Review of Mooncalves by Victoria Hetherington // Margaryta Golovchenko
Margaryta Golovchenko reviews Victoria Hetherington's Mooncalves, published through Now or Never Publishing earlier this year. We published an excerpt of Mooncalves in March, which you can find here.
Some narratives take time to unravel, and only after the first 50 or even100 pages do you learn to appreciate what the writer is doing, with their story and with their craft. For lack of a better example, these are the kinds of books that, for me, feel like the literary embodiment of John Green’s famous line from The Fault in Our Stars, except in the context of reading and appreciating a book: “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.”
Mooncalves can be characterized as a feminist ecological dystopia that alternates between different points of view—Logan, Sheilagh, and Erica in pre-Singularity (Singularity being the point in time where machine life is self-aware and self-sustaining, and has surpassed human evolution) and “the Watchers,” Abby and a robot named Buppy, in post-Singularity. What they all have in common is Joseph, self-professed prophet and leader of a violent cult called Walden that is based on a real cult that operated in rural Quebec in the 1980s. While Erica’s relationship with Logan and her relationship with Sheilagh run parallel to each other, there is a haunting overlap in how similarly abusive the two relationships are. For Abby, who is looking back at these events from the future, Logan also plays a significant part in her life, even though the relationship between the two isn’t the straightforward biological father-daughter kind.
Although there certainly is a narrative in Mooncalves, it is arguably not the book’s main focus; if you are interested in the story itself, the last 40 pages or so will feel unnecessary, which is where the strictly action-driven plot ends. Instead, Hetherington devotes much of her time to character development, exploring the cycles of grief and abuse that are perpetuated not only by men and the patriarchal society, such as Erica’s chilling memory-turned-warning(“At a payphone, you call until he answers. ‘Do you have any vodka?’ you ask. You later realize you named your price, and it was low”) but also, at times, by women themselves. At least one conversation between Erica and Sheilagh perpetuates that same misogyny:
“You shouldn’t want to be with a girl. Girls aren’t good to each other,” she said.
“Why not?” I found her eyes, reflecting the dim light from the window.
“They leave you for men. They get angrier than men, they stay angry longer, and then the anger turns into other things that don’t go away.” She stroked my hair as she spoke. “And they take a long time to tell you bad news.”
It is not until the fourth chapter that the reader begins to appreciate Hetherington’s vision and feel at ease with her writing style, which shifts and pulses as it plays by its own rules. Mooncalves can in some ways be considered an experimental novel. It begins with the “Index de Personnages” that Hetherington places before the Table of Contents, performing a function similar to the libretto in an opera, so that viewers can keep track of character names, with short descriptions, which chapter they appear in, and whether they exist in pre- or post-Singularity. Hetherington moves seamlessly between different characters and different chapter “types,” so while the Sheilagh chapters resemble the conventional, straightforward approach to storytelling, a few of the Erica chapters are confessional and reflective responses to the prompt “Here’s the Thing About [blank].” There are also three chapters called “Communion Minutes,” which act as brief intermissions in the novel that nonetheless supplement what the reader has learned from the character chapters.
Similarly, Hetherington presents the reader with her own subtle and relevantly urgent kind of speculative fiction, where the science fiction elements, much like the narrative, are secondary to the character development, and heighten rather than hinder the exploration of key themes. While Hetherington does provide a compact description of what she calls “The Merge,” in which humanity will be divided into two groups—those who have merged with technology, known as theNon-Resisters, and those who have not and fight against it, known as the Resisters—it was the sprinkling of clever little details that I enjoyed most, like the way Hetherington indirectly characterizes Buppy as a robot by mentioning some of his personality settings, such as Colloquial and Late-Stage Romantic. Hetherington’s use of footnotes is worth special mention, for although there are few of them, they are incredibly effective at providing the reader with insights into Hetherington’s vision of the future. Take, for instance, the footnote for “Gut rot,” which gets defined as “Bathtub booze: like many major North American cities, Toronto became a ‘dry’ city after the second bee extinction and subsequent mass shutdown of vineyards.”
In some ways, the future described in Mooncalves is already upon us. There’s a subtle detail that Joseph includes when he lists off all of the things that will occur in his vision of the apocalypse, and which feels like the literary equivalent of a side-eye in the direction of Indigo: “You see book stores sell candles and pillows or get boarded up.” I believe that Mooncalves is capable of becoming The Handmaid’s Tale of our time not only because of how relevant it is to current discussions about climate change and patriarchy but also for some of the ways it goes further in its discussion of feminism. Mooncalves examines how men continually try to control and dictate what female queerness is. It is a book that is, in many ways, unlike anything that I have read before, and it is hard to imagine I will encounter anything quite like it again. The best way I can describe Mooncalves is that it is a book you have to read for yourself, to experience its ups and downs and fluctuations first-hand. It has a haunting sort of quirkiness that no amount of retelling can do justice to.
Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is completing her MA in art history at York University and can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.