‘Stop telling people it’s weird’: Andrew Upton on his strange new book, and that Cate Blanchett should read it first | Australian books

Andrew Upton is full of news and drama. Most of the time it’s just vapor, he says. “When I look back now I think, ‘What was the happiest thing in the world?'”

The idea should be too seductive to compete with “my other life, my big life” with his wife, Cate Blanchetttheir four children and their film company, Dirty Films.

But the idea of ​​writing a novel about a long-lived crippled chicken would be an unusual novel for a playwright, producer and director. Krank Fuss is essentially a story in the spirit of Animal Farm, built around: it was written by a first world war soldier for his unborn daughter, who was found in a bag after he died.

Upton – who lives in East Sussex in England with his family – is a chicken breeder, and two years ago he went to a pullet breeder with an empty box to get new ones. “There was this little boy who used to grab them from a large flock of sheep and throw them into my box.

He thought of a chicken with a lame foot. He felt like he was going to a fun place. He wrote “a 10-page short story” somewhere in the box, and put aside that it was “fiction”. But he really liked the chicken.

Upton is a man of many words. Loving, vulnerable, happy, even at 6 in the morning when he calls me from Australia. “I love mornings, I get up at 5am. It’s a blessing from the universe.” That’s when she writes – and mostly on the days Blanchett runs the school. While one member of this technology may be beautiful, world famous, the other is approachable, cheerful and wearing what appears to be a favorite T-shirt.

On the camera behind her are the large and beautiful windows of the old Victorian manor house that the couple share. He lives below Biggin Hill airfield, with the sound of planes reminding him of his father, John, – “a big, big man” – who flew as a pilot in the RAF during the Second World War. All these thoughts swirled around one night as he slept. “Fly above my head, feed the chickens and collect the eggs”; the feeling that “the world is moving” and “the anxiety of war in Europe, and more wars”.

He woke up the next day and made up another story about a farm in Nazi Germany, and written by the man who ran it, Rudi, who is still shocked by what he experienced fighting in the first world war. In the first chapter, Rudi’s grandson is packing his recently deceased mother’s belongings, and finds a small leather bag containing a sealed envelope. In it is Rudi’s story: “An expression of hope written in sadness for an unborn daughter.”

What follows is the story itself, following the spoiled chicken Krank Fuss (“sick foot” in German) as he arrives – panic – in his box, and gradually learns the leadership and brutality of other anthropomorphised animals on Rudi’s small farm, while the human atrocities of the Second World War are built around him. they were rows of frightened young farmers.

The imaginary world that Upton builds is creative, interesting, one of a kind. Having a fairy tale written for a small child “opened the door to all my thoughts about AA Milne, whom I love. It is a very beautiful response to the first world war, creating something full of innocence (like Winnie-the-Pooh) .

But the fiction that Upton discovered is not filled with innocence; it’s incredibly violent, in fact, and a brutal literary moment. Realizing that they are living in human form, the animals panic and start fighting each other more and more; a wild cat comes to a terrible end, as does an adulterous cock. Wild rats sing evil; the raven kills; blood flows from the severed heads of chickens. Not all blood is cruel – there is also kindness – but also a rational thought about the weakness of farm animals who are fattened to eat, to bear their children year after year, “trapped inside a system they don’t understand”, Upton explains.. “There are several levels depending on how clever the reader is,” he says of the book, adding that he finds it “funny” and “dark and dark”.