LAURA JEAN MCKAY The Animals in That Country. Reviewed by Kurt Johnson

Laura Jean McKay’s novel asks us to see the world through animals’ eyes. It was just past Goulburn on the Hume Highway, heading back to Sydney last Christmas. The Southern Highlands were aflame, and a southerly had pushed up smoke clouds as thick as a stormfront. In an instant, the sun was blocked out and everything became ochre, soot drifted across the view; the landscape hellish and liquid. I turned off the highway and the horizon flickered orange, incandescent. Roos were bounding in the gloom, heading south away from the fire. A deer came through the scrub, stopped dead and stared. I saw into her startled eye for a moment as we passed, catching a brief glimpse of the wildness, the terror that I understood on a level deeper than thought. And I wondered, ‘What is that poor animal thinking?’ How many other Australians have stories like this since the bushfires and the one billion animals they killed? In this way, the timing of The Animals in That Country is impeccable. It is the story of Jean, a hard-drinking grandma who is working as a guide in a zoo when a pandemic sweeps the nation. The disease, zooflu, allows animals and humans to talk to each other. When I first read the blurb, I wondered how the author was going to tackle talking animals without slipping into an oat-chomping Mr Ed or the squealing little piggies of Play School. We only really have two models of talking animals – the animal-as-adult or the animal-as-child. Both are comic and either would throw off the sober tone of a book about pandemics and animals in a time of COVID and mass species extinction. The author rejects her Dr Doolittle forebears and conveys meaning not through literal communication, but through the texture of animal-speak. Let me give you an example:

Rats in the walls, calling,

Follow the 

tracks, follow them. 

keep on

singing because

the train is moving. 

It was not totally clear how the reader should parse this animal-speak. I would love to hear a reading by the author to get a sense of the meter and how the line breaks and parentheses should be read. I just sailed from one line to another with the dull sense that I was missing something vital. Yet this reliance on texture is a gamble that pays off. It’s closer to raw perception and conveys the darting, startled nature of wild animal behaviour far more than slabs of exposition ever would. Perhaps there might be room in a sequel for a third voice, as distinct from the human and the wild animal: the domestic pet. In general the narrator’s eye is used to great effect. Jean, the grandma protagonist, contracts the disease and heads off with half-dingo, half-kelpie Sue in search of her abducted granddaughter, Kimberly. As the disease progresses, Jean starts chatting with Sue. Their relationship began much earlier, when Sue was captive and Jean a zoo guide. As the intimacy between these two deepens, Jean’s symptoms grow more acute and, subtly, Jean begins to act more like an animal. Little by little, her internal monologue quietens, and she becomes instinctive and sensually aware. By the end Jean is forgetting words and ferreting around the ruined landscape like a garbage dump stray. In one brilliant twist, power shifts so that Sue becomes top dog, while Jean is left to obey Sue’s whims and eat her doggie leftovers. The reader’s acclimatisation to animal-speak is also cleverly exploited. In the beginning it makes all the sense of avant-garde beat poetry (i.e. beyond the intellect of this reviewer):

My front end

takes the food

quality. 

Muzzle

for the Queen

(Yesterday). 

Soon, though, we stop trying to mine the phrases for literal meaning or as a metaphorical schema and just let the texture wash over us. It begins to make sense. As our understanding improves, the disease progresses in Jean and so her connection to Sue becomes richer and tighter. There is plenty of action in The Animals in That Country, but sometimes vital context becomes lost in the frenzy. In one passage Jean and Sue stop at a half-looted minimart. I was sure from the context it was empty but for the gun-toting owners profiteering off desperate passers-by. When Jean enters, she chats with the lady behind the counter then suddenly comes upon two ladies tussling over a tin of food. Why had Jean not clocked them when she walked in? They just appear. On its own, not a big deal, but I found it happening more frequently – what I assumed was night, turned out to be day, etc. The sudden shock here as you re-render your mental image is a little jarring, especially for a book that so expertly controls the flow and pitch of detail. This is because sometimes the two modes – the ordinary narration and the animal speak – collide. In terms of atmosphere and landscape The Animals in That Country is a cracker because it is, at heart, an Australian road novel. The onset of mass hysteria, the escalating dystopia and social breakdown all happen on the dusty roads, in small towns or service station carparks. Whenever Jean and Sue arrive someplace, the pandemic has progressed and more people are transfixed in their communion with animals, then with birds and finally insects. Without giving too much away, the journey ends in a spectacular scene involving a pod of whales that alone is worth the book’s docket. The Animals in the Country goes beyond the usual tropes of dystopian fiction and asks what the animals will think when they inherit the planet we’ve fucked up. In asking, McKay resists the comforting and anthropomorphic phrasing of our demise. Truth is that the end of civilisation would only mean the end of history, of scientific meaning, the end of human sense and coherence. This does not mean the universe would be silent. It means the destruction of the environment is actually our own destruction and the inevitable consequence of thinking ourselves as separate from it. Laura Jean McKay The Animals in That Country Scribe Publications 2020 PB 288pp $29.99 You can read an extract from The Animals in that Country in the Newtown Review of Books here. Kurt Johnson is a journalist and author of The Red Wake: A hybrid of travel, history and journalism, Random House, 2016. You can buy The Animals in That Country from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here. To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.  

Tags: animal communication, anthropomorphism, Australian fiction, Australian women writers, dystopian fiction, Laura Jean | McKay, pandemic fiction, The Animals in That Country