MILES ALLINSON - FEVER OF ANIMALS
Book Review
Fiction
Scribe, 2015 259pp
‘I often recall that plane trip home. It comes at me out of the blue some days. I was twenty-seven years old, and I was no longer an artist, although I could not recall ever wanting to be something else.’
Fever of Animals, Miles Allinson’s award winning debut novel, begins this way, halfway through itself and with Miles, its protagonist, halfway home to see his father who has suddenly begun to die. That return flight to Melbourne, although only occasionally revisited, is the mad axle around which the rest of this impressive first novel turns, at first in steady circles and then to the lunatic-polka of a snake eating its own tail.
At one extreme there is Miles, the young and impressionable artist, in London, very quickly falling in and then out of love with his girlfriend Alice; at the other, Miles again, older but still in Europe, ‘in K., now, this gloomy little German town,’ alone and in the middle of a pretty humdrum search for the disappeared Romanian surrealist painter, Emil Bafdescu.
Allinson is a consciously literary writer and Fever of Animals a referential, anecdotal and digressive book, with frequent displays of a satisfying (though perhaps not entirely meaningful) erudition. This isn’t to endorse the book, or to mark it out as having a set of pretensions; it’s simply to point out that there’s an evident concern in Allinson’s writing for the interconnectedness of all artistic work, its indebtedness, its place in the library or the bookstore. This concern is mirrored in the book at a narrative level as its protagonist, in equal measure archivist and sleuth, tries vainly to place the elusive Bafdescu in his canon, in history, and in his friendships – particularly with the Romanian theorist and poet, Gherasim Luca – all of which tend in hindsight to be erratic and short-lived.
Allinson himself has been a bookseller at the Readings store in St Kilda, Melbourne, for years, and the neater part of me sees this tendency in his writing as following naturally from his biography. But it’s also there in the most obvious of his influences – Ben Lerner, Gerald Murnane, WG Sebald and Roberto Bolaño – all of whose books he has reviewed, or criticised, at one point or another.
The most visible of these influences are probably Sebald and Bolaño. Allinson described Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as the type of book that ‘take[s] hold of you in such a way as to direct the angle of your life for a while’ and the same peripatetic melancholy is there in Fever of Animals. Of Bolaño, at least from time to time, one recognises a lurid, hallucinatory quality to the writing, the bibliomania, the taste for obscure artists, the uncertain boundary between fiction and biography, and the use of investigation as structuring device to tie down an otherwise amorphous and tangential novel. In the end, one of the most impressive of the novel’s many conceits is that Allinson allows these influences to filter through without plagiarising any one of them, or resorting to pastiche.
It’s early on, ‘as the first round of drinks was being served at last,’ that Miles first learns of the death of Marie Smith Jones, the last surviving speaker of the Eyak language of Southcentral Alaska. In Eyak her name had meant ‘a sound that calls people from afar.’ The metaphor has twin resonances for Miles. On the one hand this is the call of the past, real or invented, the call of nostalgia or melancholy that leads the older Miles to reflect upon himself as a younger man. On the other, this is the sound of the unabashedly invented future that captivates the young aspirant of Miles’ reflections, calls him forward into it; the sound of optimism, youth and youthful promise.
In the end both of these perspectives leave the reader cold. This isn’t because either is unsatisfying, or underdeveloped, but because in its portrait of Miles the book doesn’t offer much more than these two empty halves. Despite the ruminative self-focus, Miles is a Paschal egg: the younger version always looking forward, away from himself; the older version looking away, looking back.
It’s in this way, I think, that many of the book’s early reviewers have taken it to be a book about grieving. James Tierney, writing for Kill Your Darlings, described it as a novel about the “…inescapable self-involvement of sorrow.” To a point I agree with this. But where Tierney and others see Miles’ isolation, even vanity, as part-and-parcel of his grief for his father, or his abortive relationship with his girlfriend, I wonder whether these might be placeholders for something else. That is, the realisation that the optimism of his early artistic endeavours has left him, that it was shallow and unsustainable, that it cannot be regained.
In one of the novel’s gloomier passages, Miles asks:
“What happens, in other words, when the dream is over, when the force of ordinary life, ‘the banal consensus’, as Bafdescu once called it, wins out? History ran over the top of surrealism. How, after risking their lives for this revolution, did artists respond to a world without surrealism? And the answer is, in many cases: they killed themselves.”
This is why, ultimately, I think the reader is meant to find Mile’s search for Bafdescu unconvincing. Miles isn’t looking for anything, really, except desire, interest or curiosity – the very things that should, but clearly don’t, motivate his investigations. If this is a novel about grief it’s about wanting but not knowing how to grieve. He was a young man so caught up in his own future (and, later, so caught up in reclaiming it) that he lost the opportunity to truly lose his father and his girlfriend; when he did, he didn’t care. Despite the pervading sentimentality of the book, the only time Miles expresses unadulterated emotion is as he taxis away from Heathrow – that spectacularly embodied feeling one has lurching down the runway to take-off.
Miles Allinson with a review of his own, Readings, St Kilda 2015. Photo credit: Patrick Coleridge.
Patrick Coleridge writes and reviews. He lives in Darwin where he works as a criminal defence lawyer at the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA).
