Talking Animals

A Novel

By: Joni Murphy

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

"Joni Murphy’s inventive and beautiful allegory depicts a city enmeshed in climate collapse, blinded to the signs of its imminent destruction by petty hatreds and monstrous greed: that is, the world we are living in now. Talking Animals is an Orwellian tale of totalitarianism in action, but the animals on this farm are much cuter, and they make better puns." - Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker

A fable for our times, Joni Murphy’s Talking Animals takes place in an all-animal world where creatures rather like us are forced to deal with an all-too-familiar landscape of soul-crushing jobs, polluted oceans, and a creeping sense of doom.

It’s New York City, nowish. Lemurs brew espresso. Birds tend bar. There are bears on Wall Street, and a billionaire racehorse is mayor. Sea creatures are viewed with fear and disgust and there’s chatter about building a wall to keep them out.

Alfonzo is a moody alpaca. His friend Mitchell is a sociable llama. They both work at City Hall, but their true passions are noise music and underground politics. Partly to meet girls, partly because the world might be ending, these lowly bureaucrats embark on an unlikely mission to expose the corrupt system that’s destroying the city from within. Their project takes them from the city’s bowels to its extremities, where they encounter the Sea Equality Revolutionary Front, who are either a group of dangerous radicals or an inspiring liberation movement.

In this novel, at last, nature kvetches and grieves, while talking animals offer us a kind of solace in the guise of dumb jokes. This is mass extinction as told by BoJack Horseman. This is The Fantastic Mr. Fox journeying through Kafka's Amerika. This is dogs and cats, living together. Talking Animals is an urgent allegory about friendship, art, and the elemental struggle to change one’s life under the low ceiling of capitalism.

©2020 Joni Murphy (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “In the Dark Times,” originally published in German in 1939 as “Motto: In den finsteren Zeiten,” translated by Tom Kuhn. © 1976, 1961 by Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag, from Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Critic reviews

"[Edoardo] Ballerini does a fantastic job setting the right tone of sincerity and seriousness while also portraying the main character, Alfonzo, a lovable, irascible alpaca who is just trying to get his dissertation done and move on with his life. This is a fantastic story and a masterful performance."
—AudioFile Magazine

"Come for the cover, which depicts a thoughtful alpaca, and stay for the tale of intrigue, climate change, and metropolitan doom - all in a world without humans. Sounds nice right now!"
―Vulture, "29 Books We Can't Wait to Read This Summer" 2020

"A 21st-century combination of Animal Farm and Aesop's Fables . . . Murphy packs a lot of issues - class, climate change immigration, vegetarianism, and more - into a familiar plot about malfeasance. She balances her poetic ruminations and dogmatic lecturing with a goofy relish for puns . . . Weird yet engrossing and hard to forget."
―Kirkus (starred)

Feels graspy

This book was recommended to me/presented as a modern Animal Farm. Orwell's Animal Farm was simple and allegorial to past and current political issues, highlighting where the people and community give away their agency. As a reader seeing the animals do stupid things, I would have visceral reactions of disbelief, like, "No don't do that!" and then marvel seeing the parallel in today's world. Orwell took two seemingly unrelated stories (one fiction one nonfiction) that overlapped and that told the same story in a simple and relatable way.

In contrast, Talking Animals felt like it was grasping to convey a sense of what is going on in the world. Reading it did not feel natural, it felt forced like the characters and theme were made up to fit into today's global problems. The whole storyline is essentially about Alfonso waking up to the reality of global warming, immigration, racism, bureaucracy, and corrupt politics. But the way he wakes up is so incredibly boring and predictable that I had to force myself to finish the book. The worst part is, there was no reconciliation or solution, just a drifting sense of "Well now what."

There were two highlights of the book for me:
The first one is when he's at a party and he's trying to make sense of the bigger picture. And everybody's enjoying themselves and he's overthinking everything and one of the guests says to him, "Just enjoy yourself." For me that clicked because I tend to overthink a lot and not be in the present moment. So that was a good reminder and gave me a bit of a chuckle.

The other highlight was chapter 30, which is a message from the Ocean about how things are falling apart. That whole chapter and message was beautiful, moving, and heartfelt, and well written. I could finally feel emotion and a sense of connectedness and compassion to the whole (both in the book's story and how it relates to real life).

The rest of the book was just a meandering story. The fact that they were animals and not just people did not add anything special to the book, in fact I found a distracting.