Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
As an animal person, it’s hard to really understand those who are not animal people. Stephen, who is most decidedly not an animal person, has the opposite dilemma. “He was not an animal person in the same way he was not a musical person, or an intellectual person,” Charlotte Wood writes. “Not to be musical or intellectual was unremarkable and provoked no suspicion. But not to be an animal person somehow meant he wasn’t fully human.”
This sense of being not quite human, not quite grown up, not quite living properly, saturates the whole novel, which stretches over the expanse of a single day in Stephen’s life. It’s a fairly ordinary day, but long, sweltering, exhausting. Stephen drifts through his normal routine, mindlessly working at the zoo kiosk with the same complacency as always. The familiarity of it – talking to his mother on the phone about a new TV she wants to buy, having to endure a tedious team-building activity at work – makes time lag, and the more disturbing events that punctuate the day slowly build up a feeling of weariness and defeat, growing like the residue of grime and sweat on his skin.
There’s one thing in particular that keeps weighing Stephen down – he’s planning to break up with his girlfriend Fiona that night, right after her daughter’s birthday party. He can’t say why, exactly – Stephen doesn’t understand his own feelings and motivations any more than he understands animal people. In fact, Fiona and her two young daughters are probably the best thing that has ever happened to him. Throughout the passage of his day Wood allows us glimpses into their relationship in mini-flashbacks, and his more intimate thoughts are rendered beautifully: “For the first time in his life he found himself wanting to live up to something – to meet her, to take this beautiful risk – and it made the wave of his need for her crest and break again.”
Still, he is oppressed by a feeling that breaking up with her is just something he must do, almost if it’s beyond his control. Stephen is a guy who, as his sister chastises him, “prefers his life forms behind bars or glass,” just like the animals at the zoo, so that he doesn’t have to get too close. He doesn’t want to be needed. He reflects on the way visitors at the zoo always want to believe the animals are noticing them. “Surely the most appealing thing about animals,” he thinks, “was that – far from offering unconditional love – they wanted nothing from you.”
Stephen is frustrating and kind of dull, but ultimately we are invited to sympathise with him, and it’s clear that there’s more to him simmering beneath what we’re shown. Wood carefully layers the novel with levels of meaning and makes astute observations about social dynamics, and the preoccupation with the relationship between people and animals is woven unobtrusively throughout the narrative. This is a book you can easily read in one or two sittings, but the full complexity of it is far richer than it may at first appear.