Bill Broun says he’s “weirded out” when we speak just before the publication of his debut novel, Night of the Animals. It’s the day after the Brexit vote, and it’s not the standard first-time novelist jitters that have him rattled. As his publisher is happy to point out, Brexit is a turn of events foretold by his expansive dystopian novel, set in London in 2052. I am weirded out too, I tell him. The experience of reading his novel so soon after the vote felt a little unnerving.
In Night of the Animals, a British surveillance state is led by an alternate-universe Prince Harry. He has broken the electoral system, elevated the monarchy and doubled down on existing class divisions. In this nightmarish neoliberal dystopia, access to the NHS is granted according to class, and Britain’s welfare state has disappeared under the “Barenotecy Alimentation Act of 2025 and Positive Disenfranchisement Act of 2028”. People classified as “indigent” are kept away from the so-called “new aristocracy” by the Red Watch, a policing force armed with deadly “neuralpikes”. Meanwhile, the vanishing middle class has been subdued “with purchases of chocolate and lager”, as well as “jingoism, and an abiding unctuousness toward the rich”.
In case that doesn’t make it clear enough, the world Broun imagines in his extraordinary debut is plagued by social and economic inequality. The novel’s main character, Cuthbert, is an indigent, mentally ill drug addict. (The tipple of choice in Broun’s world is a hallucinogen called Flōt.) Cuthbert perambulates London from his grim little council flat to the offices of his physician Dr Bajwa, a harried, kindly man who just wants to keep Cuthbert out of the clutches of Equipoise, the NHS’s sinister “psychotherapeutic division”. As a giant comet approaches Earth during a moment of mass insecurity, suicide cults have taken hold worldwide. Cuthbert begins to hear the voices of animals in the London zoo, urging him to let them free; if Equipoise discovers his hallucinations, they will inevitably subdue Cuthbert inside a personality-killing “Nexar hood”.
This, Broun worries, may be the society of the future. “The Brexit is the kind of trigger that down the road can lead to the horror of a Night of the Animals world,” he says.
Broun calls his book a “British novel with American DNA”. He cites Zadie Smith, Ali Smith and Monica Ali as his favorite contemporary British writers, and says he wanted to work against what he sees as a “narrow-minded and London-centric” mode in British letters. His own connection to Britain is personal and complicated. His father is a retired British machinist who married an American nurse. Broun grew up in the US, but lived in London as a young man while he attended University College London. He remembers London as an exciting place, but a “a very cold” one. Although the novel is fanciful (if partly prophetic), it has its roots in Broun’s personal experiences. Broun was aware of a “dark class consciousness at a pretty young age”.
Broun’s relationship with his father is similarly complex. He says that he feels the trouble between them was connected to national differences too. His father was an emotionally distant Ameriphobe, making sure his American-living son grew up with the BBC world service, Aston Villa and giant boxes of British candy.
Ultimately, though, Broun’s father provided a lot of source material for the novel, Broun says; the author interviewed him extensively about his childhood in Worcestershire, mining his father’s memories for information about English folk ways: saints, stories and modes of speech. In addition to being a vision of our dystopian future, Night of the Animals is deeply engaged with a variety of religious traditions, but particularly with medieval English Christianity. Cuthbert’s zoological hallucinations usher in the return of his medieval namesake, the so-called “Christ of the Otters”.
Cuthbert, his main character, battles addiction and mental health issues that reflect a sort of road not taken for Broun, who became an alcoholic when he was living in London. During periods of psychic distress, Broun encountered a number of older men who, like Cuthbert, were living on the streets with serious mental illness. “They taught me a great deal about heroism in the face of grave material difficulties,” Broun says. Broun himself is in recovery, sober 25 years.
Broun’s writing career had a somewhat rocky start. For a long time he considered himself a failed writer, after a publishing deal for a book of short stories fell through. Night of the Animals was conceived from his anger over the stories’ fate. “I’m letting the animals out of the zoo,” is how Broun sums up his feelings at the time. The novel would take Broun 14 years to write.
Meanwhile, Broun married and had a son, and got a job as an associate professor at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. His students, who are mostly first-generation college students, inspire him. “It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re teaching young people who are working two jobs and trying to raise a family while going through college.”
Broun was encouraged in his writing by his literary fairy godmother, the novelist Mary Gaitskill, who he first met while studying for an master’s degree at the University of Houston in the late 1990s. Broun helped Gaitskill learn how to drive, and regularly drove the author to the Whole Foods so she could buy groceries. She repaid him by believing in his work, and needling him to finish the book. Broun calls Giatskill “incredibly generous”.
He credits Gaitskill, along with his wife Annmarie Drury, a scholar of Victorian literature and poet, for helping him. “For years I just felt utter hopelessness. For years I thought: ‘I hate this fucking novel. I hate fucking writing it. I hate that everyone wants me to keep writing it and I wish they would all just fuck off.’”
The end result seems to have been worth it. Broun’s novel feels eerily adept at predicting the technologies that will characterize the next few decades: characters communicate using “SkinWerks”, a “bioelectric emollient sprayed onto the epidermis” that allows “wearers to read and type upon their own skin … to exchange tactile sensations, and to display digital images”. But it is above all a messianic story, culminating in a denouement that combines Cuthbert’s hallucinations, the coming comet and a miracle.
In a similarly millenarian spirit, I ask Broun if he feels like we’re doomed after Brexit. “Categorically, no,” he says.
Broun believes there will be some kind of redemption. Animals have a role, he thinks. “I’m not like, ‘I can’t wait to till the rapture comes,’” he says. “But I see a kind of new, green world. It’s connected to god and it’s connected to animals. I don’t understand how. But I know it.”
