How to Make a Monster

Around 1733, a former manservant to a president of London’s Royal Society sold his hand-illustrated compendium, A Short History of Human Prodigies, and Monstrous Births, to the Society’s current president; one memorable entry was titled “A Wild and Hairy Irishman.” Fifty years later, a Scottish surgeon and anatomist harvested the skeleton of Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, which was displayed in the Royal College of Surgeons of England until 2023.

Since classical antiquity, Western travelers, geographers, and naturalists have often described atypical individuals—and distant peoples, real and imagined—as monsters. Medieval maps depicted giants, human-animal hybrids, and figures gnawing on human limbs inhabiting the edge of the world, where harsh climates supposedly gave rise to brutish species. Centuries later, when explorers and colonial administrators wielded European science to serve empire building, perceptions of the Irish paralleled earlier commentators’ descriptions of “wild” and “monstrous” peoples.

Around 1733, a former manservant to a president of London’s Royal Society sold his hand-illustrated compendium, A Short History of Human Prodigies, and Monstrous Births, to the Society’s current president; one memorable entry was titled “A Wild and Hairy Irishman.” Fifty years later, a Scottish surgeon and anatomist harvested the skeleton of Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, which was displayed in the Royal College of Surgeons of England until 2023.

Since classical antiquity, Western travelers, geographers, and naturalists have often described atypical individuals—and distant peoples, real and imagined—as monsters. Medieval maps depicted giants, human-animal hybrids, and figures gnawing on human limbs inhabiting the edge of the world, where harsh climates supposedly gave rise to brutish species. Centuries later, when explorers and colonial administrators wielded European science to serve empire building, perceptions of the Irish paralleled earlier commentators’ descriptions of “wild” and “monstrous” peoples.

Derry-born poet and creative writing lecturer Eoghan Walls evokes such monster-making narratives in his second novel, Field Notes from an Extinction. Set in 1847 during the Great Famine, the story follows English ornithologist Ignatius Green on a quest to study the world’s last colony of great auks—or garefowl—on Tor Mor, an uninhabited rock off the coast of the Irish island of Inishtrahull. The novel unfolds through Green’s field notebook, in which he depicts Irish people as freakish, grotesque, and animal-like.

Walls has crafted an immersive, unsettling meditation on morality and monstrification, or the act of denying the humanity of individuals or groups. In contrasting Green’s empathy for the auks with his lack of any similar sentiment for the colonized Irish, the novel illuminates how ostensibly objective scientific language and analytical frameworks can narrow the parameters of who is considered worthy of compassion.

The novel’s central plot begins when the residents of Inishtrahull upend Green’s plans to study the auks. Instead of delivering Green’s provisions to Tor Mor as agreed, the villagers requisition some for themselves and deposit in their place a feral child, the offspring of an allegedly murderous, cannibalistic Irishwoman. The irate Green must tend to the child, negotiate an encounter with her fearsome mother, fight poachers, and stretch rapidly dwindling resources—all while trying to study the auks.

When it comes to the Great Famine, Green understands that Ireland is suffering “a sickness of the body & the crops.” However, he doesn’t acknowledge that the British government’s refusal to control grain exports and implement effective relief measures exacerbates death tolls. By its end in 1852, the famine would kill roughly 1 million people; nearly 3 million would emigrate. But Green frames the scarcity of food mockingly and through his own comfort: He has “coal enough for weeks, as it appears the Irish cannot eat coal.”

Green casts himself as a victim of robbery, an inadvertent accessory to human trafficking, and the survivor of attempted murder-by-abandonment. The rowboat sold to him for transportation by his provisions coordinator, Liam McGonigle, is a chicken-poop-encrusted “vessel of death” that leaks, “albeit slowly enough you can bail with a cup that has been attached to the seat by a length of twine for precisely this purpose.”

To Green, the islanders’ crime against the auks is even worse. In his notes, he accuses McGonigle and four accomplices who hunt and kill auks for the stuffed bird trade of “a deliberate act of extinction.” In reality, the last known sighting of a living great auk was off the coast of Newfoundland in 1852. (One of the last great auks in the British Isles was captured in Ireland in 1834. Fed an inappropriate diet, it eventually succumbed to a choking death by potato.)

Green rows to Inishtrahull to return the child to McGonigle, who refuses to take her back. Desperate to observe the imminent auk-hatching, Green returns reluctantly to Tor Mor with the child (a “dark day for science & the garefowl”), whose name, he learns later, is Bridget. It’s the first of many moral dilemmas he faces as he weighs scientific discovery against personal convenience, Bridget’s wants and needs, and even potential starvation.

Bridget’s experience is filtered through the lens of the crochety Green, who routinely describes her as he would an animal: “flaccid as shot game”; “naked as a piglet”; with “skin [like] roast pork.” Since she speaks no English and Green no Gaelic, he “[m]ight as well have chatted to the garefowl.” As he tries to clean her, brandishing taxidermy scissors to clip away her matted, lice-filled hair, he observes the “fuzz on her neck & shoulders” and contemplates whether she “remains within the realms of normality for a human child of hirsute lineage.”

