Our old friends see us coming and they remember what we’ve done
Smell us on the wind and they know they’ve gotta run
—Harrison Lemke, “Animals”
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
—Jack Handey, “Deep Thoughts”
Creatures, happy feast of St Francis! In a few minutes we’re taking the pets to be blessed, which is… unsettlingly appropriate for today’s newsletter.
Laura Jean McKay’s 2020 (!) The Animals in That Country is a novel about a new disease that sweeps across Australia, giving the infected the ability to communicate with animals. Through a steadily-growing awareness of animal body language, you can learn what your kittycat is really thinking! You can talk to the birds; you can hear the lyrics to whalesong.
It’s a horror novel, of course.
Animals is a brutal, if somewhat meandering read. Its narrator, boozy grandma/loser Jean, works at a wildlife preserve but hasn’t managed to pass her Ranger exam. She’s a shambling disaster with that characteristic Australian knockabout way of talking and thinking—very bluff and bro-y, or I guess matey, self-consciously blunt. She loves her granddaughter, she loves her son, she does love the kid’s mom; she loves the animals, especially the one female dingo, Sue. Once the “zooflu” hits, Sue will become her sole companion on an epic quest to find and maybe rescue her granddaughter, who has gone with her daddy to talk to whales.
The animals’ thoughts are rendered in elliptical, allusive poetry, which borrows both expected and unexpected images from human life. So the beasts do call some creatures “King” or “Queen”—but one also refers to herself as a “stakeholder.” It’s an intrusive moment that reminded me that we’re getting Jean’s best attempt to render what she’s picking up from the twitch of a hackle, the scent wafting from an anus or a sweat gland. Sometimes what the animals think is weirdly tender: Dingo Sue’s repeated use of Good Cat, for herself and sometimes for Jean. But then again, if you can hear what insects are saying, maybe it turns out that they’re saying
DRINK ’TIL DEAD.
THE EYES ARE NICE.
AND FULL.
The eyes in question are, you guessed it, Jean’s.
McKay’s animals think in hierarchies and time-words: Yesterday, Tomorrow. They have all kinds of needs and stimuli in their world that have nothing to do with us, but we’re also inescapable. They are so afraid of us, and so ready to kill us if they can. You will hear them die, and know that they’re dying. You will hear them know that they’re dying because of things we did.
Mere communication turns out not to be the same as understanding. Jean does reach the whales. She hears their strange, haunting song: a song of home. Come home—an essentially religious call. The call is more beautiful than the thoughts of flies, but, like all the beauty of animals in this book, it has sharp teeth.
Jean’s journey leaves her abject: wounded, starving, soiled, derelict. It also exalts her. By falling all the way down to the level of the animals, she does become something greater than she was. She is damaged—she isn’t a healthy human—but she knows things now, and can do things and love in ways that a healthy human won’t. The novel’s final heartbreaking twist involves the persistence of the bond between Jean and Dingo Sue, who saved one another’s lives, once in the time when Jean had power and once in the time when Dingo Sue was Queen.
Found via Abigail Nussbaum’s review, although lol I don’t totally agree with her characterization of the Sue/Jean relationship. I will also say that Jean’s alcoholism drifts to the wayside pretty quickly—she rises to the occasion more than I like to see. But that’s a quibble really.
Dingo photo by kwm00re on Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.