How I Wrote ‘Animal Welfare’
Story seed
Originally this story was called ‘Modern Heretic’, then as it developed, ‘Obituary for the Heretic’. It began with the very first line, which popped into my head as I finished another short story about a woman whose boyfriend died during an Everest attempt. His body remains there preserved in ice and she believes this is where he’d want to be. This story made me think, I definitely can’t say any of this, the internet will scream at me. The next thought, as it always is when I feel shouted at by hypothetical people, was: How can I explore this further? The second I opened the way for curiosity the first lines of this new story appeared as I wondered, What would make someone a heretic in a modern sense?
Chance
A few months earlier I’d read Pan by Knut Hamsun after picking up the 1974 edition from someone’s garden wall during a lockdown walk. The main character is at home in nature yet awkward with people. I sympathised with this feeling if not his actions. I still have this book standing up on my desk because I love the cover. Sitting at my desk doodling with the heretic, the name Knut attached itself to what I knew was going to be my favourite kind of character: an awkward bod, always saying the wrong things but unable to stop. Plenty of scope for mischief on my part.
Context
Another component was already in place and now hooked onto Knut because of the Scandinavian connection: the Cod Wars over fishing rights fought between the UK and Iceland from the 1950s to 1970s. When I heard about this, possibly in an article about Brexit negotiations, I thought the name such a glorious example of human absurdity I knew I’d be able to do something comic and disturbing with it.
Character
Over the next few days Knut wrote pages of petty rants about the zealous idiots who worshipped him for his incoherent views. Occasionally, in moments of self-loathing, he was able to admit that he also needed these people. Knut was so self-entitled and insistent in his grievances that it was a while before the characters of Free and Anemone could emerge. They arrived when I asked myself: What sort of direct opposition could the petulant and ineffective character of Knut have? I was a management consultant for ten years and thus remain deeply suspicious of myself, so it wasn’t difficult to construct Free and Anemone’s secret plan. What might these misfit opportunists do in the context of the privileged layabouts at the farmhouse?
Collaboration
The pig farm is a location I borrowed from a friend but the parallels with Animal Farm by George Orwell only surfaced as I was finishing the story and noticed the opportunity. In fact I’d written the very last lines from Knut long before I realised how they subverted Animal Farm. Of course I felt very clever at this stage though not clever enough to have done it on purpose. It was another reminder that, in the words of the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barrett in How Emotions are Made: “Your mind is a grand collaboration that you have no awareness of.”