Déjà vu reading this book, recognising the detail of a whorl of hair on a man’s back, the truths in voices unfurling to attention, transitory lives, various meanings. Plot-lovers, stay away. Those who seek the nudge of submerged truths, this is yours.
Call these stories anecdotes, call them ethnography. A cat wails, mourning her sister. A little Gothic. Elephants, shaking dirt off their ancestor’s bones. Close to Greek Gothic. Dolphins and monkeys, carrying their rotting infants. Gothic as all get out. All true. It’s uncanny.
To witness, to be respectful, ‘to look more closely’ in order to ‘recognise that the nonhuman has a life that means something to herself’ (25). Respect involves learning, to know ‘the sensitive beak contains more nerve endings than a human fingertip’ (141).
Being read to at its best. Cathleen McCarron performs the polyphony of this work with a Glasgow lilt and other dialects I cannot place but know. A love story as tinsel to trauma, all too much Mummy Darling but, oh, that voice.
A mesmeric voice, hypnotic from the first page to the last. Would like to read straight away again, cover to cover. Civil engineer, sun-charred calcium. An eye to the world that would see it made better. More planning, fewer politicians, more care.
Uncomfortable shoes for everyone benefiting from the Empire’s stolen property. Brilliant set-up that shifts stagnant pooling perspectives with a splash. Settling at its most unsettling. Australia’s bitter colonial story told with devastating freshness. (Yet alas, poor toads, again the butt of metaphor.)
Plotlines like rivers. Major tributary, the stupidity of gaols. Ancestral waters murky with the pain of colonisation. Damages done. Then that place so sacred that all visitors must shake the dirt off their feet to keep the rest of Country on kilter.
The work of co-living coded in this writing’s ethic. Reminder. One’s child is ‘just another human animal, no more or less worthy than any others’. And a finding. Babies might forget excellent cuddles but are traumatised when not cuddled ‘well enough’ (Winnicot).
Dreamy Jimmy keeps pace with a rescued greyhound, becomes the ‘lithe body of a river’, enters the ‘golden lights’ of a grotto, raps out his life with Run DMC (285). The wisdom of Gabe. People can change if ‘life lets them’ (267).
Humans getting over themselves, entering the flow that was always-already there. Wandering and wondering with all the other nomads. Forget human norms, all that ‘normality, normalcy, and normativity’ (26). Death embraced for its ‘radical immanence’ (136). Time now for ‘transformative becoming’ (165).
