The splendidly titled Fever of Animals, the debut novel by Australian artist Miles Allinson, is a ‘voice-driven’ narrative par excellence, at the heart of which is a sensually evoked life. Not much happens in quantifiable terms. Nevertheless, Allinson’s distinctive, slyly amusing voice takes us on a dizzying journey through memory, grief and what it means to be an artist with integrity. 

Following the death of his father, a directionless fine-arts graduate called Miles (a predictably postmodern name-choice) re-encounters in a Melbourne restaurant a mysterious canvas by the forgotten Romanian surrealist Emil Bafdescu: ‘A small, square landscape painting in a dark wooden frame … a black forest with a line of small,