Naomi Alderman’s remarkable novel starts with a bereaved daughter – a writer – setting up a wildlife camera in her parents’ garden. On viewing the camera footage, an unidentifiable woodland mammal is spotted. This creature rapidly starts appearing all over the country; a gentle-mannered, badger-like mini-mammoth, which society calls the mimmoth. The onset is sudden – we are two pages in when the writer, who also narrates, announces: “They had come from nowhere and now they were everywhere”.
But these creatures are not simian underground morlocks from a H G Wells dystopia, nor are they a threat towards any humans it finds. The mimmoth appears to manifest an innate empathy with the grief-stricken writer, sitting on her lap and stroking her face. This is a creature that performs rhythmic tribal dances in suburban back gardens. It creates a powerful fungal matter that results in extended life spans, improved fertility and lowers the blood pressure of people throughout the world. From an ordinary, domestic environment something extraordinary evolves.
Yet the writer is not only navigating her elderly mother’s death, she is recovering from devastating repeat pregnancy losses. The multiple miscarriages and her mother’s strokes yoke together in her imagination into many vicious “haemorrhages of blood”. “One sees things in the days and weeks after a death”, she writes. Even the writer’s birth is shadowed by the threat of death. A photo taken around the time shows her mother gazing off in the distance in photographs, as if, writes Alderman, she can “see the Angel of Death in the corner of the room”, in a morbid foreshadowing of the repeated pregnancy loss that will haunt the daughter she has just given birth to.
As she prepares for the stone-setting, we see how a mysterious species enables a grief-stricken writer to glimpse imaginary selves
Unlike our writer, who feels the “whole stupid game of living” is now a useless exercise, the mimmoth who looks at her from the twilit garden is “full of purposeful life”. The fungal growths the mimmoth produces create enormous, healthy plants which grow in the back garden of a writer whose womb could not grow a child. It is “as if the mimmoths were looking for lives where holes had opened up”. The government sets up a Mimmoth Task Force to deal with the ever-growing numbers of them. Meanwhile, the mimmoths, seemingly oblivious to the fuss around them, create tiny, blue mushrooms which disappear moments after their creation, eat lots of slugs and at one point are ‘photographed dancing in a group of eleven in the Netherlands’.
The Strangers is coyly self-reflexive. The writer is named Naomi who is overseeing a successful television adaptation of one of her novels (Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, was adapted by Amazon Prime). Meanwhile the scenes recounting her mother’s final illnesses, the nights sleeping on hospital floors, the blood, her mother’s preferring to see a doctor than saying the Shema (one of only a few Jewish references; Alderman, who was brought up Orthodox, is no longer a practising Jew) contain an emotional rawness that feels autobiographical. It was whilst her mother was hospitalised, the writer reminds us, that “my grasp on reality began to feel a little unmoored”. And: “Looking back, I think at this time I dislocated my brain”.
This novel is not a sermon on grief, but rather probes the nasty, bloody turmoil of how to keep on living. The inexplicable mimmoths serve as a metaphor for the truths we have to accept, as much as we might struggle to understand them. Perhaps the act of writing itself is part of this process too. As Alderman says “…our minds will keep on trying to help us, keep on trying to make their confused impressions into something that makes sense”. At the end of the first year after her mother’s death, as she prepares for the stone-setting, we see how a mysterious magical species has enabled a grief-stricken writer to glimpse her imaginary selves, and the possible others she might have been. This is a novel about how to accept and live alongside the losses we encounter, and how the key to doing so might possibly lie in an ordinary suburban garden.
The Strangers, by Naomi Alderman, is published by Fig Tree
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