Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls – #ABookADayInMay – Day 6

Mrs Caliban (1982) by Rachel Ingalls was all over the place when it was reprinted by Faber a few years ago – one of those reprints that dominated end-of-year lists. It certainly caught my attention, but I didn’t get around to reading it until my friend Clare gave me a copy for my birthday last year, and I raced through its 117 pages this evening.

The title obviously reminds us of the monstrous figure from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but Mrs Caliban is, in fact, a very ordinary housewife – Dorothy Caliban. She has gone through the unbearable trauma of a child dying, followed shortly by a miscarriage. Her husband is having an affair, not very subtly. A vision of the American dream of white-picket domesticity has been systematically torn apart, and yet Dorothy cannot escape from the role she had anticipated playing in it. Despite having to grieve the children and being poorly treated by the husband, she must still be the housewife. She must still wash and fold laundry, clean the house, cook the meals.

The only thing that disturbs this picture is that she might well be going mad. The announcers on the TV sometimes talk directly to her, for instance. It seems like this paranoia might become the plot – but it is sidelined for something more significant, which happens right in the middle of a very domestic scene.

Back in the kitchen again, she had all the salad ingredients out, chopping up carrots and celery with her favourite sharp vegetable knife, had put some potato chips and nuts in bowls and just slid some cheese on crackers under the grill. Then she raced for the bathroom in the spare room.

She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face.

Dorothy had earlier seen that ‘Aquarius the Monsterman’ had escaped from the Institute of Oceanographic Research, with warnings on the news about his terrible dangerousness. He has, in his escape, killed two of the scientists in brutal ways. And yet – she offers him some vegetables. He politely accepts. She slips out of the room to give her husband his anticipated meal, but returns to have a gentle, quiet conversation with this ‘Aquarius’ – who is, in fact, called Larry. He speaks perfect English, and seems to post no danger to her. And she scarcely seems surprised. I suppose, when so many terrible, dramatic things have happened in your life, you can take something like this in your stride.

Larry has a head like a frog, a body like a man, and strong, green arms. It is difficult for Ingalls to describe him in a way that doesn’t make him feel a little gross or like a figure from a supernatural movie – but we see him through Dorothy’s eyes, and she doesn’t flinch. Indeed, his kindness and interest in her are beguiling. It isn’t long before they are having sex (he is, it turns out, very human in that department). They have sex over and over, in any room of the house. It isn’t described at any length, and it certainly isn’t included for titillation. It is just further evidence of Dorothy’s new-found satisfaction in a life that is so deeply, deeply unsatisfactory.

And it turns out that Larry isn’t dangerous, really. He can easily kill – but he only killed his captors because they tortured him sadistically.

“Thank you,” he said. He was always scrupulously polite. Now that she knew of the brutal methods that had been used to ram home the Institute’s policy on polite manners, she found these little touches of good breeding in his speech as poignant as if they had been scars on his body.

Dorothy continues to conceal Larry, not even telling her best friend Estelle anything about it. I haven’t mentioned her yet, but she is a bright light in the novella, particularly in the beginning – somebody who has kept her exuberance, and encourages Dorothy, despite the sad and difficult lives they lead.

The end of the novella takes a lurch to the dramatic, with shocking events and revelations that are very different from the domestic scenes and the philosophical discussions between Dorothy and Larry that precede it. Somehow it works – perhaps because they are described with the same steady calmness that seems to shroud the rest of the book, however strange the events described. Because this is, of course, really a novella about the breakdown of a marriage and a life. There is a well-played ambiguity about Larry’s existence – could he be a figment of Dorothy’s imagination, like the TV newsreaders? – but it hardly matters, because either way this is a feminist subversion of the lives lived behind the immaculate front doors of suburbia. Ingalls plays the bizarreness of the plot with a steady hand that leaves the reader feeling that Dorothy’s unexceptional, unhappy life is the real point of fascination – right through to a final line that is very moving, even if you’re not exactly why.