When I Saw The Animal – Synopsis

Parked in by furious rich people, mid-divorce, a man misses his lunchtime gambling session. All the girls named Ella form a diagonal across the teacher’s new classroom. Diseased cattle burn in fields around the country – it is a cameraman’s role to frame the images for TV. A swagman jumps into a billabong, or was he pushed?

Many of the stories in When I Saw the Animal are about animals, exploring our ambivalence to them, how we can want them yet reject them, how they can save us yet we can be at war with them. What is it about the animal world that you are drawn to?

I’ve been thinking a lot about our behaviour as animals – that it’s hard for us to see ourselves as a species, as animalistic. For example, several of the pieces for which I’ve used the term  “Short Twos” attempt to capture a moment of human territoriality.

Conversely, I was wondering about animals’ conceptions of themselves – what would it be like if they thought of themselves as having essences in the same as human theologies depict us? In “Frogspeak”, for example, an entire species is transplanted from what might have been the amphibian Eden, a.k.a. Sydney Olympic Park.

It came to be a central theme of the book almost accidentally, in that I realised at a certain point that I’d written a lot of animal stories over time, and the title story seemed to make its way between that theme and some of the book’s other concerns – such as isolation in the midst of crowds.

In one of the stories, you describe writing as ‘an entirely random activity, its randomness checked only by the calligraphic limitations of the keyboard.’ Do you find writing as random as your character does? Can you describe your writing process?

My approach is not at all random!

The narrator in that story is a monkey, one involved in the realisation of the thought experiment that enough typing monkeys would eventually produce Hamlet. The experiment presupposes that this Hamlet would be soulless, inferior to Shakespeare’s version, because it would be an accident or at least without conscious intention on the successful monkey’s part.

I tried to give that monkey plenty of consciousness, including of the conditions in which the monkey Hamlet is produced.

The stories address quotidian unpleasantries, like getting double parked, or squabbles in a restaurant. What is it about domestic discomforts that interest you in your writing?

I was interested in the impositions we accept as ordinary, and what might happen if we took them seriously, as though they took up as much time in our lives as our grand dreams. Frequently they do. I wanted to reflect a range of lived experiences – often subjects that are considered outside or not worthy of literature – and I used a range of strategies to do that, from the reportage of overheard conversation to techniques borrowed from different genres.

You explore the concept of text in an information age, of journalism and literature. In one story, your narrator says, ‘What I love least about text is seepage. What I most love about text is particularity.’ Can you comment on this idea that language can pinpoint something yet also refer to multiple things?

The quote is part of a section in the story “War Against the Ungulates” in which the narrator characterises the journalist’s role as attempting to contain the meaning of a news event. That is, the role of the journalist is to prevent an event (a cattle epidemic) from spreading out beyond the generic journalistic remit to become a story about human control of animals and about the nature of industrialised agriculture. But it was impossible to stop. The medium is the message, and the medium is industry with a particular business model.

In some stories, you explore the bitter and ugly side of human nature and human interactions, often narrated with a dry, sardonic wit. What compels you to write about this side of human nature?

I’m not sure that it’s a compulsion, but I think I’ve sometimes focused on two aspects of these interactions. Firstly and unfortunately, humans aren’t always compassionate and generous with each other. Secondly, it’s fascinating and often troubling how opaque human motives can be to those standing close and yet, to a consciousness at a slightly greater distance, how transparent. It could be that entire therapeutic professions are dedicated to this discrepancy.

Some characters (thinking, for instance, of the young painter in “Green”) are caught in the moment, unable to exercise agency against the momentum set up by others. In “Noiseless”, the protagonist is more furious than analytical of the situation he finds himself in, and it’s difficult to slow down, reflect and found a way out.