Mrs Caliban is the bizarrely compelling story of a suburban housewife who has lost two children and can’t quite lose her husband. The frog-man introduces himself as Larry, and he and Dorothy abruptly make love in the spare room. Caliban has matter-of-factness, flat characters, and no point. The book is remarkably similar to the enchanting 2017 movie 'The Shape of Water.' But while that movie has suspense, charm, and emotion, Mrs. It’s because of Ingalls’s unerring ability to capture the absurdity of the mundane that the sudden appearance of a ‘six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature’ in Dorothy’s kitchen seems absolutely unremarkable. This short, simplistic story is about housewife Dorothy, who one day starts an affair with an amphibious monster named Larry. Exquisitely rendered grief is embodied as a backdrop for joy and yearning, survival and. Caliban is, at its core, a work of empathy and humanity. Dorothy’s life is one of gym routines in the junk room and being accosted in supermarkets by sales girls offering samples of cheese. A blend of fantasy and domestic politics Mrs. Ingalls has a canny eye for detail: the novella opens with the protagonist, Dorothy, and her faithless husband, Fred, enacting a devastating ritual around the question of whether or not he should take an umbrella to ‘work’ (or rather, as Dorothy well knows, to meet his latest mistress).
Rachel Ingalls – whose 1982 novella Mrs Caliban has now been reissued by Faber – was primarily a writer of short stories, and it shows in the precisely chosen language of this subversive, superlatively weird fairy tale.
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