Australia’s newest literary prize, the Stella Award (for writing by women) was bestowed on debut novelist Emily Bitto less than a month ago, for her novel about two children growing up as part of a diffuse artists’ colony, The Strays. I hear tell that The Strays is a very good book; it’s certainly on my never-diminishing to-be-read list. Thus far, though, it’s another of the works longlisted from the prize that has most captivated my attention: Ceridwen Dovey’s intriguing, sometimes demanding, but very rewarding Only the Animals.
Some reviewers have referred to Only the Animals as a novel, but it really isn’t, and doesn’t purport to be. It’s a thematically and philosophically linked series of 10 short stories, each told from the perspective of the soul of an animal which has died in a human conflict, which work together to create something very powerful.
Only the Animals is not, despite its labeling, anything at all like Animal Farm (in which animals are allegories of human beings, especially political human beings) or Karen Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (which plays around constantly with the lines and boundaries, such as they are, between humans and animals
For Dovey, the animals are not ciphers of humans, but nor are they used to invoke the Otherness that writers who try to write animals AS animals tend to rely upon. Her animals, instead, are bit players, observers, tiny unregarded actors on big stages whose hopes, ambitions, pains and devotions are as profound as those of the humans who surround them in varying degrees of shadow.
Dovey gives her animal souls advanced, narrative thoughts, which could just as easily, especially in some of the stories, have been spoken by a human witnessing or participating in the same event. It is a kind of anthropomorphism, of course, but, due largely to Dovey’s immense facility with language and style, it works, and after a few stories, the idea of it gets under your skin.
It came upon me suddenly, in the wonderful fifth story (Somewhere Along the Line the Pearl Would be Handed to Me – told by the soul of a mussel killed on a naval ship in Pearl Harbour) that these stories are foregrounding the experiences of the forgotten, the tangential, the collateral damage of human activity, in a way that a story about a person – no matter how well told – could never do. By writing her animal souls as sentient, intelligent, philosophical, spiritual, Dovey is writing, over and over, that what we do has consequences deeper and wider than we know; that our conflicts do not bear only our own blood; and our ravages on the world bite more piteously than we realise.
The second central device of the book, which Dovey uses to startlingly and delightfully great effect, is the literary allusiveness of it. Each of the stories is a conscious homage to a writer or a genre; in some cases the animal itself is one that featured in one or more classic stories. Colette’s cat, Kiki-la-Doucette, is the heroine of Pigeons, A Pony, the Tomcat and I – she’s killed, in the story, on the Western Front. Tolstoy’s tortoise holds stage in Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space – his story, which is an extremely good Tolstoy pastiche, ends with his use as an experimental animal on a Russian unmanned spaceship.
Some of the other stories create animals not previously literarised, but use them as a focus for really extraordinary stories in the vein of some of the greatest novels of their generation. Picking the references is one of the true pleasures of this book, and in every instance, identifying the source or influence served only to deepen my admiration for what Dovey has achieved. (Massive props especially to Dovey for managing to get a reference to Douglas Adams into one of these stories, and pulling it off without losing the genuine pathos that that story conveys).
The stories are not equally good, although perhaps it’s fairer to say that different stories are likely to appeal to different readers. Among Australian book people who’ve devoured this, there seems to be a general consensus that the first story (The Bones – soul of camel, from 1890s Australia) is the weakest, and I concur with this view. In fact, while it is well written and does indeed evoke the literary ghost of Henry Lawson, it’s a slow and not overly accessible start; it doesn’t engage the emotions in the way that, increasingly, later stories do. I was also not overly taken with Red Peter’s Little Lady (soul of chimpanzee), although I admired the craft of it.
But oh, there are some startlingly searing gems in here. Somewhere Along the Line the Pearl Would be Handed to Me (soul of mussel) is the most hilarious, profoundly good rewriting of Jack Kerouac I have ever read. I, the Elephant, Wrote This is incredibly powerful and deeply sad. Telling Fairytales (soul of bear) is disturbingly off-key and a bit of a brainworm – it wasn’t my favourite when I read it, but I think it’s the one I’ve reflected on the most. And as for my actual favourite, Psittacophile (soul of parrot) – I’m not sure how Dovey manages to make the suffering and death of one bright green bird in Beirut both matter as much as all the other deaths in that city, and stand as emblem for them, but she does.
Perhaps she does it, just as she does in each, by never letting go of her primary contention: that the perspective and suffering of animals does not matter less, cannot matter less; that animals may be redshirts in the great human narrative of world domination, but they headline their own stories, and experience their own fates, and that this way of looking at the world is no less valid or critical than any other. By writing from the view of the soul of the animal, for whom humans are the minor notes in the preoccupations of their lives and deaths, Dovey delivers a cumulatively powerful statement on both animals and humans, and the ways in which humans fail the rest of the world in which we live.
I think the final word should belong to Sprout, the narrator of A Letter to Sylvia Plath:
“The tingling many humans report feeling during an encounter with dolphins isn’t endorphins, it’s because we’ve just scanned you to know you in all dimensions. We see through you, literally. Special case indeed. Perhaps you should be asking yourself different questions. Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and sometimes as animals? And why do you sometimes treat creatures as animals and sometimes as humans?”