Laura Jean McKay's The Animals in That Country 2ser Book Club

Laura Jean McKay is the winner of the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
The Animals in That Country takes us north. Jean is a guide in a wildlife preserve. Irascibly anti-social, Jean drinks too much, smokes too much and picks fights online. Except for Thursdays when she cleans herself up and looks after her granddaughter. Jeans son Lee may have done a runner, but he did leave behind Kimberly and Jean is fiercely protective of Kim, even if Kim’s mum Ange has little time for Jean.
Jean and Kimberly love to plan for the day when they will have their own wildlife preserve. They carefully scrapbook their ideas, even as the news warns them of an illness spreading in the south.
Zooflu has hit the southern states hard, bringing flu-like symptoms, pink eyes and the ability to talk to animals!
Soon the park must close their gates and quarantine themselves against the pandemic, because who knows what the rescued animals will have to say about their captivity?
The Animals in That Country is part domestic drama, part road trip and part post apocalyptic dystopia.
Zooflu is greeted by many as an awakening of consciousness (who doesn’t want to hear how much their pets love them) but soon turns sour as humans find they cannot tolerate what they are being told.
McKay very quickly helps us understand that we are not the center of the universe anymore. That is if we ever were. The narrative shows us that whether we like it or not we are super-apex predators and all our illusions of benevolence fall away in the face of terrified creatures who only recognises humans as the gatekeeper of their freedom.
As the narrative progresses we see the gradual unravelling of society as people are faced with the wholesale changes Zooflu forces onto the world. There’s no way McKay could have foreseen what 2020 would confront us with and yet she’s given us a dramatic depiction of a society in flux.
The Animals in That Country poses a particularly sticky linguistic dilemma that seemed to me to resonate with all the shouty internet goings on that plague our lives. Because sure humans with Zooflu can decode what the animals around them are saying but often hearing does not equal understanding. And so we get some really strange and surrealistic communiques...
I mean why would you assume that a wallaby or a croc is going to talk to you like your best friend? Communication is about sharing something and taking the time to listen, even try to empathise with the other person.
And so it is Kimberly who teaches Jean; it’s not enough to just listen, she has to face up to the animals. Look at their bodies, their actions, their scents. Jean learns that she has to consider the animals perspectives to make sense of what they want to say.
Maybe I’m wrong, but how often do we do that day to day - actually try to take another’s perspective into consideration before we just keep talking??
The Animals in That Country represents a dystopia for some, a utopia for others. It’s a book of ideas wrapped in a page turning, breakneck narrative.
Check out my interview with Laura on the Final Draft Great Conversations podcast