Growing up in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, author Chris Flynn was fascinated by time travel.
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"As a kid, I didn't want to live in the present ... Belfast wasn't the nicest of places and it wasn't a very creative place," he says.
"I wanted to live in the future or the past. The idea of time travel has been on my brain since I was a small child eating my porridge ... and that's what I'm doing with this book, it's the next best thing."
In Mammoth Flynn flits between the Pleistocene Epoch, 19th century America, with detours to Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany, to a 2007 natural history auction in Manhattan, an actual event that was an important seed in the origins of this mainly true story.
Items up for auction included a 67-million-year-old skull of Tyrannosaurus bataar, the severed hand of an Egyptian mummy, the skeleton of a pterodactyl, a 10-million-year old penguin fossil and the huge tusk of a mammoth, among other things.
Actor Nicholas Cage outbid fellow thespian Leonardo DeCaprio and walked away with the T. bataar skull for a princely $276,000.
The skull was later found to be stolen and Cage returned it to its rightful owners and it was repatriated in 2015 and it now sits in the Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs in Ulaanbaatar.
And here's the twist to Mammoth. The narrators of this rollicking story are the exhibits themselves: the worldly Mammut who led his herd, the wise-cracking T.Bat, Hattie the hand who thinks she's Queen Hatshepsut, Palaeo the penguin and P-Dac the pterodactyl.
What tales they have to tell.
"Writing this book in the voice of the mammoth came to me quite late in the piece after I heard about the auction," says Flynn.
"I was thinking about Cage and DiCaprio fighting over the tyrannosaurus skull to show what big strong men they were and then I read separately that former United States president Thomas Jefferson was doing the same thing 200 years ago.
"I thought how funny that men in power are still doing this, still commodifying the natural world for their own purposes.
"I just thought, wouldn't it be fun to have these exhibits telling the story, as external observers watching our behaviours and shaking their heads as they see us making the same mistakes over and over."
At its core, Mammoth is a discussion of mankind's relationship with the natural world - a story of evolution and climate change and whether we have learned anything in the past 13,000 years or so.
Flynn isn't so sure we have.
"What have we learned in 200 years, since Jefferson, but going back further even further what have we learned in the last 10,000 years or so?
"Back then we turned up, killed everything that we saw, ate everything, made clothing from the skins of the animals, and then the earth got warmer because we'd killed all the creatures that were keeping it cold.
"We're not very smart in the way that we exclude ourselves from the animal kingdom.
"That's an ongoing issue and failing, we distance ourselves from the natural world and assume we are lords over it, instead of accepting that we're just part of it.
"We're animals too and nature has a good system going and we can't be fighting against that all the time because it's going to hurt us. We really seem to struggle with that."
We joke that we can imagine current US president Donald Trump sending a search party out for a mammoth to prove how great America is; we discuss COVID-19 and wonder whether it's another wake-up call from Mother Nature.
"We consider ourselves lords over nature but it never works out for us in the long run," he says.
"I don't know if we're capable of learning the lesson, and something like COVID comes along and tries to whack us over the head with a bit of a lesson, but will we be willing to listen this time? I don't know."
But Flynn is smart enough to realise people don't want to be lectured about such things.
"It's hard for me not to put humour in my writing," he says.
"When you're dealing with a subject like mankind's relationship with the natural world and climate change, these are super important topics that we have to try and get to grips with as a species.
"But it can be quite depressing because everything you hear, everything you read, about it just makes you feel hopeless.
"I wanted to be able to talk about those things but in a more lighthearted, humorous and informative way so you actually walk away feeling a bit more hopeful."
Flynn left Northern Island when he was 18, travelled the world and has lived in Victoria since 1999.
He now lives on Phillip Island, next to a penguin sanctuary, with his partner, illustrator Eiraian Chapman, and their cats.
His two previous novels were The Glass Kingdom and A Tiger in Eden, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize in 2013.
During lockdown, he's been baking cakes and apple tarts, almond meal biscuits and "this crazy Donna Hay snicker's bar thing...I've been getting right into it."
He knows perhaps he should have been doing more writing, "but it's not that easy to be creative in times like this, you have to tune out of the news a bit because it's all so depressing".
He spent years doing research for Mammoth before he even wrote a word of it, even ordering obscure books after he'd gone off on a tangent.
"I was pretty scared when I had the idea, I thought this is going to be pretty full on, I decided I would not approach it unless I could exhaustively research it," he says.
For that's the thing: as much as this is a fantastical story, most of it actually happened.
"It's essentially a non-fiction book but with a fictional framework," he says. "As much as I could verify things, I did.
"A lot of the historical events in the book actually happened, a lot of the characters are historical personages. I loved the idea of playing around with that, that plays to our own memory too. How does memory work? It's ironic that it's a huge elephant telling this story claiming he has perfect recall and he can remember everything.
"I've always been fascinated with how our own memories work. I have a terrible memory and then you read a memoir and people are telling you memories from when they were children, - I'm always a bit suss."
He's loved it that people have been open to a story told with these ancient narrators.
"Once you accept the conceit that it's the bones of a dead creature telling you a story it's very easy to get into.
"It's a curious way to draw you in, I'm sure plenty of people are asking is it going to be stupid, but it's funny and emotional and it carries you along a through this rollicking tale and it's finding an audience, which is even more extraordinary given it's been released in the middle of a global pandemic."
- Mammoth, by Chris Flynn. University of Queensland Press. $32.99.
- Chris Flynn is scheduled to appear as part of the Canberra Writers' Festival to be held from August 12-16. More details to come at canberrawritersfestival.com.au