By most standards Ceridwen Dovey's 33 years have been interesting. But not, apparently, interesting enough for fiction. She has moved back and forth between Australia, where she went to high school, South Africa, where she was born, and the United States, where she studied social anthropology and filmmaking at Harvard.
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Her 2008 debut novel, Blood Kin, an allegory on despotism, won accolades galore including the comment in Publishing News that she was ''the most talented, intelligent and promotable author of the decade''. (''Promotable'' might refer to her blonde good looks and easy manner.)
She has since jettisoned a novel or three, eloped in New York, abandoned a PhD, moved to Australia with her South African husband, Blake, had a baby boy, Gethin, and now written an extraordinary series of fabulist tales in homage to literary greats about animals in wartime.
The second published book of fiction among six she has written, Only the Animals is an audacious work of the imagination. A menagerie including a bear in Sarajevo zoo, a dolphin in the Gulf War and a German shepherd with the Third Reich, all caught up in human conflicts of the last century, tell the stories of their deaths. The yarns are funny, tragic, smart, arch, poignant and playful all at once, and about as un-autobiographical as it's possible to be. That's no accident.
Dovey wrestled with the common writer's maxim to ''write what you know''. She tried drawing from her own experience, but ''just didn't enjoy the process''. It bored her. The question came up at a book reading she went to in New York by the Irish author Colum McCann. ''He said no, he tries always to write what he wants to know. I thought, 'Oh, that is great, that is exactly it'. What I am in the game for is making stuff up, and using my imagination as much as possible. That is the addictive part for me.''
She wrote the last story in Only the Animals first, in 2006. The narrator is a needy parrot living with an American expat divorcee in Beirut that plucks all its feathers out during the Israeli bombing and is then abandoned when its owner flees. It was inspired by her professor's parrot in New York, which was so traumatised by seeing the second tower fall on September 11, 2001, that it self-mutilated and had to be evacuated to Cleveland for adoption.
''At the time I just found this so moving … It meant more somehow than all the other terrible stories about humans I had heard,'' Dovey says. She was both worried and relieved: at least she felt something. Perhaps, she thought, not being obliged to feel for animals as we are morally obliged to feel for fellow humans ''frees us to feel something more authentic''.
She wondered about the power of animals to invoke ''that visceral shock into feeling of some sort''. To test the idea, she chose historical conflicts that have been so exhaustively picked over by the culture that it seems ''everything you can possibly say has been said about them''.
Well, not everything. Probably no one else has tackled Pearl Harbour in the persona of a louche Hudson River mussel hitching a ride on an American battleship in hilarious homage to Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The Gulf War has surely not been viewed before from the perspective of a US Navy-trained doomed mother dolphin writing to Sylvia Plath.
''Do you know why humans use animals as metaphors?'' a witch asks the last two starving bears in Sarajevo zoo, one impatiently waiting for the other's death to provide his next meal. ''In moments of excess feeling, we can use you to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable,'' says the witch.
The brown bear responds by quoting The Iliad on Menelaus' grief standing over the body of his fallen compatriot: '' 'Menelaus bestrode his body like a fretful mother cow standing over the first calf she has -'
''The black bear cut her off. 'Do you know what human flesh tastes like?' he asked the witch.''
The title is from the tagline of the group Nature in Legend and Storytelling, co-founded by US scholar and author Boria Sax, whose work on the enduring use of animals in human culture as a means to explore human identity is a key source: ''What does it mean to be human? Perhaps only the animals can know.''
Dovey's first book, Blood Kin, looked at tyranny in an unknown place and time through the eyes of a tyrant's barber, chef and portraitist. The new, too, explores human conflict themes of hurt and trauma, guilt and complicity, but animals rather than a tyrant's acolytes put the reader on the front line.
The epitaph quotes fellow South African-Australian J. M. Coetzee, from his book Elizabeth Costello: ''Each creature is key to all other creatures. A dog sitting in a patch of sun licking itself, says he, is at one moment a dog and at the next a vessel of revelation.''
''Conflicts are so fascinating because they are when we are at our worst,'' says Dovey. Her animal narrators bear witness as might flies on the wall: ''When we think no one is watching, it brings out the beastliness in us.'' So does hunger, a recurring theme: ''It is very difficult to remain human in any sense of the word when you are hungry,'' she notes.
Only the Animals is neither a sentimental children's book nor a lecture on animal rights. It's the ideas, not the animals, that beguile Dovey. She is neither vegetarian nor animal lover, in particular. She has no pets and likes eating meat. Her animal characters range along a spectrum from innocence to guilt; they sometimes behave badly.
''That was important to me, that they were agents in their own stories,'' she says. She read deeply on animals in literature, conflict history and the writers she honours in the stories, as the website note on sources (interesting in itself) attests.
She intentionally lifts words, phrases and sentences verbatim from these sources. Her artful fabrications had this reader sheepishly, bizarrely Googling to check whether Tolstoy had a famous tortoise, for example, or whether the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian II kept an extraordinarily well-travelled elephant named Sulieman. (Answers: no and yes.)
''It was an education for me too,'' laughs Dovey, though a pleasurable one, with the bonus of coming to authors she hadn't known or known well and being able to ''bathe in their words''. The borrowed anecdote about Colette's last word being ''Look!'' is what Dovey herself seems to be saying to the reader, along with Laugh! Weep! and Wonder!
As her animals contemplated what ''their'' author's work might have meant, Dovey began to see much of 20th-century literature as a coming to terms with the loss of paradise. Thanks to Darwin, ''we could not look back on that past of a beautiful naked human couple frolicking in the garden of Eden''. Instead, we are kin to chimpanzees; the closer we get to them, the more we push them away. ''It is almost like this last century we have been processing how to make sense of that hierarchy, jostling for a place somewhere on that tree as far away from animals as possible.''
Dovey realised with a jolt recently she has been writing for 10 years. Blood Kin, written for her master's thesis in creative writing at the University of Cape Town, grew out of an ''unhappy time'' in South Africa when her plan to make a documentary about the then president, Thabo Mbeki, through people close to him proved unrealistic. The New York Times described the book as ''precise and terrifying'' and ''a high-wire act''.
With the ensuing book contract she embarked on a historical novel about Mozambique but ''lost my way and gave up on it''. It was a ''really difficult failure'' but part of what she now recognises as a long apprenticeship. ''I was learning to write about history and conflict without becoming boring or preachy.''
With a two-year-old and a part-time job researching domestic energy use at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, she's learned to be ''a lot less precious about when and how I write'', such as by ignoring all the mess when the baby is asleep.
Her next book, now in draft, is about an old man involved in the Dying with Dignity movement in Sydney. It's ''not sad and depressing, I hope''. On the strength of Only the Animals, this reader is willing to take her at her word.
Only the Animals is published on Wednesday by Hamish Hamilton.