Animals at Night by Naomi Booth
Reviewed by Cath Barton
‘How will I fill the hours tonight if sleep won’t come?’
The soundtrack to Animals at Night, Naomi Booth’s new collection of short stories, comes from the wild creatures active at night — the coughing of foxes, scratching of rats, alien noises of pheasants. There is also something in the mix here that comes from the animal nature of people themselves, sensations that are amplified in the deep darkness of the night hours. In ‘Cluster’, a baby feeds repeatedly and inexhaustibly, so that for her mother the night becomes ‘a dark blur of milk and skin and adrenaline’, while in ‘Tell me what you like’, a woman feels ‘most animal’ as she drives alone through the landscape at night. Booth highlights the ways in which human action mirrors that of animals. For example, in ‘Forever chemicals’ Sylvie describes a first intimacy: ‘His hot mouth mollusced around my cold skin.’
Birth and death, the only certainties for human beings as for other animals, are themes that run through this collection, though no wild creature digs a grave for its mother as the narrator of ‘Strangers’ does after she has taken her mother’s corpse on one last less-than-rollicking road trip. Nor is it likely that animals feel the nuances of emotion conveyed in that story, although they accompany the woman’s digging with ‘warbled lamentations’.
What truly unites the stories in this collection is a feeling of edginess, a sense of people dealing with significant issues in their lives. In ‘Cluster’, a second person narration emphasises the new mother’s anxieties, her feeling that she is ‘culpable’ for ‘conjuring something into being’ and her craving for care from her own mother, something beautifully evoked at the end of the story. In the majority of the other stories, the narration is in the first person, keeping the reader in the thick of the action, whether in tackling a rat infestation as in ‘Clean work’, or the passage of a holiday that comes to a shockingly abrupt end in ‘The mouth of vaunt’.
Even those stories which are told from the more distant standpoint of third person achieve a strung-out tension as they lead the reader to each tale’s conclusion. In the title story this is done literally step by step as the two couples take an ill-fated walk onto a main road, a journey taken again at night by one of the women, searching by the light of her phone for a mortally-wounded animal.
Booth’s stories are most powerful when told at a length which allows the gradual revelation of what is happening. This is so in the stories bookending the collection, ‘Strangers’ and ‘Sour Hall’. In the former, the reader is witness to the narrator’s growing awareness that ‘Everyone I loved was becoming a stranger’, only to experience the kindness of a stranger as she nears the end of her journey. In ‘Sour Hall’, as the months pass on a remote farm and the pregnant cow Vera approaches her confinement, Ash’s own terror grows palpably and, at the end, becomes manifest. Both are particularly memorable stories.
Contemporary events are threaded through the stories: the experience of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, fears of illness and environmental degradation. Booth is needle-sharp in highlighting the nub of things, as in Sylvie’s observation in ‘Forever Chemicals’: ‘I didn’t know, back then, that some things accumulate in the body forever: first love and polyfluoroalkyl substances.’
Booth addresses complex issues in her stories without resorting to over-simplification. In ‘The chrysalides’, a story set in lockdown, Nia receives a gift of caterpillars. She watches them transform and in due course emerge from their chrysalides and transform into butterflies. Her mother finds it impossible to explain the nature and meaning of life to Nia, just wishes that she could tell her that the only thing we know for sure will not happen to her.
Leavening the mix somewhat is ‘Transcendent inadequacies’, a story about a piano teacher’s cruelty and eventual nemesis at the hands of his young pupils. Similarly ‘Lovebirds’, an amusing short anecdote about an escapee parrot. There are, in Animals at Night, a couple of other shorter pieces which perhaps feel more like ideas in need of development than complete stories, but overall this is an exceptional collection in the strong and distinctive voice already heard in Booth’s previous novels Sealed and Exit Management.