Animal People

Author: Charlotte Wood
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Price: $29.99 (paperback)

 

Animal instincts

In Animal People, disillusioned zoo employee Stephen is the hapless person who gets stuck next to the crazy guy on the bus: in this case, a muttering, dishevelled young man who wears glasses without lenses and sends a ‘shiver of anxiety’ rippling through the other passengers as he lurches up the aisle. As the man heads for the only vacant seat, Stephen makes a desperate bid to avoid conversation—he ‘stared out of the window, stared so hard his eyes watered. This was the trouble with living in Norton. The place was full of fucking mad people.’

The trouble with being Stephen is more complex. In Animal People, Charlotte Woods’s clever and absorbing new novel, Stephen endures what feels like the longest and hottest day of his life, one that lurches towards an act that could either free him from a self-made prison or trap him even further. With a deft balance of wit and melancholy, Woods draws us into Stephen’s world for just twelve hours, simultaneously exploring the inner life of a lost man and the chaos and contradictions of contemporary existence.

Stephen wakes on an oppressively hot summer day that’s only going to get more uncomfortable, chiefly because has set himself the rather masochistic task of splitting up with his girlfriend, Fiona—whom he clearly cares deeply about—at the birthday party of her five-year-old daughter, Ella, that very afternoon. The enormity of this looming betrayal weighs on Stephen’s mind, magnified by the growing awfulness of his day: he’s unsettled by a morning phone call from his mother when he’s trying to get ready for his tedious job at a zoo fast food kiosk, nearly kills a pedestrian on his way to work, and spends his shift cleaning out the deep fat fryer and attending a humiliating cowboy-themed teambuilding exercise. In the sticky heat of the afternoon, Stephen must endure Ella’s birthday party, where he is surrounded by five-year-olds in tutus and Fiona’s horrible family, who uniformly regard him as a dropout.

Woods has a droll style and a keen eye for the minutiae of the everyday. Stephen’s failed attempts to avoid an awkward encounter with his neighbour Nerida and her crotch-sniffing dog, and his bewilderment at his elderly mother’s grasp of technology (‘she used acronyms in conversation—Did you get my SMS? I sent you the URL!’) are apt and humorous reflections of modern living, at once entertaining and familiar. Through Stephen’s eyes, the ordinary becomes striking and poignant, allowing Woods to weave an absorbing and believable first-person narrative that builds towards the brilliantly climactic set piece of Ella’s birthday party. 

At the heart of Animal People is the vexed question of relationships—human to human, and human to animal—and how we need them to make sense of our lives. Stephen is unsettled by ‘animal people’—those who seem to prefer the love and company of animals—but he isn’t so enamoured of people in general. When he finally arrives for his shift at the zoo, his observations are both amusing and disquieting, casting humanity in a unflattering light—the people, realises Stephen, have an ‘odd, desperate need for the animals to notice them.’ Outside the rhino enclosure, two women stand scrolling through their mobile phone photos of baby rhino Adik: ‘”that was pretty lame,” one said. The other nodded, frowning, puzzled, at the pictures. “It just sort of stood there,” she said.’

The action builds towards a tense and dramatic conclusion as Stephen inches ever closer to the dreaded task he has set himself—a task he (and we) must know is a mistake. Paradoxically, Fiona is the only person in Stephen’s life who truly loves and accepts him, but she is the one he feels he has to push away, convinced that he can’t make her happy.

Woods’s denouement is a disastrous suburban scene that unfolds with comic horror. Though Fiona is lovely, her party guests are vile, and Stephen—arriving sweaty and dirty after several miserable hours behind the deep fat fryer—feels as unpleasant as the reception he gets. Between Fiona’s ex-husband, ‘wine-collecting, six-foot-four, human-fucking-rights barrister Richard,’ and her snarky new-age sister-in-law Belinda, ‘prone to placing her palm flat across her chest and emphasising that she was a mother,’ Stephen is surrounded by detractors; his attempts to survive the afternoon and fulfil his agonising task can only end badly, and he decides that ‘only beer would save him.’

But it’s not as bleak as all that. Despite the (riveting) domestic mess that unfolds in its final third, Animal People is fundamentally a love story, and its conclusion is beautifully handled and subtly moving. Stephen may profess not to understand people like Nerida, who fusses over her huge and hairy German Shepherd as though it’s her firstborn child; but ultimately, he comes to realise that what’s important isn’t so much for people to love animals, ‘but for us to love them.’ The same could be said of human relationships, for all their complications and pain. For Stephen, in the end, the simple fact of love is what matters.