"Enthralling and sorrowful, Only the Animals is wholly extraordinary." Michelle de Kretser
PP: Can you tell us a little about your new book Only the Animals?
CD: Only the Animals is told from the perspectives of ten animal souls, all of whom have died in human conflicts in the past century or so - a cat in the trenches in WW1, or a dog on the Eastern Front in WW2, or the last surviving animal in the Sarajevo Zoo, a black bear, slowly starving to death during the siege of Sarajevo. Each animal also pays tribute to an author who has used animals imaginatively in his or her fiction during that same time period - either by mimicking that author's style, or addressing the author directly, or describing an interaction with the author while they were both alive.
PP: Each of the animals has a connection to a writer. What was the reason for creating such relationships?
CD: The year I wrote the first story (the parrot story, in a different form), I was reading Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, and while doing research for the story I went back to Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot and the original Flaubert story about a woman's relationship with a parrot, A Simple Heart - and I was searching for a way for the stories not to be relentlessly depressing; here's another animal that was killed, and here's how they died; and here's another and another..... so I decided that each animal's soul should also pay tribute to other authors who had worked in this symbolic space before - and in this way put a bit of hope and humour in the stories, to signal that along the way of human history, some of our best writers have tried to find a way to say something meaningful about animals, or conflict, or both.
There's something hopeful in this, an antidote to all the terror and pain.
"....in this way put a bit of hope and humour in the stories, to signal that along the way of human history, some of our best writers have tried to find a way to say something meaningful about animals..."
PP: How did the idea of writing from the perspective of the souls of dead animals come about?
CD: I was inspired by the final sections of J. M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello, where he imagines her arriving at the gates of some kind of Paradise - though one that Kafka himself might have imagined. She is dead, but in limbo, in purgatory, and I loved the tone he takes in that part - half wry, half anguished. I wanted to tell the death narratives of each animal rather than the life narratives, so that together they would add up to a powerful menagerie - or Book of the Dead - with a sort of ritual power due to what they have witnessed and related from the afterlife.
PP: Was finding the voices of each animal difficult?
CD: The process of finding each animal's voice was the most fun part of writing the book! Sometimes the animal's voice came first, sometimes the author's did, and sometimes it was only in researching an animal that I came upon an author who had written about animals in some form in his/her fiction that seemed relevant to what I was trying to say. For example, I knew Colette had owned a cat, but I'd never read her work before, and it was only in reading her essays and fiction that I discovered that she really did visit her new husband at the front during WW1, and had often written from the perspective of her cat, and from there the cat's voice emerged.
Similarly, I wrote the dolphin story soon after I had my son, so I was interested in the nurturing side of dolphins, and by chance I was reading a biography of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's marriage, and through that discovered Hughes' animal poems for children - and it suddenly seemed natural for the dolphin to be writing directly to Sylvia Plath, and to be a little bit mad at Ted Hughes.
"....it suddenly seemed natural for the dolphin to be writing directly to Sylvia Plath, and to be a little mad at Ted Hughes."
PP: What do you think are the major themes of this collection of stories?
CD: The task I set myself for this book was to see if I could take these over-determined, already obsessively gone over experiences of horror, pain and suffering - these human conflicts from late colonial times at the turn of the last century all the way through to the aftershocks of 9/11 and the war on terror at its end - and, by gazing at the same conflict through the eyes of an individual creature, a non-human animal, shock myself (and anybody who might read the book) into feeling something authentic.
I wanted to short-circuit the rational retelling of these conflicts in history and avoid the usual dry focus on technology and leaders and outcomes and politics through the absurdity of a talking animal soul speaking from beyond the grave about the way he/she died in a particular conflict. And perhaps - because you're not morally obliged to feel anything, as you would for a human - you can let yourself see that conflict from the oblique angle, this skewed perspective, this tiny window on such a massive painful mess; and maybe that helps you to understand what it might have been like, a quick insight into the lived experience of it, a jolt of experience. It's that alienating effect of gazing through an animal's eyes that I think can be most powerful.
PP: Do you have a favourite story or character in this collection?
CD: The elephant story. I think it's the most moving, in part because I was channelling my love for my sister in writing the story about sibling elephants caught up in the civil war in Mozambique in the 1980s.
PP: You had had many careers outside that of being a writer. Can you tell us a little about your background?
CD: I grew up between South Africa and Australia - we moved back and forth a lot, and eventually I went to high school in Sydney, and then went overseas to study on scholarship at Harvard as an undergraduate, having never been to America before.I studied Social Anthropology for many years as both an undergraduate and post-graduate student, and made ethnographic films in South Africa, before turning to fiction.
I moved back to Sydney from the States almost five years ago to be closer to my parents.
"I've also come to realise that every single project suggests its own form and seems to arrive in the imagination in a particular form for a reason."
PP: You previously wrote a novel called Blood Kin. Can you tell us why you chose to follow this up with a collection of stories and not another novel?
CD: In some ways, Blood Kin is structured like a series of interlinked stories too, but it's defined as a novel because I circle back to the same characters and their alternating monologues. The themes are similar in both books; in Blood Kin, I looked at power abuse from the perspectives of three men who had worked closely with a deposed dictator but in a non-political capacity (his chef, portraitist and barber) - an oblique approach to understanding power and it's workings.
In Only the Animals, writing from the perspective of animals is a similarly oblique take on human conflict and suffering; instead of approaching these themes head-on, my hope is that something else comes into view, something unexpected, when we look at well-known conflicts from another angle.
So there's not a huge difference between them even if one is technically called a novel and the other a collection of stories or a novel-in-stories or a themed story collection.
But now that I've been writing fiction for over 10 years, I've also come to realise that every single project suggests its own form and seems to arrive in the imagination in a particular form for a reason - just as it suggests the way you will work on it, the rhythm and pacing of how you write it.
So to answer the question, I didn't really think about form at all - it was simply a new idea, a new project, and I wrote it as it felt it had to be written.
PP: Is it too soon to ask if you are working on anything new right now?
CD: When Penguin Books took on this book they also took on a draft of a novel of an old man who gets involved in the Dying With Dignity movement in Australia. We'll wait and see what happens from here!