Although the animal protagonists of these 10 stories find themselves caught in human conflicts, Dovey is at no risk of succumbing to the sentimentality or moralising to which her enterprise could have fallen prey. Somewhere Along the Line the Pearl Would be Handed to Me is, for instance, frequently hilarious; a homage to On the Road which sees its molluscular hero hitching a ride to Pearl Harbor on the hull of a battleship as he avoids putting down threads and gathering algae.
The dolphin narrator of A Letter to Sylvia Plath, meanwhile, offers an account not just of her US navy service but a damning feminist critique of Ted Hughes: “Human women need no reminder that they’re animals. So why do your men keep shouting it from the rooftops as if they’ve discovered how to transform base metals into gold? Imagine a male dolphin who has to keep having epiphanies to remember he’s an animal!” Dazzling.
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