It’s not just about a canny dreamer of a fox who learns how to speak ‘Yuman’ by doing a Little Matchstick Girl stunt outside a house not far from his Den… Oh no! It’s also a mind-map of how to tell stories (as in, how to put one together). The word ‘story’ is mentioned 16 times. “One leson I lerned during my nites at that Yuman window was: a gud riter will make the reeder feel as bad as the Yuman does in there Story. Like the riter will make you feel as bad as Sinderela. You will feel sad you cannot go to the danse. And mad you have to sweep. You will feel like biting Stepmother on her Gown. Or, if you are Penokio, you will feel like: I wud rather not be made of wud. I wud rather be made of skin, so my father Jipeta will stop hitting me with a hamer. And so farth.” Saunders like to ‘play’ and through Fox 8’s newfound understanding of how people anthropomorphise, we get to see how ridiculous our approach to life really is. Then there’s our grotesque co-dependency with capitalism, running alongside our complete dislocation from nature. The narrator is funny, naïve, dreamy and cute. But he’s too trusting. His fellow foxes are losing their habitat, there’s no food to be had, everything is changing and dying and when one of his mates meets a brutal end, Fox 8 tries to address humanity. There’s pure wild entrepreneurship to how Saunders dives into his stories, the beauty of his world-building, blatant havoc and he how jumps back out again laughing. “Now, one thing I lerned from Storys is, when something big is about to okur, a riter will go: Then it hapened!” I think Saunders missed a trick through, Fox 8 should’ve talked directly to him at the end.
First published in The Guardian, 21st October, 2017, and in print as a standalone, Fox 8, Bloomsbury, 2018
A Personal Anthology 