Laura Jean McKay: On Speculative Fiction, Veganism, Our Relationship with Nature and Her Novel, "The Animals in That Country"
Laura Jean McKay, the author of Holiday in Cambodia, shortlisted for three national book awards in Australia, is back with a creative, bold, and exhilarating debut novel. The Animals in That Country is a refreshingly original story about a foul-mouthed, alcoholic grandma searching for a lost granddaughter and the viral ‘ZooFlu’ phenomenon that is sweeping the country allowing the communication between humans and animals. Touching upon themes of animal ethics, the limits of language, and connectedness, McKay’s immersive prose offers a timely take on the fraught ways in which animals feature in our lives and raises urgent questions about our complicated relationships with them.
I was thrilled to get the opportunity to speak with Laura about our relationship with nature, veganism, writing ‘speculative’ fiction, and the strangeness of releasing The Animals in That Country, a story about influenza, during a global pandemic.
On the simplest level, The Animals in That Country is about a viral pandemic that sweeps the country and the societal collapse that follows. You were ahead of the zeitgeist when you wrote this book – what was your reaction when you found out it would be published amid an actual pandemic?
Years ago, when I started writing Animals, I was bitten by a mosquito with chikungunya (dengue’s evil cousin) and became delirious with fever, bedridden on and off for a year. I was trying to write this book about interspecies communication and needed a way for humans to be able to understand other animals so a fictionalized version of the illness I was struggling through seemed perfect. It was a plot device drawn from real life but one that I tended to play down when I talked about the novel because it sounded improbable. A highly infectious flu with bizarre symptoms? Ridiculous.
Years later we were gearing up for publication when the reports of a real pandemic broke out. The Animals in That Country was released into the first wave of coronavirus. At the time, New Zealand lockdown was one of the strictest in the world. People were messaging me about the amazing luck of releasing a topical novel, but of course it was awful. Thousands were ill and dying and the arts and education industries collapsed. In New Zealand no one could actually buy the book – we couldn’t really get anything that wasn’t from a supermarket. I had the bizarre experience of watching some scenes of my novel play out in real life – the lockdowns, the panic buying, mask wearing, infection rates – while other realities of the shared global crisis were beyond my imagination.
No one has mentioned being about to talk to animals … yet!
While authors can’t predict the future, great writing draws on intense thought and research, insightful observation, and so much of the book rings true in this moment. What kind of research did you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?
I had a really clear picture in my mind of a woman on a road with a dog of some sort. A canine. So before I started researching I had to write through who this canine and her human companion were. I wrote a very different book first – a whole rambling draft. Then I got the chance to take up an artist residency at a wildlife park in the Northern Territory of Australia – real Crocodile Dundee country. I was living in the middle of this park surrounded by wild and captive animals, sweating and feeling overwhelmed by the density of the natural world, when I realized that this was the book or at least its beginning.
If you’re writing, you’re also researching. In the period of this book’s creation, the effects of climate change have intensified, politics polarized, species extinction escalated, and social media become news – these dramatic shifts permeate any imagined world. It’s no wonder this and other books that are coming out are dystopian – we reflect what’s around us, even if we don’t intend to.
The title of your novel is inspired by a Margaret Atwood poem - In this country the animals have the faces of animals. As another author who has conquered speculative and dystopian fiction, has she inspired you in anyway?
Coming across Atwood’s poem “The Animals in That Country” from her 1968 collection of the same name was such a lovely moment of recognition. Here was a poem that is essentially an ode to road kill talking about animals who “have the faces of people,” and then later “the faces of animals” until finally “the faces of no-one.” The many ways that we categorize animals, our dependence and use of them, and our ultimate disregard for their lives were themes that I wanted to get to in the book, and that Atwood’s poem encapsulates on one page. (Poets! They’re amazing.)
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is, of course, foundational amongst a certain demographic. The themes in that book probably relate more to the novel I’m working on now, but it’s such an important example of how to write a sideways world, or a world two seconds into the future. We enter a time that is so similar to ours it starts out as a realism, then there’s a shift – an event, a decision, a political movement – and we are careened into another reality. We’re experiencing that speculative moment right now amid the COVID pandemic. The only thing that has changed is that there is a virus, and yet that changes everything. Many people have commentated that The Handmaid’s Tale takes white characters to a place that is the lived reality for many people, especially under legacies of colonization, displacement and slavery. Again, a similar thing can be seen with the pandemic, which not only disproportionately effects marginalized communities but highlights the fact that many people have experienced the global crisis of inequality for centuries.
