The world's going to pot and Andrew Upton feels the weight of knowing he's not really able to do much about it.
The celebrated Australian playwright, director and producer, who was co-artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company with his wife Cate Blanchett for five seasons, says there's a sense of powerlessness doing the rounds.
"It's very hard to know what exactly to do. We know that there's something's not working, and we know that we're moving towards a lot of conflict, and we know that we don't want it, and we know that it's a disaster, and we know that it can't end well, all those things," Upton says.
"But there's a sort of strange sense of how do you go about affecting that, changing that, and why is it happening?
"And why when, you know, I've not spoken to a single soul who likes where things are heading, but why can't we do anything about it? And that, to me, is where the allegory of this farm kind of remains alive or remains vibrant."
The farm is the setting of his novel, Krank Fuss (Puncher & Wattmann, $34.95). In the lead-up to World War II, a chicken with a deformed foot is on the smallholding of a Bavarian farmer as global events rage around her with local implications.
What choices matter when they will not change the big picture?
"I really feel for my dear little chicken, Krank Fuss, because I think she really is doing as much as she can about it, but it's sort of nothing," Upton says.
"It's sort of a disaster. You know, we're all in a very big system, and that sometimes is daunting, and to me that is what ... I'm hoping to open the conversation up, I suppose, or reach out and communicate."
Allegorical stories - the stuff of Homer, Plato and Aesop - seem now to be a form out of favour. Upton says there's something scary for writers tackling them and maybe readers are out of practice.
"I think obviously in the end you can kind of do anything, which is amazing and very liberating," he says of writing prose.
"You know, once I decided, once I'd sort of felt my way to the, to the farm and the animals and really all through Krank Fuss, through the chicken herself, through to meeting Gibby and then, oh man, what if I go to the barn?
"And you know, just that, that I could have gone anywhere really."
While Upton has worked extensively across the stage and screen, Krank Fuss is his first novel. He has felt the absence of the usual reaction available in a theatre to knowing whether the work works.
"Even though there's a slight intimacy and sort of quiet relationship in prose, the incredible thing of being in a theatre or in a space where you've constructed particularly a joke and getting 800 people laughing at once is an incredible feeling that obviously poor novelists must never know," he says.
"Because unless they were sitting in a weird library where everyone was reading the same book at the same time, that would never happen."
The unavoidable comparison for Krank Fuss is with George Orwell's Animal Farm, the allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalin's rise that plays out among the animals of Manor Farm, published in August 1945.
Upton says he hoped his allegory remained free enough to capture the resonances between the late 1930s in Europe and the world now.
"I think [Animal Farm] is a brilliant book, etched very deeply. ... It was very much a touchstone, but I really don't think it's the same kind of allegory," Upton says.
"Those pigs translate across, in a way, to people, but certainly to very specific kind of forces or figures.
"For me, the real allegory, if you like, or the one that I was more interested in, was just the idea that we ourselves might find ourselves in a place and a structure and an institution that we don't really understand, like the animals on the farm."
