Animals is one of those curious, amusing and disturbing books that makes you wince and laugh aloud at the same time. It's all about the disintegration of an unnamed character. He is an illustrator but does not draw much during the short course of the novel. As the title would have you guess, he has quite a few encounters in his big-city environment with animals; they are all unsettling, and he worries and frets about his reactions to each. He muses internally a lot, over decisions that haven't even been made. His inner monologue reminded me a lot of Holden Caulfield. Also like Catcher in the Rye, the book covers just a few days, or perhaps a week, turning around and around.

The main events are not really solid events at all, and before long you start to wonder how much in just in the narrator's mind, and not really occuring at all... It starts when the illustrator is disturbed at seeing a dead mouse in a gutter and examines it in detail; he is fascinated and upset at his friend's description of a haunted building; he gets locked into a public park after hours and has a run-in with an amicable policeman; he has an encounter with a famous woman which goes all wrong; he has an inexplicable row with his partner and bunks with various friends for a few days, but that all goes awry as well. His friends are experimental artists, architects and writers, all very interesting characters in their own right. One, which never ceased to amuse me, was a man who had created an elaborate imaginary country (centuries of detailed history and all) for the sake of writing anonymously about politics but had never yet penned a political novel; our narrator bluntly points out flaws in this fabricated world and causes that friendship to go sour as well. Threaded through it all is a fascinating look at societal norms and blunders, an examination of details that often go unremarked.

The ending took me completely by surprise. I didn't know what to think. It made me realize how utterly unreliable this narrator was. How much of what he related was just imagined? It's one of those endings that makes you sit and flip your brain back and forth: did what I think just happened, really happen? I was doubly frustrated because I also wanted to know, of course, what happened to his partner, if it really was what the narrator had suggested, because his memory turned out to be unreliable as well. I'm definitely going to have to read this book again to see if I can pick it all apart and read between the lines better.

from the Dogear Diary ( )

The book's narrator, whose name we never learn, is an illustrator who begins by recounting a very bad day--a dead mouse in the gutter, a friend's tale of a haunted building that inspires an uneasy feeling about Australia, a close escape from dying in a swimming pool, a stomach-turning encounter with a spider. And tthe day ends with a possibly homicidal encounter with his partner, K., which leads to the narrator packing bags and embarking on a week or so of drifting and disintegration.

The narrator is unreliable, sometimes knowingly but always unwillingly--memory and occasionally language itself are disintegrating. This seems to be the result of distance from what's called 'the world': Only what is not human is the world, and not a centimetre of a city has no touch of the human in it. The world though is intruding into the protagonist's consciousness, most obviously in the form of phantom-like animals.

The writing is quite good. There are descriptions I won't soon forget, and passages that could easily have slipped into the sophomoric or polemic are instead simply thought-provoking. The book is also funny; Ridgway has a sharp ear for inane claims of PR people, a good eye for small social embarrassments, and he gets in some wonderful digs at performance art and at the conventions of fantasy fiction. Even the end of what is a terribly unsettling story of a disoriented descent is very blackly humourous. And that ending slips in neatly with what's gone before, as do all the snippets of clues throughout.

Different kettle of fish to Hawthorn & Child, obviously, and though Hawthorn was good I'm more likely to re-read this one.