New Animal by Ella Baxter: strap in for a crazed weekend in the world of BDSM

New Animal

Author: Ella Baxter

ISBN-13: 9781529074802

Publisher: Picador

Guideline Price: £14.99

“She stands briefly and helps Steven to his feet before kicking him in the back of the knees so that he falls onto the floor again. “That’s how you get them down,’ she says.” Readers of this paper of record, brace yourselves. Ella Baxter’s debut novel, New Animal, features a protagonist, Amelia Aurelia, who embarks on a kind of crazed long weekend in the world of BDSM in the hopes of outrunning her grief following the unexpected death of a family member.

For the uninitiated Amelia, and, indeed, the uninitiated reader, this brave new world offers plenty of distraction. A hook-up through a dating app with a guy, which is to say a sadist, called Leo lands her an invite to a fetish party in a disused industrial warehouse. The bouncer states the terms plainly: “‘No drugs, no egos, no means no, we’ve got a slave zone, punishment post and rack that are not to be used for anything other than for tethering slaves, capiche?’”

Amelia capiches, though without really grasping what she’s letting herself in for. This becomes something of a refrain throughout the book. At times the lessons are swift and (literally) cruel, as with Leo’s delight in publicly whipping her naked body at the party. Elsewhere, they’re imparted like scholarly wisdom from elders who run the local BDSM centre in town: “‘Domming is an art form. It is about tension and release, and it involves an understanding of what control is, and what it is not.’”

This same person tells Amelia that BDSM won’t help her escape her pain in the outside world, which in a way is what the book is about: a young woman’s attempts to abuse the body in order to numb the mind. New Animal is an interesting take on this subject, though sadly the book’s most engaging writing occurs before the sadomasochism mission gets under way.

Early chapters introducing us to Amelia’s life in Melbourne are vibrant and forthright. Almost 30, she lives with her parents and works as a make-up artist in the family-owned funeral home. Baxter gets us close to her character’s experience with clever, visceral descriptions of the work: “You begin to expect the slow decompression. It helps to think of them as old balloons.” The details are morbidly fascinating, from the way her stepdad Vincent preps the bodies “with a rose-coloured wave of formaldehyde” to give them a life-like appearance, to the actions and rituals of funeral attendees: “The earliest anyone ever turned up was three hours before the service. That was for an eight-year-old who had drowned in a neighbour’s pool.”

This part of the narrative has a natural momentum, occasional cliff-hangers, nothing feels forced. Things change when Amelia flees to Tasmania to stay with her biological father Jack. Certain plausibility issues abound; to detail them would ruin the story, but suffice to say that her family’s attempts to get her to come home again are eminently understandable in the circumstances.

Too much

The book’s bigger issue is with time management. There is too much going on in the space of a few days, not enough room for cause and effect, the compression of time that is necessary in fiction. Transitions are clumsy, revelations somewhat artless: “Oh my good god, it hits me: I have become the man on the horse. I am at one with my earlier visualisation; I have embodied the scenario at last.” Reflections come at the wrong moments, in the midst of the action, and read more like diversions. Side characters – from a neighbour who kills himself, to immediate family members – aren’t given enough airtime for their losses to hit home with the reader.

New Animal is 100 per cent Amelia’s show, in keeping with a character who is self-centred, brave and, above all, honest. There’s a compelling quality to this honesty that recalls Raven Leilani’s Luster, or the sex-addicted eponymous narrator of Leila Slimani’s Adele. As with these books, Baxter focuses on the ways in which pain works its way through the body, and how easy it can be to mistake it for pleasure.

A writer and artist living in Melbourne, Baxter has had poetry published in Spineless Wonders, Gargouille Literary Journal and Bowen St Press. Her sculptures have been exhibited in site-specific locations around Victoria and at Gasworks Arts Park. In her spare time, she runs a small business making bespoke death shrouds.

This arresting end to an author bio is reflective of Baxter’s style in her fiction. While structurally problematic, New Animals holds the reader’s interest because of its startling set-ups and the intricacies of its peculiar worlds: “The water bubbles raucously as I take another glug of wine and wonder how long we will spend anaesthetising ourselves here before moving to the bedroom and doing it all again – how many layers of oblivion we need this afternoon.”