NAW Reading Challenge: Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey
To celebrate our inaugural New Australian Writing (NAW) Award shortlist, we’re running a NAW Reading Challenge.
This week our participants have read Only The Animals by Ceridwen Dovey. Here are their responses to the book (Ed. note: may contain spoilers!)
Our favourite response for this week (not to mention the winner of our $100 gift voucher) is…
Alice says:
One could make a list of all the animals mentioned in this book – from antelopes to zebras, with bats, cats, bears, dogs, dolphins, goannas, parrots and plenty of other fauna in between. Or you could make a list of all the wars that these animals have been caught up in – either directly or indirectly – from African wars of independence, to civil conflicts in Africa and the Balkans, to American wars against almost everyone and, of course, to both of the World Wars. Or you could make a list of all the nations (including former nations) caught up in those wars and home to or visited by those animals – from Australia to Zambia. Or you could make a list of all the famous authors mentioned throughout the book – from Aesop to Darwin, Hughes, Lawson, Orwell, Plath, Tolstoy, Woolf and many other famous names in between.
By layering all of these lists throughout the lines of her stories, Dovey creates an intricately symmetrical mosaic of reference and parable, history and fable. The use of the first person animal protagonist gives the stories the feel of children’s bedtime stories, but the actual language is not fit for children’s ears at all. It is a Disneyland of realpolitik: stories of life and death, sex and sexuality, sexism and racism, bestiality and brutality.
Each of these ten stories (reflections of Boccaccio’s Decameron) ends with a death. Each contains within it reference to several animal species, at least two wars, and at least one mention of sex. Modern children are likely to receive their first lessons about death and / or sex through the medium of the animal kingdom: they see roadkill, or the family pet dies, or the cat has kittens. They cry at the conclusion of Watership Down or Charlotte’s Web. But Dovey’s stories are not stories for children at all. They are very much stories for adults – experienced, cynical, unsentimental, full of ‘animal truths’.
These stories are not so much about the relationship between humans and animals, as they are stories about animals trying to live within, and make sense of, a human world. It is this filter that enables Dovey to give her stories the amusing, self-reflective light touch that makes them so attractive, despite their often grim messages. Even when reflecting on the worst aspects of human nature – the propensity of men to fight and kill each other – she is able to reveal the absurdity of the human condition through the wisdom of her animal protagonists.
And, here are some more of our favourites…
Cath says:
I must admit that when I first started reading this book I didn’t enjoy it. I found the first story (about a camel travelling with Henry Lawson) awkward and strange, and I wasn’t sure how I was meant to take this idea of the ‘animal narrator’. But I kept reading anyway and by the time I finished the last story, I was a convert. I actually almost cried when I read the story of the elephants. What I really took away from this book was the insight it gives into human nature and this was largely due to this idea of ‘animal narrators’. As I was reading I realised that we weren’t meant to read the narrators as ‘animals’ or ‘humans’ per se, but as a hybrid of both, with a rare ability to be both within and outside of humanity.
When I read reviews after finishing the book, I saw lots of people had similar experiences to mine too and so I’d argue that Only The Animals is definitely a book worth persevering with. Yes, it’s unusual and challenging, but it’s also intelligent and thoughtful and beautifully written.
(And the story of the mussels is very funny.)
Jill says:
Is the ‘hindered narrative’ the new black? This currently fashionable genre tends to operate in first person, narrated by a character with a limited ability to understand the world. The reader is invited to bring their larger view of the context to the narrative. This dissonance creates new and interesting perspectives on something. Does Only The Animals fall into this category? It is a loose collection of stories set usually in periods or events of historical import and seen through the eyes of an animal.
The perplexing moral universe of Nazi Germany is explored through the eyes of a German Shepherd, gifted to Himmler by Hitler. The story canvasses experimentation with dog breeding, vegetarianism, actions by the Nazi government to protect animals from harm and use of dogs by the Soviets as ‘anti-tank’ bomb explosion devices. It’s not pretty. The vulnerability of a herd of elephants in war-torn Mozambique is heartbreaking. This grimness is offset by the loving relationships between humans and animals; a dolphin and her trainer, a parrot and a lonely woman. It is also offset by playfulness such as a tortoise critiquing Virginia Woolf’s writing style.
Despite the ambition of this text, it does not quite work. The animals, with few exceptions, sounded too similar. They are frequently anthropomorphised (in comparison with a novel like Dog Boy where we are taken to a liminal dog/human space). The book succeeds in taking us into the world of animal ethics, but not as convincingly into their heads.
