by Terri Mullholland.
Juliet Jacques, Monaco (Toothgrinder Press, 2023)
Don’t be fooled by the slightness of this volume, nothing by Juliet Jacques is ever slight, and this experimental, autofiction novella is no exception.
Monaco is a series of ten emails, interspersed with photographs, from an unnamed narrator (sergeant-rock@gmail) to an unnamed recipient (robinsonrj191@gmail), a former lover, describing a visit to the Principality of Monaco — a place ‘not even as big as Horsham’ — in April 2022.
The purpose of the narrator’s visit is ostensibly for a work trip to ‘capture Monaco’ for Chris, the editor of Photo World, in the run-up to the Grand Prix. But it’s really because her therapist ‘told me to take a break, maybe somewhere I hadn’t been before, somewhere I wouldn’t normally go.’
And Monaco, the playground of the rich, is definitely not somewhere the narrator, a Labour supporter and a socialist, would normally go. The opening email describing the delayed flight out from Gatwick — ‘Maybe they all had Covid’ — sets the political scene for the story. It’s the narrator’s first time abroad since ‘that weekend at the Biennale in September 2019, just after The World Transformed and JC’s speech on the Old Steine when you took my arm and said we’re going to win […] My heart still breaks.’
Loss — physical loss, political loss, and romantic loss — is a recurrent theme. The narrator draws attention to it explicitly in her encounters with the grave of Princess Grace, the war memorials, and the grand mausolea of the rich: ‘Maybe it’s just me but there’s a melancholy running through the Principality’. That melancholy is heightened by being alone and it is clear how much the silent recipient, the person who once shared her bed and her life is missed: ‘I woke up early and put my hand out to reach for you, like I still do every morning, but there wasn’t even another pillow’.
The emails are the narrator’s attempt to make sense of, to try to understand and tease out her complex relationship with Monaco and the confused feelings it evokes: ‘I think I like it — or at least I don’t hate it’. And, a day later, ‘Starting to feel, I don’t know, comfortable here?’ In response to her daily dispatch, the narrator receives no reply during her trip. But the former lover speaks through the narrator’s text, their response anticipated, their words often inserted, creating the sense of a vivid dialogue and debate.
To demonstrate ‘how weirdly perfect it all is’, and how unreal that perfection is, the narrator attaches photographs. That weird perfection, a state-created illusion, is captured in the narrator’s observation on the artificial beach at Larvotto, which ‘just about sums this place up: expensively imported sand on reclaimed land and a single palm tree.’
It soon becomes apparent the Grand Prix angle is limited. The narrator suggests Monaco’s public art instead, but Chris says it’s ‘boring’ and tells her ‘to focus on the “glamour of the place”’. Chris knows as well as the narrator this is ‘off-brand’ — ‘but then it’s “off-brand” for me to be in Monaco, and maybe that would make the piece more interesting?’
The narrator embarks on a ‘glamour’ hunt. But like the artificial beauty of the landscape, the glamour never seems quite real either. In surreal, cinematic descriptions it is frequently juxtaposed against its unglamourous, downmarket equivalent. On a night out, dressed in a new frock from a Monaco boutique — ‘red and white with a diagonal sash’ that she is told looks like ‘the Monaco football shirt’ — the narrator eats at a restaurant with ‘all these golden arches (I know, “like McDonald’s”)’.
Heading for the casino, with an H&M cardigan over the expensive frock, she enters a looking-glass world. She meets a woman with a face ‘the colour of Monaco, white skin and red, red lips’, who tells her: ‘You are going to be lucky’. The narrator is briefly seduced by the idea that she, too, can become part of the illusion: ‘Everyone was looking at me, and I suddenly felt how straight and yet strange this place was, all these people living out some idea of decadent luxury that they’d learned from a hundred years of cinema. How could I not be the star?’
Through the lens of autofiction, and a setting that is a fiction created out of fictions, Jacques challenges the reader to think more widely about political fabrications, gambles, and hypocrisies at home in Britain.
Many years ago, while holidaying in Nice, I took a train to Monaco for a day trip. Like the narrator, I also found something weirdly seductive about the unreality of the place. It was easy to slip into a fantasy of being one of the despised super-rich, or at least having their bank balance, for the day. Would I become someone else if I stayed and played? The narrator wonders the same thing, wanting to discover, ‘how people I’ve always hated actually live’ and how ‘I might position myself within that… or be positioned … or become someone else.’
Monaco is a place that believes its own illusion, and that tempts us into believing it too. Its a place where you can be someone else, at least temporarily, where you can be lucky if only for a night. It’s a fantasy of a better world. And Jacques text is equally seductive. The immersive intimacy of the email format, means the reader is right there with the narrator, sharing the journey. Like the narrator, we want to hate Monaco, but can’t quite bring ourselves to do it. We start to wonder if we could actually like it, just a little.
Chris was right, glamour might be ‘off-brand’, but in searching for it, and failing to write about it, Juliet Jacques has written something with characteristic wit and flair that is brilliantly on brand.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She has published four books: Rayner Heppenstall: A Critical Study (Dalkey Archive, 2007); Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015); a volume of short stories, Variations (Influx Press, 2021); and Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021 (Cipher Press, 2022). Her fifth, a novella entitled Monaco, is published by Toothgrinder Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Terri Mullholland is a writer and researcher living in London. She has a PhD from the University of Oxford, where she has taught English Literature and Critical Theory. Her flash fiction has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Litro, Mercurious, and The Liminal Review, and her pamphlet of hybrid pieces Weather / Patterns was published by intergraphia books in October 2022.
