The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

The animals’ words are spaced out, sometimes like haiku, and printed in bold. Early in the book - before the pandemic strikes - Jean is warned against her tendency to anthropomorphise: ‘people who anthropomorphise tend not to read the cues, and people who don’t read cues are dangerous’. The animals communicate like this - not always from their mouths. The animals always use the pronoun ‘it’ - not ‘his’, ‘her’, etc - perhaps getting back at the way we often refer to them as ‘it’.

At other times Sue refers to Jean as ‘good cat’. Jean, like everyone else, gets the zooflu and after a while she hears: The bite by no means destroys the relationship between Jean and Sue. Early in the book she tries to free Sue from a wire fence and Sue bites her hand and throughout the story, the infection in Jean’s hand festers and worsens. Jean works as a guide at a wildlife park. She isn’t sociable and, only when lack of alcohol permits, does she want to love and look after her granddaughter, Kimberley. The main character Jean is not particularly likeable - rough and feisty from the school of hardknocks. Words - but not always immediately easy to understand. So that the world for these humans is an excruciating buzzing of communication. In this book, ‘zooflu’ is rampaging through the country and one of the main consequences is that infected humans gain an understanding of the communication of nonhuman animals - at first mammals, then birds, then insects.

What if a virus could give humans the ability to communicate with animals? This book was published at the time of the Covid pandemic, but that was just coincidence. Margaret Atwood, ‘The animals in that country’ from Selected Poems 19. At the end of the poem, the animals ‘have the faces of no-one’. In Margaret Atwood’s poem the animals ‘have the faces of people’ and the teeth in the bull who is slaughtered ‘are human’. The title pays homage to a poem by Margaret Atwood. It is certainly a book of speculative fiction. This debut novel has won many awards, including the Victorian Prize for Literature and the 2021 Arthur C.

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay