Obligate Carnivore
by Stephanie Johnson

We need to talk about cats. The briefly infamous cover image of Stephanie Johnson’s short story collection Obligate Carnivore (not a catchy title) is a cat with gleaming human dentures and something bloody in the corner of its mouth. He looks vicious and unrepentant. Notes at the back of the book tell you that the story it illustrates was originally titled ‘A Cat Called Gareth Morgan’.

You can probably see where this is going. The story is a kind of satire of environmental consciousness or perhaps of wokeness in general. A couple in Dunedin – he works for the Royal Albatross Centre, she was in the box office at the Fortune Theatre – are proud of their zero-waste lifestyle, their plastic-free and vegan credentials. But when the theatre closes, the now bereft narrator imagines life with a new companion, a small ginger cat. Her sister names the cat Gareth Morgan in ironic honour of the entrepreneur turned politician whose most memorable policy idea was to ban cats to save New Zealand’s native birdlife.

Soon the feline Gareth is bringing home the corpses of one bird after another and, to cut a short story even shorter, either the cat goes or the boyfriend goes. The ending is surprisingly, and hilariously, savage and it is possible to see the cat as a resurgence of the narrator’s natural, primal being that has been suppressed by her boyfriend’s right-on, vegan wokeness.

Another story, ‘The Cat House’, does a similar thing with a cat, a man and a shocking injury (this time the cat is called Bono). Most of the satirical stories in this collection are set in a recognisable middle-aged, upper middle-class milieu of good jobs, nice homes and troubled marriages, or as a male narrator puts it, ‘late-middle-aged people spinning out into ever-widening circles of anxiety, neurosis, selfishness, impending financial doom, fear of ageing, unabated and debilitating boredom’. But it is always done with a light touch and a very natural, easy sense of humour.

You may not be surprised to learn that men are usually the problem, whether they are too woke or not woke enough. Some of the stories are not exactly subtle, such as the one about a four-times-married white male historian at a conference in Canada and a rampant old bear in a nearby forest. (‘History as told by men like me is not the contemporary vibe.’) As in the story about Gareth, animals can double as expressions of our shadowy or hidden selves. In this unsentimental social world there are predators and prey, winners and losers.

There is an enjoyable sharpness and flippancy in Johnson’s approach. Entertainment is valued over depth. These are fine examples of magazine stories, the kind of thing the Listener or Metro regularly used to run. Some are so short they are little more than vignettes, and even the longest yearn to be longer. Some of Johnson’s people could probably set up novels. Who doesn’t want to hear more about Nigel, the houseboat hippie, from ‘My Lady’s View, 1972’?

Someone at the Whangarei City Council has decided that I shouldn’t live on my houseboat anymore, so I’m hassled regularly by men in walkshorts and long socks held up by elastics … [I’m] worried they’ve seen me twitch the curtains. They’re red curtains made of hessian, a parting gift from my lady who left me because she couldn’t stand living so close to the municipal tip. That’s what she said. But I later found out that she’d run off to Jerusalem to be with Hemi Baxter …

Bewilderment is a ‘contemporary vibe’. One of the best stories here, ‘Library Morning for Lost Men’, observes a reluctant man in therapy. The narrator, Vin, is asked if his marital separation was a mutual decision.

‘Yes no.’ What an answer … Lots of people said it now, more and more – begin sentences with ‘Yes no’ or ‘No yes]. Yeah nah. What was that about? It seemed to represent something depressing about New Zealanders, some kind of bewildered ambivalence.

In another story, set in Australia as a few of these are, a man thinks about taking his autistic son to New Zealand. He will fit right in: ‘There’s lots of New Zealanders just like him. Shut down. Quiet. Won’t meet your eye. Not keen on communication.’

Obligate Carnivore collects 27 stories in fewer than 200 pages. That is a lot, and they are better in small doses rather than a binge read. Otherwise a sense of sameness could set in. The less typical stories stand out from the crowd, like the poignant Katherine Mansfield pastiche in ‘Shell Piano’ and the tourist Gothic of ‘The New Zealand Experience’. The closing story, ‘The Pear Tree’, breaks with domestic realism and moved confidently towards a zone that is more surreal. But even when things turn surreal, we are still thinking about people – usually women, to be fair– who are looking for a way out of their stultifying urban existence. Johnson’s character Jena finally makes a break for it:

All over the world women felt themselves losing their grip on their lives or sinking away until they were invisible. She wouldn’t be one of them.