ONLY THE ANIMALS

Fiction

The mussel quotes Kerouac

ONLY THE ANIMALS:
Stories

By Ceridwen Dovey

248 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Madison Bush

The premise: what can we learn about the nature of human conflict looking through the eyes of animals whose fates are intertwined with writers of the past century? 

Ten posthumous animal reflections interspersed with obscure cameos by lesser-known writers give us the answer: human conflict is a tragic, foolish waste that causes animal misery via domestication, subjugation, and carelessness.  Did we need ten stories to realize that? Probably not, but after a trip through time, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century in Australia, continuing to World War I in France and Germany, World War II in Poland and Hawaii, through the Cold War, and ending with the conflicts of the past twenty years in Mozambique, Bosnia, Iraq, and Lebanon, you will walk away certain of one thing: in the end, the world would be better left to the beasts. 

Anyone who thinks that domestication improves an animal’s chance of survival should think again. In “Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat and I” our narrator, the famous cat, Kiki-la-Doucette, abandoned on the French Front of World War I by her temperamental mistress, the writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette, bonds with the young soldiers of the front, all the while tormenting a friendly tomcat in true feline fashion. We, the readers, become invested in her desire to return to her mistress, all the while waiting for tragedy to descend. In “Psittacophile,” a parrot in Beirut, cursed with the long lifespan of parrots, is bought by an American and named for a Flaubert novel, only to be abandoned as the flighty human evacuates under threat of Israeli airstrikes. In “Plautus: A Memoir of My Years on Earth and Last Days in Space,” a turtle makes its way from the home of Tolstoy, to Virginia Woolf, then onto a spaceship. Don’t look for happy endings here. These are posthumous memoirs, and the animals raised to be cared for cannot survive on their own.

In between the pets and the wild animals—which we will get to—are the animals trained for a purpose. Some serve willingly, such as the wolf-dog bred by Nazis in “Hundstage,” who philosophizes on reincarnation and sees dead people in the woods; the dolphins trained for war in “A Letter to Sylvia Plath”; and the dutiful bear-soldier in “Telling Fairy Tales,” who begins in 1992 Bosnia during the Yugoslav Wars but finds himself carried off into a Balkan fairy tale. Others though, are not willing participants. The narrator of “The Bones” is a camel, one of the many brought to Australia from far away to serve as a beast of burden. He discusses the pain of losing his herd mates, of killing another camel, and watches bemused as men fight over the bones of Aboriginal queens.  More confused, both in story-telling and moral is the tale, “Red Peter’s Little Lady,” a strange correspondence between man and ape—or perhaps between chimpanzee and chimpanzee, which fails to clarify who or what is being used. Does the harnessing of animals always lead to their doom? I would like to think not, but these stories leave little doubt that human mastery only leads to death.

Equally sympathetic to animal lovers are the stories involving wild animals. In these stories, mankind’s poor decisions wreak havoc on animal bystanders. A mussel in “Somewhere Along the Line” migrates to Hawaii to spawn and breed with thousands of other mussels, before being annihilated by the attack on Pearl Harbor. “I, The Elephant, Wrote This” introduces us to the life cycle and spirituality of wild elephants in Mozambique. We are along for the ride as the mussel quotes Kerouac and the elephant fights to protect her children, in a world rendered hostile by man.

The stories succeed in drawing sympathy from animal lovers, but the concept of introducing famous writers falls flat. It would have worked better had the references to these famous writers been less vague, the roles of the writers more crucial. Instead references to Tolstoy, Freud, and Henry Lawson—among others—obscure the true heart of the collection—the animals, wild, domestic, and in-between.