Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 20, 2021
Novels that attribute human speech and characteristics to animals are often intended to shed light on the human condition. I suppose the same might be said of Warner Brothers cartoons. In any event, the nonhuman characters in The Council of Animals judge humans from an animal perspective. The verdict is mixed.
The novel imagines that all animals can speak to each other using a common language called Grak. The animals meet in a council to decide how they should respond to an undefined event known as the Calamity. The Calamity destroyed the ecosystem. Some forests turned to plastic. All creatures suffered, but the outcome was disastrous for humans, few of whom are still alive.
In theory, the council consists of one representative of each species in the Animal Kingdom. In practice, only a few representatives attend the meeting. Too much political representation, after all, is unwieldy. The job of attendees is to decide the fate of the remaining humans. Some animals favor eating them. Others would let them live. In a Shakespearean moment, a bear cradles a skull and thinks: “Humanity or not? I voted for them before. But whether they are worth the struggle, or only chew toys? Better to take my diurnal death, and hibernate, and perhaps dream of honey.”
The story of the council meeting and its aftermath is told by an historian. “History is a dark tale that doesn’t wag,” the historian tells us. The council meeting is attended by a horse, a bear, a baboon, a dog, a cat, and a crow. The dog once accompanied a human General in a war against people who, for reasons the dog cannot comprehend, forbade bacon. The dog generally likes humans, as dogs do, but is easily distracted by thrown sticks. The cat also favors humans but, as cats do, has its own agenda. According to the cat, “It is better to accept what cannot be changed, and pee on it.” The baboon doesn’t like humans at all and is rather Machiavellian in his manipulation of the horse. The crow is lost in his eccentric religion; nothing much matters to the bird except the Great Egg.
Eventually a few of the animals decide to make contact with the surviving humans, having heard a rumor that one of them speaks grak. They meet a boy who overcomes his misery by reading. The historian tells us that the boy loses himself in books that convey “not only the pain of life but some of its joy, some of our pleasures, whether sleeping in the sunshine, hearing the final notes of a blue sheep aria, or knowing, for a little while, the mind of another animal.” The story follows the group’s progress and eventually leads to a confrontation, followed by an amusing resolution.
Nick McDonell uses birds to satirize religion. He employs the entire Animal Kingdom to suggest that humans are not the only species to experience prejudice. Insects and rodents are rather put off by the failure of other animals to give them respect. A scorpion complains that mammals are no better than insects but will never be fair. A baboon complains that baboons “are not a monolith. Species does not determine what an animal thinks.”
Another similarity between animals and humans is the propensity of some (but not all) toward violence and authoritarianism. “We evolved to eat each other,” laments the historian. Leaders arouse the violent tendencies of their followers to cement their power. The historian wonders why we are “continually surprised by the rapacity, violence, and arrogance of those creatures who ascent to leadership.”
The novel leads to an ending that might be described as cute, perhaps because there were few possible endings to the story that a reader might be willing to accept. The Council of Animals doesn’t have the political significance of Animal Farm or the world-building complexity of Watership Down, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is — a quirky allegorical story that uses animals to remind humans of our foibles. In that regard, it resembles last year’s Talking Animals, another book about anthropomorphic animals that won my admiration.
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