Review: Here Be Leviathans by Chris Flynn

Chris Flynn’s previous novel Mammoth inhabited the voice of a woolly mammoth, or rather his skeleton, as it awaited auction in a storeroom in New York. In this collection of nine short stories Flynn considerably expands the vocal gymnastics to encompass not just animals — a bear, a genetically modified platypus, a sabretooth tiger and a Rhesus macaque — but objects too: a seat on an airplane, a luxury yacht, a hotel room, and, in one story, a river, a bushfire and a rifle. Part of the fun of these stories is the puzzle of being dropped into someone or something else’s mind — where am I? When? Who? — and in Flynn’s imagination the answers to these questions are potentially limitless. To deal with such a menagerie of narrators Flynn concocts a cacophony of voices, from Ocker Australian (the platypus) to a kind of pidgin (a fox in Shot Down In Flames) to torrents of unpunctuated vernacular (the rifle in the same story).

But the invention only begins with the narrators. So the bear in Inheritance learns he takes on the memories of his prey; the sabretooth in the title story is the first of his kind released as part of a rewilding experiment/Westworld-style theme park where rich folks come to slum it in the Pleistocene; and the yacht is shepherding its passengers through the fjords of Tierra Del Fuego while a virulent virus ends civilisation onshore like The Last Of Us meets Triangle Of Sadness, the virus’s royal We intruding into the ship’s narrative. I can’t quite describe what Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is about, but it involves a horny smurfette who seems have had her genitals removed by aliens and is seeking shelter with a Banksy-style graffiti artist in seemingly post-apocalyptic Las Vegas. (If you don’t get it the first time, Flynn has supplied ten pages of rather endearing explanatory notes at the back of the collection).

Actually many these stories are rather horny. Room 719 in A Beautiful Unexpected Turn is as voyeuristic as Gerald Foos, except the room doesn’t seem to need the bizarre passages and viewing windows that Talese’s voyeur installed (the story builds to climax involving a foursome). The rifle in Shot Down In Flames is as eager as a pornified virgin to kill its first human. “Slide one into the barrel that’s it ooh that feels good,” it coos as it receives a bullet. Amid the horror of a virus that causes advanced Alzheimer’s within hours, The Strait Of Magellan centres on a gag about people needing to be anally examined.

All of which is to say that these stories are really about being human, “all blind and pink and fucking useless” as the platypus complains, if not always successfully so. But when they are, they conjure the same kind of wistful yearning that Flynn achieved in Mammoth. I was struck by seat 22F, lying in the forest as “the moss advanced”, or the macaque leaving the Earth’s atmosphere “a slow, beautiful fade to black. Like the jacket of Manet’s Dead Toreador. Like closing your eyes in the forest. Like death.” The story of Girl helping Boy escape his abusive father in Shot Down In Flames, and Hector and Diane’s marriage as witnessed by the hotel room they return to on their wedding anniversary, are gently poignant. When the narrative invention connects with insight into the human condition, the stories sing.

Gay rating: 3/5 for queer characters, relationships and sex throughout.