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Andrew Upton is full of half-finished stories and plays. Usually they just sort of evaporate, he says. “I look back now and think, ‘what on earth did I find interesting about that?’”
An idea has to be really quite seductive to compete with “my other life, my main life” with his wife, Cate Blanchett, their four children and their film company, Dirty Films.
But the idea to write a book about a disfigured chicken stuck around for so long it would become the playwright, producer and director’s unusual debut novel. Krank Fuss is largely an allegory in the spirit of Animal Farm, built around a conceit: it was written by a first world war veteran for his unborn daughter, and discovered in a briefcase after her death.
Upton – who lives in East Sussex with his family – is a keeper of chickens, and two years ago he went to a pullet breeder with an empty box to get some new ones. “There was this young lad who was catching them from the bigger flock and dumping them into my box. And I thought, what are they [the chickens] thinking? How do they make sense of this?”
He imagined a chicken with a disfigured foot. He felt like it could go to interesting places. He wrote a “little 10-page story” about it arriving somewhere in a box, then put it aside for being “a bit fanciful”. But he really liked that chicken.
Upton is a man of many words. Amiable, unguarded, exuberant, even at six in the morning when he takes my video call from Australia. “I love the mornings, I get up at 5am. It’s a blessing from the universe.” That’s when he writes – and more so on the days Blanchett is doing the school run. While one member of this artistic partnership may be glamorously, globally famous, the other is approachable, cheerful and wearing what looks like a well-loved T-shirt.
On the camera behind him are the large and magnificent windows of the historic Victorian manor house the family shares. They live under Biggin Hill airfield, with the sound from the planes a reminder of his father, John, – a “great, great guy” – who had flown as a navigator in the RAF during WW1. It was all these ideas that swirled together one night as he was going to bed. “The planes above my head, feeding the chickens and gathering the eggs”; feeling that “the world was shifting on its axis” and “anxious about wars in Europe, and wars generally”.
He woke up the next day with the framing of a fable set on a farm in Nazi Germany, and written by the man running it, Rudi, still reeling from his experiences fighting in the first world war. In the first chapter, Rudi’s grandson is packing up the belongings of his recently deceased mother, when he chances upon a small leather satchel containing a sealed envelope. In it is Rudi’s story: “a gesture of hope written in grief to an unborn daughter.”
What follows is the fable itself, following the disfigured chicken Krank Fuss (“sick foot” in German) as she arrives – terrified – in her box, and slowly learns about the hierarchy and brutishness of the other anthropomorphised animals on Rudi’s smallholding, as the impending human violence of the second world war builds around her: “A convoy of trucks boomed by. Inside, ready for the abattoir, were lines of terrified young farmers. Their eyes were like gleaming stones, vivid white with fear and sorrow.”
The imaginary world Upton builds is inventive, fantastical, its own genre. Having it be a fable written for a small child “opened the door to all my thoughts about AA Milne, who I adore. It’s such a beautiful response to the first world war, to create something so full of innocence [as Winnie-the-Pooh].”
But the fable Upton invented isn’t full of innocence; it’s surprisingly violent, in fact, with moments of literary savagery. Realising they are living within a human construct, the animals panic and begin fighting with each other in an apocalyptic escalation; a predatory cat comes to a spectacularly gruesome end, as does a repulsive rapist rooster. Ravenous rats are a chorus of evil; crows kill; blood spurts from decapitated heads of poultry. It is not all blood and gore – there is kindness there too – and thoughtful ideas about the powerlessness of farm animals being fattened for food, having their babies taken away year after year, “trapped inside a system they don’t understand,” Upton explains. “There are a number of levels depending on how astute the reader is,” he says of the book, adding that he finds it “funny” as well as being “a bit bleak and black”.
In his 10 years as co-artistic director with Blanchett at the Sydney Theatre Company, Upton adapted the classics of Chekhov, Ibsen and others, getting inside the heads and rich worlds of those greats. “I think all those writers were on my shoulder,” he says, of turning to fiction. “Getting to know Chekhov’s worldview, so very rich and beautiful but very layered and complicated. And Ibsen, his fantastical layer of work and that hyper-naturalistic, hyper-realistic understanding of people.”
He didn’t show anyone Krank Fuss until he had finished the full draft – but his first reader was Blanchett, as it always is, “as soon as it is turned out”. He also gave it to Australian writer and director Kip Williams, and his eldest son Dashiell (“he is very interested in storytelling and is a really good reader”). He did warn them: “It’s really weird. All three of them said, ‘Stop telling people it’s weird’.”
As it goes out to readers, in his mind he is still tinkering with the world he has created. “I don’t know where my writing will lead me to now, but it has led me to this, and I am thrilled. It has opened up a doorway to me as an older fellow that I honestly thought had sort of shut.”
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