finally made her acquaintance.

I give this novel(la)...

5 Universes!

Mrs Caliban definitely isn't for everyone, but it is a brilliant read nonetheless. With sparse but stunning prose, Ingalls elevates a plot that could have been absurd to one that feels true.