LAURA JEAN MCKAY

The Clarke Award winner on where she found her inspiration

WHEN THE WINNER OF THIS YEAR’S Arthur C Clarke Award, The Animals In That Country, was announced, award director Tom Hunter heralded the book as a “first contact novel, only the multiple alien species that humanity encounters have been sharing the Earth with us all along”. It details what happens when, due to a “zooflu” pandemic (the timing was coincidental), infected humans develop the ability to understand animals.

The description delighted first-time novelist Laura Jean Mckay. “I’d never thought of that before,” she says, speaking via video from her New Zealand home, “but that’s what’s so great about getting science fiction writers and readers reading your work in that way: to understand for you what you’ve been trying to do for seven years!”

Of course, Mckay knew exactly what she was doing. She has a PHD in literary animal studies. She began seriously thinking about what it might be like to talk to animals after coming face to face with a fully grown lone male kangaroo in the Australian bush – a potentially dangerous moment.

“For some reason, I wasn’t scared at all,” she remembers, “And for some reason, he didn’t appear to be worried by the encounter either. We just stood and faced each other, and then tried to get around each other, the way you do when you’re walking into a restaurant. We had this funny, weird moment and then went our separate ways.”

This keyed off two thoughts. Firstly, that it would have been much more frightening if she’d encountered “an adult male human on a dark path”. The second was, “If I could have this real moment of lovely connection with a completely different species, what would happen if the language barrier was taken away, and we could communicate with each other?”

VICTORIAN VALUES

To judge by Animals, it wouldn’t be easy. At the novel’s heart are two characters. There’s Jean, a straight-talking alcoholic who works as a guide at an outback wildlife park and only genuinely connects with one other human: her granddaughter, Kimberly. Then there’s Sue, a captive dingo born in the wild but now institutionalised. When Jean’s son, a charming wastrel, takes Kimberly to the coast to discover what whale song means, Jean and Sue go in pursuit – a journey that finds Mckay at the midpoint of Doctor Dolittle and Thelma And Louise.

It’s a book dedicated to “animals – all of us”, but also to “grandparents, especially my Ma and Nana”. Looking back, says Mckay, she had “quite an odd childhood”. Her father, a poet, died just before she was born, although family memories of him were vivid. “My mum did a really great job of bringing us up,” she remembers. “She’s a very strong person.” In Mckay’s early years, she lived at different times with both sets of grandparents, including time spent on a farm in Victoria. These were practical people: “They were really the inspiration for Jean,” she says.

As a child she wrote, to the extent that “it was so much deeply a part of me that when it was time to go to university, I didn’t even think about studying writing”. However, she didn’t really get serious about it until she was in her thirties, when she spent time in Cambodia as an aid worker – an experience that inspired her short story collection Holiday In Cambodia.

INSECT CONTROL

Another inspiration for the novel was a mosquito which, on a trip to Bali, infected her with the chikungunya virus, like “dengue [fever] on crack” in its effects. “I got a high fever, I turned bright red, my skin started shedding off my body as I was walking around.”

When the fever died down, the idea that an insect could have such an “amazing amount of power” that it could “share a bit of spit with me and transform my body completely for the next two years” left a lasting impact. “If she can hold that power, without really knowing about it, that shifts the entire human/other species dynamic. Let’s give animals the agency to fling themselves over the page and express themselves and go through the world – wouldn’t that be exciting?”

But there’s also a more melancholy facet to all of this. Researching her PHD, Mckay became fascinated by “chimpanzee stars”. In Florida she met Michael Jackson’s companion chimpanzee, Bubbles. When she tried to take a photograph, Bubbles, who’d been traumatised by paparazzi, “picked up a bit of poo from the ground and threw it”. In contrast, Mckay connected instantly with Bubbles’s best friend Ripley. In their different ways, both chimpanzee encounters serve as reminders that the animals in that country can often communicate very clearly indeed.

The Animals In That Country is available in both hardback and paperback, published by Scribe.

I turned bright red and my skin started shedding off my body as I was walking around