Book Review: No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull

No Gods, No Monsters is an existential novel that gives the reader a world with mythological monsters. Everything starts to unravel for the reader when Laina’s brother is murdered by the police, but that’s not the whole truth. There is more. There’s Rebecca, there’s Lincoln, there’s a dragon, a child, and dead fathers, and ghosts, and secret societies. All played together, laying out a mystery. The book starts quoting the Unbearable Lightness of Being like this holy scripture, explaining what it means to exist, and from there, the author lays his case for what he thinks about the meaning of life, the university, and everything as he plays all his characters in the play of monsters, gods, and humans. He hides the plot to keep the mystery to himself.

I love a good mystery, but I’m afraid this wasn’t one. Everything felt forced, like the author wanted to write the next great American novel, using everything he had learned from the classics and the bizarre. I’m not sure if simplification would have made a difference. Maybe clarification would have done the trick. I feel bad writing so because the author put so much into the book and there were so many concepts I loved dearly. Still, I say so. Reading this book was tiresome, annoying, and frustrating, and not in a good way. In the end, when the mystery is revealed, I don’t get the liberation I wanted. It was like, I see, things make more sense now, but that’s not some great secret you are telling me. I would have loved to figure it out rather than been told. And I don’t mean the theme of the book: racism and what it is to exist in the liminal as a minority and what such a community has to do to survive and find its place in society. That part was beautifully written.

Maybe what I struggle with is the Unbearable Lightness of Being and its tie to the “protagonist’s” tone. I put the protagonist into quotations because there is no single protagonist; the protagonist is the mystery and the plot, and, as the author writes in his clarification of the book: the community. For me, the Unbearable Lightness of Being is a book for the young with its pseudo-understanding of what it means to exist in the everyday. It is this poetic tone struggling with the meaning and existing and searching for it in the pointless of oneself. It is a book about nihilism and individualism, highly understandable with its historical background, but not as scripture, what it means to exist. At the end of the No Gods, No Monsters, the book returns to the one and the experience of it from the interconnectedness of the community (individual paths in existence), and I feel cheated. The community ceases, and the mystery is the Unbearable Existence of a Person in a universe that is unlawful.

I’m annoyed.

Thank you for reading the review! I have a wonderful weekend ❤