But Unlikely Animals is a broader, brassier, and even more fiercely tender story. It was tragicomic and told in a simple voice that belied its emotional complexity and brio. It bears some similarity to Hartnett’s much loved first novel, Rabbit Cake, which centered on another family in crisis, and also featured lots of animals. At the center of this big-hearted face-licker of a novel is a careful study of how we evolve through the act of caretaking.
What’s special about Hartnett’s chorus of the dead, though, is that they stress the tension between overlapping realities.
The first-person plural as a narrative device affords moments of lyrical wandering that telescope perspective and time, so that tangents and quirks, the past and the present, all fold into the central action of the story. Although the novel moves at a brisk pace, its characters carefully and lovingly drawn, its developments surprising and credible, it has the feel at times of a gossip session. It’s the chorus of Everton’s dead that narrate the novel, and their affection for the town and its residents is what softens the stark, brutal reality of the fractured community.
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