Britain, the US, and Australia all hail an author from Palmerston North
Palmerston North author Laura Jean McKay has won one of the world's most prestigious literary awards – the Arthur C Clarke award, named after the great sci-fi author – for her debut novel The Animals in That Country.
It's the latest honour in a string of international awards, nominations and commendations that surely make her the most successful New Zealand writer of the year.
The Animals in That Country has an attractive prescience – it took McKay seven years to write, and she set it during a pandemic. But its central dazzling premise is that humans can understand what animals are saying. The book has received the following accolades:
- Winner of The 2021 Arthur Clarke award in Britain. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid's Tale, Coleson Whitehead for The Underground Railroad, and China Miéville, three times; finalists have included Kazuo Ishiguro, Marcel Theroux (son of/brother of), and Wellington author Phillip Mann. Kind of amusingly, the two thousand pounds annual award money has risen incrementally by one quid each year since 2001 (as a nice self-reference to Clarke's quite famous 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey), and so the exact figure McKay pocketed was 2021 pounds. Award convenors said, "In many ways Laura’s book could be considered as a first contact novel, only the multiple alien species that humanity encounters have been sharing the Earth with us all along…Her win repositions the boundaries of science fiction."
- Winner of the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature. Australia’s richest literary prize - McKay pocketed $100,000 – saw her win the overall award as well as the fiction award, which earned her a further $25,000. Judges: "McKay's novel is written with profound empathy, provoking the reader to consider their place in the world, and ensuring they will never see animals in the same way again."
- Winner of the 2021 Australian Book Industry Awards Small Publisher’s Adult Book of the Year Award. The Animals in That Country is published by the small but prestigiously formed Scribe.
- Winner of the 2020 Aurealis Awards’ Best Science Fiction Novel. The award "recognises the achievements of Australian sci-fi, fantasy and horror".
- Shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize. Its site proclaims, "Stella drives significant cultural change by elevating the work of Australian women writers – cis, trans, and non-binary inclusive."
- Shortlisted for the 2021 Readings Prize for new Australian fiction. Fair that she is recognised as an Australian writer; you'd think, though, that she was also eligible for local awards as a New Zealand writer.
- Longlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Established in 1957 (its inaugural winner was Patrick White for Voss), the Franklin is basically Australia's Booker Prize. Peter Carey has won it three times, Tim Winton a record four times.
- Named one of the best five sci-fi novels of 2020 by the Sunday Times in England. It also earned a rave review in the Guardian: "McKay sets herself an extraordinary challenge: to represent animal communication in words. The book succeeds by walking a difficult and delicate line between understanding and incomprehension, creating something like dirty realism out of its fantastical premise...[It's a] stirring attempt to inhabit other consciousnesses."
- Named one of the top 10 books of 2020 by Dan Kois at US news site Slate. Yes, that Dan Kois, known as American Dan during the year he spent in New Zealand, where he formed a love for our literature. His ecstatic praise for The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox led to a US publishing deal, and his top 10 list last year also included Nothing To See by Wellington writer Pip Adam ("Eventually American publishers will figure out that the New Zealand novelist Pip Adam is a stone-cold genius"). He wrote of The Animals in That Country, "A wildly inventive dystopian adventure, in which a mysterious pandemic causes humans to be able to understand the speech of animals. As an irascible grandmother follows her son across the Australian Outback, she’s tormented by the birds overhead, bugged by the ants underfoot, and protected by a dingo who wouldn’t mind becoming the alpha. Both a hell of a ride and a revealing thought experiment about our place in the natural world."
I spoke briefly with Laura last week. She is an accumulation of unlikelinesses – an Australian author who lives in Palmerston North, and who suffers the continuing affects of a mosquito bite in 2013, in Bali, which gave her the tremendously unpleasant Chikungunya virus and helped inspire the idea for a pandemic that could infect humans with an interesting side-affect: the ability to understand animal speech. She teaches creative writing at Massey University alongside Ingrid Horrocks and Thom Conroy. Conroy conducted a terrific interview with her in Headland in June, and described the animal speech in her book as "feral poetry". I loved that phrase and reminded her of it when we began our chat.
She said, "It's interesting how people describe the animal language in my book as poetry. I always see it more as more like song lyrics. Something that people do with animal language a lot in books is to make the animals poetic or prophetic. They're supposed to come to us with the answers to the meaning of life. I really wanted the animals to be living their own lives and that their life doesn’t have anything to do with us."
I remarked that the seabird in 70s trash classic Jonathan Livingstone Seagull was infinitely wise but that perhaps animals are not blessed with wisdom per se.
"Just like we're not. Even if they are wise, it's not a wisdom that we necessarily understand. We are fairly limited. We rely a lot on vision and speech and don’t have those extra abilities like flight and other ways of perceiving the world."
