Picture digitally altered: Judy Green.

Animal crackers a satirical reality

SOMETIMES novelists punctuate their careers with an occasional book of stories. Often enough, these stories feel like a visit to the novelist’s kitchen. Here you might see a half-baked idea, the raw ingredients for a plot, a character that hasn’t come out right, something the writer tried before. Such collections can make frustrating reading because they do justice neither to the real craft of story-writing nor to the ability of a novelist who, typically, needs a big canvas.

Happily, none of this applies to Anson Cameron’s new book, Pepsi Bears. Cameron has written five novels and an earlier collection of stories, all of them shaped by an eagle-eyed wit that enjoys the very human pretensions it so deftly undermines. But Pepsi Bears feels nothing like a break between longer works. These 13 very funny stories stand together to form a satisfying whole.

Each of them features animals that are able to outfox the humans with whom they have the misfortune to share their planet. The animals in this book have the knack of making people look ridiculous, sometimes in gentle ways and sometimes with more punishing humour. The book is subtitled: ”In which the nature of mankind is cruelly illuminated by various beasts.” In music, they used to call this kind of thing a concept album.

Pepsi Bears and other stories by Anson Cameron.

The title story concerns a marketing student who lands a job in advertising at Mansey Brothers AdInfinitum, where he pinches an idea from his own half-finished novel and has the Pepsi logo painted on the 3000 remaining polar bears. As a result, the bears lose their camouflage and head south in search of food, now only able to camouflage themselves against billboards. Eventually, one bear kills a kid at a hockey game and both Pepsi and Tommy John have a PR disaster on their hands. Tommy John saves himself by inventing an extinct creature called the Eurobeaver that, in turn, manages to become transformed into an alternative public enemy and so takes the heat off Tommy. The story is a cunning satire on the nature of manufactured reality.

Cameron isn’t much interested in the layers of youthful angst that might lurk beneath the plastic surface of the likes of Tommy John, a figure whose real world extends no further than the boundaries of his own ego. On the contrary, he openly mocks narrow-minded opportunism. There is a measure of Jonathan Swift in these stories: they take familiar pretensions and reduce them to the absurd. A famously superior early reader of Gulliver’s Travels is said to have pronounced judgment that she didn’t believe a word of it. Likewise, some of these stories are scarcely believable. But their moral agenda is instantly recognisable. They challenge many of our most selfish cultural assumptions. Like Swift, they fight bulldust with bulldust.

There is much fun to be had in the process. Take the story Song of the Lyrebird, the outlines of which bring to mind the kerfuffle a few years ago over the similarity between the tunes of Down Under and Kookaburra. In Cameron’s story, Maureen, the ageing composer of Ulladulla Lullaby, is taken for a ride by a young mogul who sees a great opportunity to make the world dance to his tune. Cameron’s account of Maureen’s revenge is delicious.

Some stories are more mellow. One example is A Zebra in No Man’s Land in which a zebra called Nyx is donated to Australian geologists in 1914 by the governor of Uganda. Nyx ends up pulling a puppet theatre in rural Victoria. She gets a coat of brown paint and is sold on to the Australian army, seeing service in horrific conditions near Ypres.

There is a fine scene in which Nyx loses her paint and is revealed as what she really is. The entire Western Front is brought to a standstill by this: the innocence of a zebra and the incongruity of finding one on a battlefield reduces soldiers to tears.

Nyx is, ironically, the most humane thing for miles. Two armies are caught off guard by the absurdity of finding a zebra in their midst. They are unable, of course, to see that their own situation is far more absurd.

The absurdity of so much of what we accept as commonplace is the theme of this entire collection and it takes a satirist as fine as Cameron to feed human arrogance with humble pie. Time and again, he shows that a short story may well be a tall story. But that is far from making it a small story.

?Michael McGirr is the head of faith and mission at St Kevin’s College. His most recent book, The Lost Art of Sleep, is published by Picador.