Naomi Alderman's The Strangers Blends Grief and Eco-Horror

Naomi Alderman's new novel, The Strangers, explores grief through the lens of eco-horror. The Women's Prize-winning author narrates the book as herself, mourning her mother's death and a series of miscarriages.

According to a review in The Guardian, the book tests a philosophical idea from Ludwig Wittgenstein about the disorienting nature of loss. Alderman's structural ingenuity allows the reader to grapple with grief's ineffable aspects.

The Mimmoth Mystery

The plot involves the discovery of a new species, flat-faced, long-nosed mammals called mimmoths. They are largely inscrutable but seem to improve local soil ecology. Their ambiguity makes them floating signifiers in a polarized world. To some they are harbingers of a better future; to others they are "invaders, genetic freaks, not natural."

Alderman sketches the political and media environment with a light touch. She describes failing British institutions as a "Potemkin village" with a clockwork mechanism slowly running down.

A Genre Hybrid

The book is a hybrid of memoir and speculative fiction, a high-risk manoeuvre that raises the philosophical stakes. It is a more intimate story than Alderman's previous works like The Power, which upended the global gender hierarchy.

Alderman handles the obvious political allegories without letting them collapse into polemic. The reviewer notes occasional moments that feel transplanted from an era of front pages and evening news, not unchecked genocide livestreamed on phones.

The Unchosen Nature of Loss

Fundamentally, the novel asserts the painful truth that we do not get to choose what we lose. The narrator wonders if she has fallen prey to "mimmoth-psychosis," a delusion of unique intimacy with the creatures. This connects to ideas of grief as a site where selfhood is undone and remade.

The mimmoths' arrival coincides with an upsurge in fungal mycelium, a network symbolizing sociality and resource reallocation. Alderman asks if there is a parallel in how we allocate attention and love between the living, the dead, and the never-born. As the novelist Naomi Alderman writes in the book, "I do not wish my ghosts away." The Strangers is a deeply moving attempt to live alongside such intractable questions.