Once cleaned and dressed, Green observes that if Bridget were given ringlets and scented in “liberal buckets of rosewater …  she could almost pass as English”—but that, “[s]haved as she is, the effect is more simian.” Indeed, Green approaches Bridget and the Irish like an anthropologist, drawing on a discipline pervaded with sexist, racist, and ethnocentric stereotypes in both method and terminology. He describes some of McGonigle’s relatives and various islanders as “scrawny, muttering in their guttural tongue”; and as “skinny monkey youths” resembling “sea-otters in their hirsuteness, weak shoulders & sloped brows.”

Such stereotypes date back at least as far the 12th century, when Ireland was invaded by descendants of England’s Norman conquerors. In the Middle Ages, chroniclers described Ireland as a land of barbarity, bristling with werewolves and human-ox hybrids. Ireland became England’s first Atlantic colony during the 16th century, when the English Crown confiscated Irish land and granted it to planters and military adventurers. By dehumanizing Irish people and denigrating their customs, English writers framed the conquest of Ireland as acceptable, even necessary.

Green’s animal metaphors—particularly those involving monkeys—thus activate a longstanding European shorthand. Medieval Christian theologians warned that people were merely conditionally human, their souls slipping back into those of beasts if they ignored the spiritual contract with God. Apes were the last animal God made before fashioning Adam, and it was with apes (broadly construed) that the least “civilized” people supposedly overlapped.

Narratives of “enfreakment,” meanwhile, framed bodily differences as spectacular errors of nature. In the 19th century, impresarios exhibited “bearded ladies” and “wild” individuals as acceptable viewing for family entertainment and scholarly study. At the height of the British Empire, when white Englishness was the ultimate aspiration, showmen highlighted how individuals departed from those norms. By pathologizing difference, they erected a permission structure for touching and gaping at people—especially women and girls—like Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman trafficked from South Africa, and Krao, an atypically hairy Laotian child whose captor advertised her as Darwin’s “missing link.”

White Englishmen also framed figures such as Baartman and Krao as transgressing gender norms—just as Green does when he records Bridget’s “moustache of puckered scabs” and describes her tall, strong mother, Aisling O’Leary, as a “slut” and a “grinning giantess,” noting that he “thought her a man” because of “the sheer bulk of her.”

While Green dehumanizes Bridget, Aisling, and other Irish characters, he anthropomorphizes the auks, even naming the colony’s denizens after monarchs and Shakespearean characters. Obsessed with their well-being, he calls the death of Canute, a bird named after a legendary 11th-century English king, a “sorrow” and a “scientific & human loss.”

After Canute’s death, Green dissects and begins to preserve the bird, but when he turns his back on the body, which is potentially infused with arsenic from the embalming soap, Bridget grabs the heart and begins to eat it. Panicking at the potential loss of his specimen—a “scientific tragedy”—Green persuades Bridget to spit out the heart. He even fears for Bridget’s safety, signaling a turning point in his feelings toward the child. The impact is limited, however: Once Bridget’s basic needs are met, Green continues to choose observing birds over fulfilling her desires.

A month after Bridget’s arrival, the pair leave Tor Mor again for Inishtrahull, where the situation has grown dire. Green observes the sick, the dead, and the dying on every road and in nearly every dwelling. He arrives at the bleak realization that the reason the Irish chose to kill and sell the auks—whose international market value rose in part because of the extinction it hastened—was a matter of survival. Killing the last great auks (those aforementioned “deliberate act[s] of extinction”) meant affording grain, which could be the difference between life and death by starvation.

In interviews, Walls has observed how the far right in Ireland describes immigrants with the same language that the English used to dehumanize Irish people in the 19th century. During a time of widespread xenophobia, Field Notes reminds readers that millions of Europeans—Irish, Italian, and more—were once refugees, their humanity dismissed by privileged elites.

How does a nation remember collective trauma? Was the Irish takeaway from the tragedy that saw nearly half the country perish or emigrate “never again”—or “never again to anyone”? As a European country and a former British colony, Ireland has a unique position. The country often stands in solidarity with other oppressed peoples, including with the South African anti-apartheid movement and, more recently, with Palestinians in Gaza. That sensibility is at odds with increasingly vocal and violent racist and anti-immigrant sentiment in the country today.

Between 1999 and 2001, Walls lived in Rwanda and witnessed famine in the aftermath of genocide. He saw firsthand human compassion amid immense suffering and economic inequality, but also the moral dilemmas facing outsiders who observed those struggles. Field Notes illustrates how such empathy and understanding grow through extended contact—and how intersecting catastrophes can lead individuals to abandon their humanity and preserve certain beings at the expense of others.