Laura Jean McKay on writing influenza

by |April 21, 2020
The Animals In that Country - Laura Jean McKay

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country and Holiday in Cambodia, shortlisted for three national book awards in Australia. Her work appears in Meanjin, Overland, Best Australian Stories, The Saturday Paper, and The North American Review. Laura is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne focusing on literary animal studies. She is the ‘animal expert’ presenter on ABC Listen’s Animal Sound Safari.

Here at Booktopia, we’re absolutely mad about this book, so today we invited Laura onto the blog to talk about the strangeness of releasing a novel about influenza during a global pandemic. Read on!


Laura Jean McKay

Laura Jean McKay

Zoanthropathy (from Greek: zó̱o, “animal”, anthroponis, “human”, pathy, “disorder”), commonly known as “zooflu” is an H7N7 subtype of influenza A virus, a genus of orthomyxovirus, the viruses responsible for influenza. It is spread through saliva.

It was 2013 and I was bedridden from a mosquito bite that sent me into a feverish delirium. The illness was extreme with an angry rash, skin peeling and achy-breaky bones, but ‘chikungunya’ wasn’t that common in the West and only had the sparest entry on Wikipedia. I was working on a novel about human and other animal communication and, as I grew sicker, so did the novel. The characters developed flu symptoms and I, searching for answers, gave them the web entries that I wished for.

The strain known as zoanthropathy affects cognition in humans, and it is believed that enhanced communication between humans and nonhuman animals is possible. Zoanthropathy is hosted and spread by humans.

As I wrote, other novels were published about how humans and nonhumans might ‘talk’ to each other. Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth (2013), Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014) and Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light (2014) shone lights along the pathways between species. I knew I wanted to write that too. Hard to work, though, when my fingers felt like they were breaking. I couldn’t fight the illness, I was the illness, so I just lay down and went with it.

While I was bedridden at home, my zooflu-infected characters surged into action. In the novel, the usual flu symptoms passed – a fever, a runny nose, delirium, conjunctivitis – and the characters found they were able to understand what other animals were saying with their bodies. Instead of isolating, the protagonists Grandma Jean and Dingo Sue took to the roads in a move that would see them severely fined in a real pandemic. Characters wore face masks and protection, not to stop the infection – it was too late for that – but to block out the messages sleuthing from animal bodies and forming meanings that humans almost couldn’t bear.

The disease is very high in morbidity and very low in mortality. Infected humans appear able to communicate (encode) and translate (decode) previously unrecognisable non-verbal communications via major senses such as sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound with nonhuman animals. Zooflu is also referred to as “talking animal disease”.

The Animals in That Country was published in April 2020 right into the COVID-19 pandemic. There are many sharp correlations between zooflu and coronavirus – the panic, the government ineptitude, the radically changed world – but my zooflu seems bright eyed and bushy-tailed compared to the plague that is currently ravaging the world. The key symptom of zooflu is that bird and insect bodies shout things that we can understand as they ping through the air. Nothing like that has happened in the real pandemic. Along with everyone else, I now hide inside behind the desk where I finished writing those scenes, and read the news with horror as the infection rates of coronavirus reach the millions and the death toll grows day by day. The Animals in That Country is a novel that features a strange new flu, but it’s mostly about connection – especially between species – and how we might find it in the strangest of times.

–Laura Jean McKay

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay (Scribe Publications) is out now.

The Animals in That Countryby Laura Jean McKay

The Animals in That Country

by Laura Jean McKay

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She's never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu - its chief symptom is that its...

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