“This disease means that everything we knew about animals is going to change.” This book’s consideration of animal ethics is particularly timely. I read in another interview that you only became vegan after writing this book – do you hope to encourage readers to similarly rethink their relationship to animals?
It’s true! I was eating meat when I started writing Animals and by the time I was halfway through I didn’t want to anymore. I was only eating it out of social habit and fear of stigma – people will become hysterical over the V-word. I already had a dairy sensitivity so it was just me and eggs for a while there. A little more research to write a short story set in a chicken factory sorted that out. As the animal studies theorist Erica Fudge says (I’m paraphrasing) “We don’t eat our subjects.” I don’t know many people who have conducted an in-depth study of our relationships to animals and not come out the other side preferring carrots over cows. Having said that, my intention wasn’t to convince people of anything – that novel would be terrible. But I very much want for people to stop and take a look at the nonhuman world – animals and our environment – and ask, “What are you to me? What am I to you?” What do we find, when we take a step back? Are we being honest about our relationship with nature?
Have you always wanted to write? If you didn’t write, what would you do for work?
I have been making up stories for as long as I can remember. My dad – who was a poet – died before I was born and we always had piles of his poems around, including a beautiful posthumous book my mum published with his friends. I wanted to write like him, so in primary school I was composing these intense meditations on subjects I really didn’t know about – wandering through deserts, real Jim Morrison stuff with an 11-year-old country girl twist!
I don’t know what I’d do without writing. I’d probably be an out-of-work actor? (Something to aspire to anyway). Money-wise, when I’m not writing I teach writing at a University and when I’m not doing those things, I read.
Do you plan or see yourself writing more dystopian or speculative fiction? What can we next look forward to reading from you?
I thought my next novel was a gritty realist story. But the problem is if you write gritty realism now (in the way we usually think of realism), you’re writing historical or at least nostalgia fiction; and anything that used to be speculative is now realist. So what I’m working on has become rather speculative. I keep using that term – it’s not my favorite, but it’s what we have to describe what I think of as sideways fiction. On plot: I’m still working it out and I’m not a planner. I’ll just say that it’s a joy to be writing again and a good way to process a world which, even from the safety of New Zealand, seems too much.
A quote from the book that made me laugh was “Has anyone had trouble getting garlic?” – did you panic buy anything at the start of lockdown?
I was in Sydney to record Animals for the audiobook when coronavirus was becoming a real global concern. I’d spend the day in a dark studio reading out scenes of fights breaking out in supermarkets and ransacked supplies, only to emerge blinking to news of those very events. I would go to the supermarket to find people in masks staring at empty toilet paper aisles.
When I returned to New Zealand, it was announced that we were going into total lockdown. My partner said, “Right, I’m going out to buy a board game, a smart TV and a shovel. Do you need anything else?” (I still don’t know what the shovel is for).
In the hours before lockdown I was making work phone calls and panic buying Chinese and Indian food supplies at the local shops. We did eat really well in the next few months.
I cannot emphasize how hard it was to not panic rescue an animal …
Finally, what have you been reading or listening to during this time of self-isolation? Any recommendations?
Ling Ma’s Severance – about a flu pandemic that sweeps the world – was my absolute favorite read. It was published in 2017 and feels like a handbook for how to deal, psychologically at least, with the idea of coronavirus. For escapism to the pre-pandemic world I consumed Sally Rooney’s Normal People in a day and found homesickness-for-Australia balm in Melissa Lukashenko’s Too Much Lip and Ronnie Scott’s The Adversary.
Amid these finished books are at least ten – it’s a towering pile anyway – of those I started and loved but lacked the concentration for in lockdown. Three of them that have me utterly absorbed again are Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults, Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountain and Kerry Hulme’s The Bone People.
Laura Jean McKay holds a PhD with research focusing on literary animal studies, and she is currently the "animal expert" presenter on ABC Listen’s "Animal Sound Safari." Her work has been published in Words Without Borders, J Journal, North American Review, Fixional (among others), and has been shortlisted for several awards. The Animals in That Country is McKay's debut novel.
About the Interviewer
Evie Braithwaite is a writer and aspiring publisher based in Liverpool, England, and an English Literature and Spanish graduate of the University of Leeds. Her favourite time of the day is reading in the early morning quiet and is passionate about celebrating regional diversity and literature that sparks conversations. When she isn't reading, you can find her singing badly along to music, learning a new language, or trialling a new vegan recipe. You can find her on Instagram: @eviebraithwaite, Twitter: @eviebraithwaite, and on her blog Evie Jayne: www.eviejayne.co.uk
