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Dog's Eye View: Sophie Cunningham talks to Eva Hornung

March 22

Eva Hornung won the Australian/Vogel Award for her first novel (under the name Eva Sallis), Hiam, in 1997. She has worked extensively on human rights issues, particularly with the group she helped found, Australians against Racism. Other novels published under the name Sallis are The City of Sea Lions, Fire Fire, Mahjar and The Marsh Birds (which also won several major awards). In the December issue of Meanjin, Sophie Cunningham spoke to her about her latest novel, Dog Boy, which was published in early 2009. A brief extract is below and you can read the full interview on the editions page.



Sophie Cunningham: You used to write under the name Eva Sallis and now you write as Eva Hornung. Have you found that writing under a different name has affected the book at all?

Eva Hornung: It probably hasn’t affected the book at all, but it attracts media attention. It was a painful decision to make, and I found media have been quite impertinent. Sometimes I just say, ‘My marriage ended,’ and sensible people say, ‘I’m sorry for asking,’ and that’s fine.

Sophie: What else did they think the answer was going to be?

Eva: Well, people have asked me, was it a promotion strategy?

Sophie: If anything I would have thought it would be an anti-promotion strategy!

Eva: Yes. If you build up your career under a name and you’re known by that name, suddenly ditching that name is not a good thing, especially if you’re still doing literary fiction. I’ve got very mixed feelings about it. I’ve left my Eva Sallis website up as a memento to that time, those books. Most of them are still in print.

Sophie: Are you going to try to get your backlist into ‘Hornung’ or just keep it as Eva Sallis?

Eva: Anything that comes out from now on, I’m Eva Hornung. I’ve always been Eva Hornung. Apparently legally you’re always what you were born, so Eva Sallis was just a 26-year dream. A good one.

Sophie: There’s an interest in disenfranchisement in all your work.

Eva: Yes, same book six times.

Sophie: Dog Boy reads to me differently from the others, but afterwards I could hear the echoes.

Eva: There are unifying concerns: longing and boundaries and exile; the interplay between dehumanisation and the definitions we impose on others. That’s always interested me. If another big book would bite—I wish it would—it would probably be the same book again.

Sophie: I thought Dog Boy was one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read. I liked how the dogs were characters, how you entered the animal world. Could you tell us a bit about where the idea came from? I know that you read a newspaper article about a boy but is that where the idea came from, or have you been thinking about writing a book about animals for longer than that?

Eva: I never actually expected to write this book, so that newspaper story really was the catalyst. But in hindsight, it had a long germination. I’ve been writing very slowly a collection of short stories called ‘The Sad Book of Animals’, and quite a few of those are attempts to explore the limits of my own imagination or the limits of human imagination and see how hard or easy it is to persuade a reader that they’ve really inhabited the consciousness of a creature that’s other than human.

Sophie: What animals are you writing about in that collection?

Eva: I’ve got a story called ‘Abattoir’ from the point of view of a cow, and I’ve got a story called ‘Life Sentence’ from the point of view of a cockatoo, and a sort of funny sad story from the point of view of a dog called ‘Dog’s Breath’, and then a few more satiric ones about the human relationship with the environment.

Sophie: And is that collection going to be published?

Eva: Well, as I said, I’ve been writing it very slowly. I think I’ve only got six stories. I’ve published most of those stories at one point or other. But yes ultimately I would hope to finish it. It’s certainly something I’m mulling over again now.

Sophie: Have you owned or had relationships with all of those different types of animals? Does research get you where you need to go or is it actually just about observing the animals?

Eva: I have known cows and cockatoos. Plenty of dogs. In the case of Dog Boy, I did very little research on dogs. I did some research on feral dog packs and the way they are self-regulated, mainly to confirm that my instincts were right about how I portrayed my pack. I didn’t expect to know as much as I found I knew. I’ve always had dogs and really every dog I’ve ever known came forward and said ‘I’m part of this’. I’ve only ever owned two dogs at once and I’ve only ever taken care of three at once, but every memory of dogs really surfaced for this.

Sophie: So you’ve had dogs since you were a child?

Eva: Yes, and I think I have always observed them closely. Dog body language is familiar to me. You know how you people-watch—I think all writers people-watch—I have always dog-watched as well: all the nuances of how dogs interact and the amusing things you see dogs do. There’s just an archive there.

Sophie: You don’t anthropomorphise the dogs in Dog Boy at all.

Eva: No, it was very important not to. I think there is one scene that’s borderline but I really needed it and I honed it and I worked on it to make sure it was at least possible for a dog.

Sophie: What scene was that?

Eva: Where Mamochka [the dog that adopts Dog Boy] brings home a second child, and her motivations for bringing home the second child are clear to the reader.

Sophie: That she wants to mother?

Eva: Well, she also wants her first human child to quit wandering in the human world; if it’s humans he needs, she’ll provide a human. And she wants to curtail his adventures into the world beyond which she can effectively influence or protect him. She has a crush on humans but a lot of dogs do. Even dogs that have gone feral for one reason or another.

Incidentally, in Moscow you can tell which ones are perfectly happily adapted to looking after themselves, and those that are really dependent on human beings for their survival. Mamochka is a dog that has formed a feral pack but is nonetheless replete with a whole wealth of memories that involve human beings, and that significantly modifies both her relationship with human beings and her behaviours.


 

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