‘This flu means people can talk to animals.’
Her head shoots up. ‘I want the flu, Granny. Don’t you?’
‘Grown-ups don’t wish they had diseases, and neither should you.'
'But don't you?'
...'Course I bloody do.' [loc. 615]
Australia, not long from now: Jean works at a wildlife park run by her son's ex-girlfriend Angie, and spends a lot of time with Angie's daughter Kimberley. Jean drives the zoo train, fortified by sly nips of vodka, and provides a commentary for the tourists: "One's saying 'give me that chow, you mongrel' ... and then the other one says 'I'm no mongrel, I'm purebred'. Jean would like to be a ranger, but Angie thinks she anthropomorphises the animals too much. When Sue the dingo gets caught in wire, Jean -- who thinks Sue is her special friend -- doesn't wait for the rangers to turn up, and gets badly bitten freeing Sue. Meanwhile, visitors are heading for the park, infected by the latest flu ('zoanthropy') which appears to enable enhanced communication between humans and animals.
They all -- Angie, Jean, Kimberley, Kim's daddy Lee -- get the flu.
Angie tries talking to Bernie, the park's crocodile, who wants to play. Jean is sobered (only metaphorically) by the realisation that all the small mammals are constantly terrified of humans, who they think will kill them. And Lee takes Kim and sets off south towards the ocean, to hear what the whales are saying.
The animals' communication is not speech: it's the language of bodies, a whisker, a smell, a fart. It's set in a different font (not sufficiently different on my default Kindle settings, but plainer in the Cloud Reader app) and it is allusive, surreal, distinctive, speciated. There is nothing cute here, no Dr Dolittle with his kindly care for child-like inferiors: instead I was reminded of Wittgenstein's argument that 'if a lion could speak, we could not understand him'. As Jean and Sue travel south on the (literal) trail of Lee and Kim -- yep, it's a road trip, a sparring-for-dominance buddy movie -- Sue's observations are sometimes opaque, while Jean is frequently drunk, probably feverish from her infected bite, and perhaps too trusting of her fellow humans. Over the course of their journey, Jean discovers some hard truths about her family: she also learns a lot from Sue. And by the novel's unexpected, downbeat, desolate close, she has lost everything that mattered to her.
I found this a compelling read, and a deeply unsettling experience: looking up from this to find my cat staring at me was ... alarming. It made me think of how often and how trivially we anthropomorphise, project and tell stories about the animals in our lives. Remember that the carrion birds are discussing how soon they'll be able to eat you. Remember that mosquitos want to drink until they die. Remember that the whales call us home into the deep.
I'd be doing the novel a disservice by not mentioning that it is also celebratory, cheerful, often very funny; and that Jean, with her drinking and her abrasive personality and her deadbeat life, is a fascinating narrator. I loved the different voices of the different species, and the surreal insights into animal life: cats freezing time by catching mice, pigs released from their abbatoir future milling around in the road. Evocative descriptions of the Australian desert: all-too-credible responses to pandemic. A deserving winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award.
No comments:
Post a Comment