A review by octavia_cade
Night of the Animals by Bill Broun

adventurous dark emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

This is sprawling and mythological and bizarre and I want my own copy. A really fantastic mix of scifi and fantasy, set in a future dystopian London - a future dystopian world - where all animals are being exterminated thanks to a religious cult, and social control and disenfranchisement are rife. Enter the protagonist, a filthy, intermittently sane and entirely drug-addled nonagenarian who can talk to animals and thinks his long-dead brother, who drowned as a young child, is a saint of the otters. Cuthbert, in his attempt to free the remaining creatures of London Zoo, is almost and sometimes a saint himself, and is far more often someone you might avoid when walking down the street. He talks to sand cats and is befuddled by penguins and is utterly obsessed with otters, which he thinks are the ultimate representation of the land.

Cuthbert is frankly crackers, the poor old sod. He's also not entirely wrong, and as the animals work on him and through him a sort of green magic returns to England. I read in the back acknowledgements that this book took fourteen years to write - it's Broun's first - and I think it was worth every one of them. It's extraordinary. Very human, too, and hopeful amidst disaster. I love it.