FICTION
New Animal
Ella Baxter
Allen & Unwin, $29.99

Ella Baxter’s debut novel is drenched in sex and death. The aftermath of both is similar after all, muses Amelia Aurelia, her 28-year-old, first-person narrator. There are “patches of fluids, excess hair and dry skin”. Amelia works in the family funeral parlour as a cosmetician for the embalmed bodies. She loves and is excellent at her job, and the whole process of preparing the departed for their final viewing before burial or cremation is dealt with the utmost care and respect.

But life, as Judy the mortuary reception opines, is either boring or shocking. And Amelia’s about to be unceremoniously jolted into the latter category. She’s all too familiar with dispensing consolatory comments to the bereaved and has never been personally affected but the sudden death of a family member upends her world. Impulsively, she runs off to Tasmania, to hide away with her semi-estranged biological father in his ramshackle property.

Being sensitive and an over-thinker, she obsessively uses strangers she finds online to move her out of her head and into her body, to fill her up “with physical feeling to the point where emotions and thoughts were wrung out”. Sex is distraction and anaesthesia. The men are discarded like used tissues afterwards. There is never any emotional connection.

In Hobart, one of her random matches leads her to a BDSM event, where there are such things as a slave zone and a punishment post. Being flayed on stage with a bullwhip by a self-professed sadist piques her curiosity to try to explore the kink world more thoroughly and the novel tracks Amelia’s movements into this territory of pleasure, pain, consent, and permeable boundaries at the same time as it follows her inchoate, unprocessed grief at losing a loved one.

The title is a nod to that Shakespeare line about sex as a beast with two backs. On most nights back at home Amelia tried to make a new animal, “to become this two-headed thing with flailing limbs, chomping teeth and tangled hair”. She wants to feel like someone else entirely, and experimenting in the sadomasochistic arena takes her to the upper levels of dissociation from herself. Alas, it becomes clear that these transactional activities don’t offer her much long-lasting joy nor satisfaction.

Readers beware, there are suicide mentions that may be triggering and various scenes that may arouse discomfort, disgust or nervous tittering, but there’s no judgement or moral censure by Baxter of the various proclivities of participants of the BDSM scene.

Sex aside, there’s also much love in New Animal. The book is an unabashed celebration of non-nuclear families. The “new” in the title can also refer to different configurations and permutations of relationships that are just accepted without raised eyebrows by anyone. Amelia’s brother Simon, is in a “throuple”, an ongoing love affair with two others, Hugh and Carmen. Amelia accepts both her birth and her stepfather, and Judy is like a second mother to her.