'Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue.
'Then one day, disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country. This is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too. But as the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds.
'When Jean’s infected son, Lee, takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin. Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species.
'Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what it means to be human — and what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Epigraph: In this country the animals have the faces of animals. - Margaret Atwood, 'The Animals in That Country'.
But I'm afraid that somewhere in his wild dog's heart, he secretly despises me. - Helen Garner, 'Red Dog: A Mutiny'
Preppers and Survivalism in the AustLit Database
This work has been affiliated with the Preppers and Survivalism project due to its relationship to either prepping or prepper-inflected survivalism more generally, and contains one or more of the following:
1. A strong belief in some imminent threat
2. Taking active steps to prepare for that perceived threat
3. A character or characters (or text) who self-identify as a ‘prepper’, or some synonymous/modified term: ‘financial preppers’, ‘weekend preppers’, ‘fitness preppers’, etc.
'This essay asks: what is the value of cross-species empathy in a time of ecological crisis and how can contemporary fiction help along new thinking about human relationships with other animals? I make the case that empathy, in the dominant sense, fetishizes closeness. Empathy has become positive and valuable because it is said to narrow the distance between self and others. I develop the idea that the dominant view of empathy gives limited consideration to how degrees and kinds of difference complicate this view, while disregarding the enduring presence of other animals in scientific and philosophical treatments of empathy. In my close reading, I examine a concept routinely connected to empathy in existing scholarship: proximity. I investigate how different kinds of proximities manifest and complicate empathies between humans and other animals in Laura Jean's 2020 novel, The Animals in That Country. My methodology differs from traditional treatments of empathy in Literary Studies in two significant ways. First, I do not define cross-species empathy upfront, but look to McKay's text to produce new ways of thinking about empathy through the different kinds of proximities (spatial, linguistic, geographical, species) that unfold. And second, I do not examine how a reader's empathy for humans or other animals is encouraged or stifled by the text. Rather, I view McKay's text, as an art form and a critical tool, as David Herman instructs, "for reconsidering—for critiquing or reaffirming, dismantling, or reconstructing" what cross-species can be and do in the here and now.' (Publication abstract)
'The Animals in That Country, the debut novel of Laura Jean McKay, has certainly hit the jackpot for timeliness. The novel is about a virus that sweeps through Australia, leading to government lockdowns and generating widespread hysteria. That virus even has an association with animals, though the effects of the novel’s “Zooflu” are very different from those of Covid-19. Humans infected by the “talking animal disease” develop the discombobulating ability to understand non-human animals. Plot-wise and with regard to tone, this novel is a hybrid beast, sitting somewhere between the dystopia of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the absurdity of Doctor Dolittle. However, as an attempt to reimagine how we understand our place in the animal world, this novel stands alone.' (Introduction)
'Talking animals in fiction have, for the most part, been confined to children’s or otherwise peripheral literature. Yet they often serve a serious purpose. Aesop’s fables, with their anthropoid wolves, frogs, and ants, have been put to use as moral lessons for children since the Renaissance. The ‘it-narrative’, fashionable in eighteenth-century England and perhaps best exemplified by Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little: Or, the life and adventures of a lap-dog (1752), saw various animals expatiate their suffering at human hands.' (Introduction)
'Laura Jean McKay’s novel asks us to see the world through animals’ eyes.'
'In the age of Covid-19 we are taking comfort from animals and wildlife – but we should learn from them too.'
'Victorian author Laura Jean McKay has won the top prize at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards with her debut novel, which imagines a viral pandemic in Australia that gives humans the ability to understand animals.' (Introduction)
