Will Snelling reviews God Complex by Rachael Allen (Faber, 2024)
Rachael Allen’s debut, Kingdomland (Faber, 2019) was instantly striking, inviting the reader into a surreal world full of suffering and black humour:
In among all the crying, I see
A burning child on the stove.
The same one as before?
Elsewhere, peacocks screamed in the night, forests burned, and pain was served “deep-seared / on a silver dish”. Images of carnivorism and industrial farming filled much of the book, often as a way of exploring personal trauma through the lens of our mistreatment of the natural world. Her second collection, God Complex, occupies similar terrain, drawing out the parallels between environmental decay and unhappy relationships. This time, however, Allen sifts through the debris of one relationship across the sprawl of a single long poem, split into titled sections.
The narrative takes the shape of a kind of fractured breakup-memoir. Allen interweaves this narrative with references to the “disaster horizon” of climate change, setting it apart from more purely confessional works like Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap. Her perspective is one that, refreshingly, looks both inwards and out at the world. Climate change is a difficult subject to make compelling in writing: it can seem abstract and intangible, especially when you are lucky enough to be (currently) sheltered from its worst effects. But Allen makes the destruction of the natural environment felt and immediate, describing the pollution of a river with a dark relish: “after you left, I swam in the toxic river. / Rapid and thick with hard-scummed edges, / feverish from farm waste and floating cut grass.” Elsewhere, Allen draws out the humour in the solipsism of the way human dramas play out while the more urgent matter of climate change unfolds:
I float under the meshed structure of the sky and thank god I am grieving while the climate dims. What an effort otherwise.
The tone is resigned and downbeat, while suggesting a kind of synchronicity between emotional states and environments, an idea which ripples throughout the whole narrative.
For Allen, relations between people and their environments are never one-way. For example, she playfully illustrates how altering the body necessarily alters the wider environment, causing a chain of mutation in the ecosystem: “The hormones I take live in the water around me and alter the water and me […] the fish take my drugs through the water, so I am closer to them, and their bodies begin to morph to look like mine.” Later, she expresses a desire “to stop taking [her] hormones, like an organic cow.” There is often an identification with non-human life, and a suggestion of the similarities in how the bodies of women and the bodies of farmed animals are constrained and tampered with for somebody else’s benefit.
For Allen, relations between people and their environments are never one-way
The decay of built environments is another theme, and Allen is especially good at conveying the bleakness and impoverishment of Britain, including its weather: “Seaside poverty has its own smell, black and white, / simple and lead-laced like old Pyrex”, while cloudy British skies are a “grey effort of collusion”. Early on, the poet describes the unfavourable living conditions she and her partner find themselves in, where men checking for asbestos tell them “not to breathe / too forcibly in that corner”. Another abode is described as “theatrically mouldy, too temporary to be haunted”. For Allen, Britain is synonymous with claustrophobia and limited horizons, thus turning it into another mirror for the hopeless relationship at the centre of the book. Indeed, there is the suggestion that relationships are always a product of their environments, that certain environments might make love harder to achieve. The abusive partner is still responsible for their actions, but these might equally have been caused by a broader atmosphere of hopelessness. It is in this regard that the book is most unique and insightful.
There is vividness and humour in the best of Allen’s descriptions; however, the language can lose its edge at times. An awkwardly academic register occasionally creeps in:
We grow stunted in contaminated soil,
eking into the bloodstream, bringing
an omnipresent confusion into the social
consciousness. How wholly are we to be pressed?
While the last sentence – with its simple, monosyllabic words – brings an urgency to the pleading, an abstract phrase like “social consciousness” seems too close to jargon, too much like something you would read in a scholarly article. Elsewhere, there is disappointing cliché: “If you heard me in the kitchen, I would feel the centre of gravity shift”. And there are moments where the surrealistic, disjunctive language simply left me confused. To borrow Allen’s own phrase, “sense slides into oblivion”, particularly in some of the many sentences without a verb, for example: “A search engine apocryphal and winged”. Or when two clauses are joined uneasily with a comma, such as: “I make you here a scapegoat, mimetic violence”. Also, some of the wilder imagery doesn’t convince me, such as where she says holding hands “felt wrong, like balancing a large, dead fish on my leg”. Allen’s use of striking, surprising language can often be arresting but here it just seems like an unlikely comparison.
To whom does the “god complex” in the title belong? Allen leaves some ambiguity around this question. Most obviously, the reader might infer it is the dominating and controlling romantic partner, who forces the poet to take on a “syntax sown with apology” and to “steer clear of fierce opinions”. But it might also be the human race itself, more specifically those “who block / the ants’ nests’ swirl outside / their homes”. The poet urges these people to let the ants “maul the house / and surfaces with black trail”. In this way there is an identification with the non-human, the poet seeing a corollary with her own degraded position within a toxic relationship. Furthermore, portraying humanity as the abusive partner, and the earth as the abused, suggests the earth would be better off without us.
Allen complicates this binary, however, when her narrator begins to perceive themselves as a kind of deity despite their degradation:
I try to tell myself, on all fours,
That yes I am a god in my submission.
There is a sense of self-delusion in this passage, in the narrator’s desperate desire to believe that they might have autonomy when they at their most powerless. But it also suggests that seeing oneself as animal-like might bring its own kind of power, if only in breaking the from the idea that humanity isn’t only a few evolutionary steps from the animal life it would often rather see as entirely other and separate. Human superiority only results in our becoming ‘stunted’, as we recklessly pollute our only home.
To whom does the “god complex” in the title belong? Allen leaves some ambiguity around this question
One of the most interesting things about God Complex is how the idea of nature itself is approached and questioned. At the end of the collection, the poet suggests a process of healing is underway, but rather than describing a return to a “natural” state, her body is described in both technological and religious terms:
The fibrous circuitry of veins
is a council in my body –
a sequence of fraying sects
created for the processes that gouge away without permission,
making me better.
The body’s processes are described in a technological and religious vocabulary of “circuitry” and “sects”; there’s nothing quite “natural” about them. Instead, the natural seems to mirror the manmade, with all of its ugliness and conflict. But that conflict, it seems, is necessary to restore equilibrium, to make the body “better”. It’s a bleak view, and reflects how violence seems to saturate Allen’s conception of the world. But it’s that darkness which makes her poetry so strange and exciting, and helps it to escape the overfamiliar sentimentality and easy binaries of so much other writing about the environment.
Will Snelling is a writer from Hastings. His work has featured in New Critique and Ink Sweat and Tears, and in 2022 he completed an MPhil on Elizabeth Bishop at Bristol University.
