Laura Jean McKay’s “The Animals in That Country”

A brilliant debut novel of too much understanding.

The Animals in That Country is the debut novel of Australian writer Laura Jean McKay; it’s an extraordinary book about a plague of understanding that sweeps across Australia, leaving the infected cursed with the ability to communicate with animals.

https://scribepublications.com/books-authors/books/the-animals-in-that-country-9781950354375

As a premise, this is very good: an inversion of the standard trope of people and animals communicating with one another and finding mutual understanding and peace as a result. In execution, it’s even better: McKay sets herself the (seemingly) impossible of dramatizing human-animal communication without anthropomorphizing the animals, and then pulls it off — brilliantly.

The protagonist of Animals is Jean, a self-destructive, aging grandmother living in a wildlife park with her daughter-in-law (the park’s director) and her granddaughter, Kim. Her son in not in his daughter’s life — he’s a loose-footed, irresponsible womanizer who’s disappeared. Her ex-husband is also long gone. All Jean really has is Kim, who is the only reason she moderates her drinking and her self-immolating confrontations with friends, family, and strangers on the internet.