Voices in the Park

About this book

A stern-looking female gorilla in a smart blue coat and a red hat takes her son and her pedigree Labrador for a walk in the park, where they meet a down on his luck male gorilla with his daughter and their dog. The dogs and the children play together happily, but the female gorilla clearly thinks that she, her dog and her son are above mixing with the others, and drags them away.

Told from the four different viewpoints of the two adults and the two children, this subtle and layered tale of class and perspective is full of Browne’s characteristic strangeness, and, as ever, a kind of mythic quality because the “humans” are depicted as gorillas. One gorilla family lives in an austere, expensive white house with a high wall; the other lives in a block of flats, but their moods very much influence how we see both homes, and how we perceive the characters. Overall, it’s the children and the dogs that don’t care about class and money that play together happily – and the out of work dad whose daughter makes him a cup of tea when they get home. Beautiful, profound and with lots to look at in Browne’s painterly tableaux.

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