The Mongoose

by Annemarie Jutel

The Mongoose is a tightly drawn, absorbing story of suffering.  It uses, as do many graphic works, an animal/spirit as metaphor for the troubles of the main character.  Just as the black dog, dragon, jellyfish, hawk, and even Danger Pickle, it is a common trope to depict an external creature with agency as a stand in for the pain of the human protagonist.

In The Mongoose, we watch Júlia suffer.  As we turn the pages, we pick up more information about the cause of Júlia’s distress.  She lies in bed; her mother comes to cheer her up (and nag her).  She’s on sick leave.  Her brother is keeping her company.  The pieces start to fall together.  We progressively understand that Júlia, a former professional runner and now physical education teacher, is dealing with the untimely death of her life partner.  We only understand the cause of her sadness in the last section of the book, and as we build up to it, we meet her, her irritatingly bossy mother, her brother, who is a paradox of inactivity and activity, her holy roller sister-in-law and a number of other minor characters.

In amongst all of the human characters, is the vegetable garden.  Carefully planted by Júlia as an elegy to her departed lover, it is dug up by an animal.  Cat?  Deer?  No, mongoose, at least according to Júlia.  No one believes her account.  It must be a cat!  And, in a hurry to learn more about mongooses (and no, the plural is not “mongeese”), I find out that they are mainly carnivorous, and are, as Júlia ponders in the book, able to decapitate venomous snakes.

Visually, the mongoose is the most important part of the book.  While her characters otherwise don’t inspire me visually, the mongoose is full-on adorable.  Something you might want to pick up and cuddle:  a smiling assassin.  The image of this smiling rodent weaves through the book, and underlines what I think is the take home message.  The characters aren’t what they necessarily appear to be; each one has its nefarious other.

The Mongoose, page 17

While this story may have been intended to underline the power of grief, the pall of sadness, this is not where it was most effective.  With each turn of the page, I found another anti-hero.  Each one of the characters acted against our anticipated behavioural model.  Her brother—tortured by his own losses—sits, apathetic, playing games.  He is empathetic, however, and he is his sister’s best support team.  Or, at least so we think.  He offers to plant her garden, he makes her delicate pasta tossed with garlic and olive oil, but all the same, can’t entertain his sister’s ruminations.  “Do you think you can keep running away and avoid everything forever?” (p.166) he shouts, when she starts talking about the mongoose again, and then tells her he is going to move out.

But Júlia too has her unpleasant side.  We have seen her, page after page, overwhelmed by sadness, dragging herself around, and we expect from her a modicum of sensitivity, when she finds a student avoiding her physical education class, on his phone, isolated, possibly sad.  Instead of empathy, we see a kind of drill sergeant.  “I can just sit here and watch you ruin your life, if that’s what you want … [118]!”  Hardly the caring pedagogy one expects from a woman so close to her own emotions.

The sadness and loss that I expect the creator would have preferred me to focus on was not as well told as the characters and their contradictions.  It is this that the mongoose punctuated.  It was magnificent, and out of place, and evil as well as adorable.  It may just be that so too are we, all of us, from time to time.

About the reviewer:  Annemarie Jutel is a sociologist of diagnosis and author of the books “Putting a Name to it:  Diagnosis in Contemporary Society (JHUP)”  and  “Diagnosis: Truths and Tales (TUP)”.  She has also written a graphic memoir about grief The Tear Bottle: A Graphic Story of Love and Things.