Writing Animals by Timothy C. Baker

Author:Timothy C. Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030038809
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Open Narratives: Evie Wyld and Yannick Murphy

Both All the Birds, Singing and The Call open with a vivid description of animal death, divorced from any context. Wyld’s novel begins with ‘[a]nother sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding’.31 The combination of domestic simile and graphic violence immediately disorients the reader, while the following sentences, mentioning the singing of crows and the first-person narrator shoving her boot in a dog’s face, to prevent him from eating the sheep’s entrails, similarly fail to elucidate the scene. The violence is not only shocking but also quotidian; the reader is immediately thrust into a world underpinned by death. The Call has a similarly abrupt opening, introducing the reader to its list-based structure with a moment of death: CALL: A cow with her dead calf half-born.

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