Philip Armstrong's poetry and Laura Jean McKay's award-winning novel The Animals in That Country feature animals as significant characters. The authors talk at 2020 Word Christchurch.

Animals feature as characters in both Philip Armstrong's poetry and Laura Jean McKay's award-winning novel The Animals in That Country. The authors talk at 2020 Word Christchurch.

Listen to Laura Jean McKay talking with Philip Armstrong about The Animals in That Country and Sinking Lessons

Laura Jean McKay's novel The Animals in That Country imagines a world in which a new virus gives those humans who catch it the ability to understand animals. The core relationship explored in its Australian setting is between the main human character Jean, and a dingo called Sue. This audacious novel won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Fiction award at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and is also shortlisted for the Stella Prize.

Laura Jean McKay:

It's no easy task to try to write a novel where animals might communicate. I felt that I needed to write two books - this gritty realist book about a woman who loves a drink and a smoke and has a very active love life.

She doesn't really like people but she loves animals, and she's going through a really crappy divorce. That's quite a realist thing.

And then I had to write this novel that was almost speculative, where suddenly there's a strange new 'flu, a pandemic going through the world, and one of the outcomes is that people can finally understand what other animals are saying.

And so, to bring these new novels together, and to make it work, was quite the undertaking.

I want people to take a step back, look at the animals in their life, and if you don't have a companion, maybe it's the birds in the street, and consider what is our actual relationship with them. What does that mean, and what can we do about that?

Philip Armstrong:

The protagonist, having caught this 'flu (which does something to your cognitive abilities, and enables you to understand animals) - you know, that's a hard sell for a reader. We can think of animals talking if we're reading Richard Adams or kids books, and there are people like Barbara Gowdy who have narrated serious novels from the point of view of animals, as if animals think and speak like us.

But Laura Jean doesn't do that. She knows, and we know that animals don't, can't, and will never, speak like us. What the virus in the novel does is enable you to be more sensitive to the chemicals, and the body language, and the pheromones, and the vocalisations, and the gestures, and smell of animals' urine markings, and these things come together in a most extraordinary way…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details