Beyond human
A cursory list of Western fables would have to start with Aesop’s, before leapfrogging the centuries to the tales of Reynard the Trickster Fox, the stories of La Fontaine, Charles Perrault’s “Puss in Boots,” on up to the 20th century of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” And in each instance, animal protagonists serve as mirrors to a medley of human types, from the avaricious to the crafty to the noble.
South Africa-born writer Ceridwen Dovey, author of “Blood Kin,” takes her place along this literary continuum with her new collection of stories, “Only the Animals.” Something that distinguishes Dovey’s approach from her literary forebears, however, is that all of her animal protagonists are already dead, transmogrified into “souls,” and recounting their life stories against the varying backdrops of some of recent history’s most violent and destructive conflicts.
Dovey also has chosen to weave the lives of renowned literary figures into her characters’ stories. In “Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat and I,” for instance, we meet Kiki-la-Doucette, a cat who in both reality and fiction was the beloved angora of the taboobusting writer Colette.
Separated from her while she’s gone to visit “her new husband, the awful Henri, who was made a sergeant at the outbreak of the war and fully believes he deserves the title,” Kiki wanders into a soldiers’ encampment and settles in. She meets a tomcat from her old block and the two of them quickly become an item. While she waits for Colette to rescue her, Kiki encounters other animals forced into the war effort: message-bearing pigeons, enemy-sniffing dogs, pack mules with their vocal cords slashed so that their braying won’t reveal troop positions.
Yet while all of this “small” detail is told in a manner that’s both moving and horrific, the factual, totalizing destruction of World War I irrevocably looms large, overshadowing both Colette and Kiki’s presence. And when Kiki dies in the arms of a soldier, the story dissolves into sentimentality.
Despite the strength of Dovey’s prose, which is solid and accomplished throughout, other stories escape sentimentality only to become mired in earnestness. In “A Letter to Sylvia Plath,” a dolphin named Sprout explains her unwitting involvement in the death of an enemy diver in the Persian Gulf during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
While sharing her observations with Plath on such things as the near-telepathic communicating powers of dolphins and the singularly female experience of giving birth — as well as admitting a grudging respect for Ted Hughes — Sprout is also hoping to connect with a kindred suicidal spirit. But Sprout’s searching tone eventually turns sanctimonious, particularly when she asks the question, “Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and sometimes as animals?” As if Plath might have an answer for us all.
A virtue of the collection lies in Dovey’s sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit examination of the master-slave relationship between animals and humans. Some of her protagonists — a camel enlisted for a mission to exhume an aboriginal queen’s bones, a laboratory chimp trained perhaps too successfully to behave like a human being — have been severed from families and homes and forced into servitude. While captive, they silently endure the intimate confessions of their captors or become tragically enmeshed in their sordid machinations.
Yet by privileging animal experience over human and then contextualizing it with repeated incursions of historical events and figures, Dovey introduces a tension that destabilizes the collection, upending her efforts to create and sustain a convincing “animal-first” telling.
Kafka’s glancing appearance in the life of the laboratory chimp exerts a disproportionate influence on the story’s outcome, making the whole thing feel contrived. In another story, a centenarian tortoise named Plautus describes escaping from the clutches of a hermit and putting himself in the care of the Tolstoy family before being passed on to Virginia Woolf, George Orwell and then Tom Stoppard, becoming a kind of Zelig of the animal kingdom along the way — but to no discernible end.
Couldn’t un-famous, “normal” people have served as equally worthy human characters for Dovey’s stories? Between the history lessons and the distracting celebrity writer cameos, it’s difficult to figure out what she’s after. As a result of these impulses, “Only the Animals” feels like an indeterminate manifesto alternately protesting human cruelty to all living things while celebrating a list of favorite writers and books.
One is finally left to wonder: Why aren’t these creatures ever given the opportunity to get angry and resist instead of observing and lamenting in all-too-human fashion? Despite Dovey’s deep research and ambitious scope, what these stories really lack is bite.