McKay has a PhD in animal literary studies. I asked her about the primary texts and any influence they may have had on her novel.
"Well, definitely Being Prey by Val Plumwood," she said. "She's an Australian philosopher and she talks about how she went out into the estuaries in the north of Australia. She was a very skilled canoe woman and bush person, and she went on the wrong estuary and got attacked by a crocodile who rocked her out of the boat and tried to drag her under. And there's a moment where she stares into the crocodile's eyes and she describes it as 'looking at her with interest'. Which is a beautiful way to describe an encounter with another animal. You know, it's not like the crocodile looked at her with anger, or hatred, or hunger. It's such a beautiful essay about being prey, about what it is like to be meat for another creature that is more powerful than us."
She made passing mention in her Headland interview to having her own encounter with a crocodile. I asked what that encounter was.
"So there's a place called Cahills Crossing in the Northern Territory [on the East Alligator River!] and it floods every single day. You have to pick your time in order to cross it in your car. We were coming back from a trip and we waited in line with the other cars, but some of the local people thought, 'Oh, it's fine', and drove in. A car got stuck and suddenly these giant log things appeared and there were these three-, four-metre crocodiles, and they were just there, at the car windows, just waiting. I was on the bank, half ready to run, because these creatures are terrifying, but also half ready to leap up onto a crocodile and help people and probably get eaten myself. They were silent, and quick, and so ready to take advantage of that situation. It was so magnificent and terrifying."
She thinks the current was too fast for the crocodiles; the family in the car managed to wade in and cross. I asked what she thought about that experience and what influence it may have had on The Animals in That Country.
She said, "Well - everything I write about is really either about relationships, whether they are between humans or interspecies, and also about power. I am really fascinated by the way power is held. When I'm writing human-animal relationships I'm really trying to play with power dynamics. In another encounter I met a mosquito in Bali that gave me a disease."
McKay talks a lot about that mosquito in interviews; it was a significant mosquito, a crucial mosquito.
"I realised when I was in the throes of this disease, and my skin was peeling off, and was turning bright red, and I was delirious, and I felt I was turning into a mosquito, that the power dynamic had shifted. This tiny little animal had shared something with me that had transformed my body."
The obvious literary parallel is with the short story by Frank Kafka, "Metamorphosis", in which poor old Gregor Sansa wakes up one morning to find he has become a bug.
"Yeah, absolutely," she said. "And I did metamorphose. My body did change. I did wake up in my bed transformed into 'a monstrous insect' just like the Kafka story that I've adored for years. I sometimes wonder about Kafka's experiences and how he knew exactly how to write that."
Nabokov's great essay on "Metamorphosis" points to Samsa's family, who at first are "under the impression that his condition is some kind of foul but not hopeless illness that may pass with time" - a good working description of McKay's Chikungunya virus. We talked a little more about Kafka, and she recommended another story of his that was an animal literature classic - "Burrow", about a mole creature "who is just obsessed with its underground lair, and keeping other people out. Very useful for today's survivalists." McKay's partner is Tom Doig, who is working on a book about survivalists, and their love of underground bunkers; he hopes to work on the project as one of the winners of the 2021 Surrey Hotel-Newsroom writers residency award.
And then I asked her about her relationship with animals in Palmerston North.
"It's mostly – I mean – cows. There are just so many cows here. Palmerston North smells like cows. There are cows everywhere. The river is filled with cow stuff. On my way to work every day I find myself travelling through almost every stage of a cow's life. At different points there will be pregnant cows, then baby cows being separated from mother cows, and then at some point there will be a field full of young bulls and another field with young bullocks, and in the final stage," she said, relishing the journey of her narrative and its climax, "there's this really strange field. When I first arrived, I wondered, 'Who painted these bullet targets on the side of these cows?' And then I realised it's actually a sort of an experiment with the cows where they cut a porthole in the cow's side, and create a flap they can open, and look at its insides and do their experiments on it." She said she had plans to create an Instagram account of daily photos of cows and call it The Daily Cow. She didn't get very far but I asked her to send a photo of one of her daily cows and that image concludes this interview, below.
So anyway how is that she has become New Zealand's most successful writer in 2021? What, I asked, is the likely resonance of The Animals in That Country? She supposed that maybe it was a sign of the times, that we regard speculative fiction as a good and accurate reflection of the world in collapse. "We are living," she said, "in an apocalypse that we once only envisaged. I think this is the apocalypse. I think we're in it. We’re in the beginning of it. People are always talking about the end of the world, but climate change is here. It's not something we're trying to mitigate for the future. We are in it now. We have to get used to the idea of how to conduct ourselves in the apocalypse."
The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay (Scribe, $37 ) is available in bookstores nationwide.
