245 p. 2014
This book is a series of short stories written by the souls of dead animals mentioned obliquely in literature. Not a promising premise, I must admit. When I mentioned to my husband what this book was about, he said (rather derisively) that it sounded like the little tsunami of books that emerged a few years ago about the overlooked wives of famous men ( Mrs Cook; Shakespeare’s Wife; Ahab’s Wife etc). While I’m not enamoured of the comparison, I can see the similarities. Dovey is writing into and against a better-known narrative by using imagination to bounce off her historical and literary research.
The stories are arranged chronologically and range across continents. They are set during times of war, and all of them explore human-animal interaction. In each case, there is a connection with a writer who paid homage in some way to an animal in her or his work. In the case of the parrot, Dovey pays homage to Julian Barnes who himself paid homage to Flaubert in Flaubert’s Parrot. The stories have this layer-upon-layer texture.
We start with the Camel who accompanied Henry Lawson on an inland expedition in 1892; we meet the Cat that Collette took with her to the Western Front in 1915; we meet Tolstoy’s tortoise who ends her long life in space; we encounter a dolphin trained by the US navy in 2003, and a parrot in Lebanon in 2006- and others in between. I’m not sure, though, that the narrative voices of the different animals were different enough (unless, of course all souls sound the same), even though there were cadences and allusions referencing the authors mentioned in each chapter.
I must confess to feeling rather out of my depth in catching the allusions and little in-jokes that I detected, but could not understand, as I read the stories. As with any mash-up, which is I suppose what these are, there’s a blurry line between the derived and the truly original. There’s a list on Dovey’s website that references her sources, both literary and historical, and it further blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction.
As a result, I found this book a rather uneasy reading experience. As with The Girl with the Dog, I found myself discomfited by feeling as if an academic and literary game was being played over my head, or as if I was being excluded from a conversation spoken in riddles by a group determined not to let me understand. Does that matter, if you’re enjoying the story in its own right? I suppose not. Or is it that I resent being excluded by ignorance and am chafing against how that makes me feel?
There’s enough curiosity about seeing the author perform that keeps you reading, because this is a book of literary performance. Any collection of short stories is arbitrary- what is included, what is left out- and I felt that way with this collection as well. There could be an Only the Animals II, or III if she felt so inclined (and I strongly suspect and hope that she does not). Not because the project is flawed, but because it should only be done once, and done well, as it is.
I have posted this review to the Australian Women Writers Challenge site
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 