Fever of Animals (Miles Allinson, Scribe)

The protagonist of Fever of Animals is Miles, a young Australian artist and writer who is chain-smoking his way across Europe, seeking to uncover the fate of an obscure Romanian surrealist. This meandering and largely ineffectual journey is interspersed with recollections of Miles’ relationship and break-up with his girlfriend Alice some years ago, in a series of vignettes that traverse Melbourne, South America, London and Venice. As this fever-dream of a novel veers between the quotidian and the nightmarish, it asks vital and difficult questions about the role of art, politics, madness, identity and intimacy. As Roberto Bolaño often does so successfully in his novels, Allinson invents a convincing biography for his imaginary artist, Emil Bafdescu, locating him in the mid-20th century surrealism movement and establishing his path of influence on other imagined artists. Fever of Animals, which won the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, is filled with the impenetrable symbolism of half-remembered dreams, as Miles’ memories lurch back and forth and overlap. These elements sometimes echo the nihilism of Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe, but the horror of Allinson’s novel is more subterranean and restrained. It is an unsettling and deeply impressive debut.

Veronica Sullivan is the online editor of Kill Your Darlings

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Category: Reviews