Whether we see the primary cause as being postmodernism (for decades we’ve been told that our master narratives no longer connect us to each other) or cultural fragmentation (apart from worldwide phenomena such as Game of Thrones and the World Cup, we possess few shared encounters), the intellectual consensus is that we don’t talk meaningfully to each other because we lack communal stories. Leavers and Remainers, Trumpers and Never Trumpers seem to read the same experiences in entirely different ways.
This failure to communicate is what makes Alberto Manguel’s Fabulous Monsters such a charming and essential book.As a result of a lifetime of reading, he argues that as divided as we may be about the universality of shared stories (the Bennet sisters, he says, never spoke to him, while Pride and Prejudice is one of my read-every-year books), our culture and our history are indeed marked by a multitude of characters who can still help explain us to ourselves and to each other.
Manguel calls Dracula an ‘essential monster’, and argues, in smart, funny short essays, that all the figures about whom he writes represent something essential about human experience. In a wide-ranging exploration of literature, religion, myth and pop culture, he delves into what 40 of these characters might deliver to us, how they might limn those universal human themes that William Faulkner spoke about in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
It takes a certain amount of romantic literary optimism to believe that these characters — some of them more than 2,000 years old — might continue to speak to our wired world; but Manguel convinces us that they could help heal our fractured public and intellectual life. Fabulous Monsters is a paean to the value of literature, an affectionate literary memoir in tiny bites, and a close critical and cultural reading of significant stories worthy of our attention.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in