It’s the near future. Despite predictions and warnings aplenty, there has been little actual action or change, and so the climate crisis has escalated rapidly. New Zealand bears the blessing and curse of having remaining temperate landscapes for comfortable human habitation, at least for now. The Wealthugees have arrived, using their financial clout and political influence to flee their troubled or decimated homelands to buy some added time to continue the existence of privilege, comfort, and power to which they’ve become accustomed.
Unsurprisingly, the native New Zealand population resents the Wealthugee influx, yet has become dependent on their money and accustomed to the scraps of ‘the good life’ that happen to fall aside for regular people to enjoy on occasion. But of course, there’s an irony to such sentiments, as many of these ‘native’ New Zealand people came from another wave of immigrant, colonizing stock intruding upon a previous ‘native’ Māori population, arriving centuries earlier via East Polynesia, who continue to live on the mainland island they call Aotearoa.
In She’s a Killer, Kirsten McDougall writes a near-future dystopia that does explore these layers of colonization and control, but the core of the novel rests on the personality/psychology of her protagonist and an overall satirical tone that balances the comedic and the disturbing.
The protagonist is Alice, a woman in her thirties who falls just one point short of having an official ‘genius’ IQ, a statistic that she seems to have unconsciously (or is it just fate?) incorporated into a stubbornly consistent state of underachieving and apathy. With failed romances, unfulfilled career potentials, and an estranged mother (who lives in the same house, but is walled off into a separate unconnected flat, and only communicated with when necessary via Morse code signals,) Alice seems very much alone to just survive in this miserable climate-ravaged, Wealthugee-invaded world.
Well, alone except for her invisible friend Simp, who recently has returned to talk to Alice after being gone for years after Alice’s childhood, and that incident that resulted in her childhood home burning down. And there’s also Alice’s lifelong best friend, a woman who being married to an up-and-coming go-getter, and with a child, is at a very different place than Alice is. But back in their youth, Alice once saved her from an attempted suicide, so they still share a deep connection. The friend is the only person Alice still gives a little grace and patience, despite frustrations. With everyone else, Alice is blunt and unforgiving, dismissive if not hostile.
As you might suspect by now, Alice is a bit of an unreliable point-of-view in the novel, a person who is paradoxically extremely self-aware in some regards while maintaining self-delusion in others.
Alice’s routine existence of practiced disconnection becomes upended when a Russian-literature-loving man named Pablo begins talking to her, and eventually dating her. Eventually Pablo introduces Alice to his teenage daughter Erika, an ‘official’, full-fledged genius with activist ambitions. Alice gradually realizes there is more to Erika than she was led to believe, with Erika’s drive being enough to pull Alice along with for an alarming and deadly ride.
The plot of She’s a Killer is slow to pick up, with significant reveals and action only coming half-way through the novel or beyond. Yet, the title itself already spoils a certain degree of what is to come. As such I found it to be a difficult novel to really get into, and by the time there were developments, I wasn’t that invested in the plot because of the unlikable characters and often infuriating journey through Alice’s mind/decisions through that slow build. Perhaps my apathy to the plot simply mirrored Alice’s own point of view of the world and her situation that I was reading.
But at the same time I concede those characters (especially Alice and Erika) are what makes She’s a Killer most interesting and compelling to read. All of the characters here are basically terrible people in one form or another, morally compromised either overtly through action or indirectly through non-action. An astute commentary on humanity and the climate crisis? Even with all there is in the characters to disturb or to infuriate and annoy, McDougall does a fantastic job of somehow still making them seem justifiable at some level, and relatable. A reader may not normally act like the characters in She’s a Killer, or have a mindset like any of them, but I’m sure we’ve all had moments or instances. At the very least, times where we’ve wished we could/would act in such a way, despite knowing better or deciding otherwise, whether due to morality or fear.
Ultimately She’s a Killer is a satire, and it does make the reader consider the sometimes absurd-feeling state we as humanity are now in socially, ecologically, politically, etc. When/how do we choose to act – or not to act? How do we balance taking care of ourselves while also keeping in mind others? What do we fight for, what do we sacrifice, what costs do we consider? What are our limits?
McDougall supplies no answers and the satire highlights dysfunction. The ending doesn’t supply optimism or pessimism so much as illustrate that something is going to happen one way or another through the combination of our action/inaction, and whether it results in true improvements, a step further into ruin, or simply a continuation of the status quo is anyone’s guess, everyone’s interpretation, what we make of it.
