Thylacine

The Thylacine is one of Lev Zubov’s two animal analogs, a recreated striped predator whose presence makes the boundaries between pet, engineered creature, and watchful stranger feel uncertain. Seen first in the garden and later at the household’s door and beside Lev’s Mercedes, it draws attention not through any explained purpose but through its distinct bodily manner and its sustained, disconcerting regard for Wilf Netherton.

Identity and Appearance

Netherton watches the Thylacine in the garden of Lev’s father’s Notting Hill house, beside an illuminated bed of hostas. The animal has a stiff tail and a vertically striped flank, and turns toward him in what the narration calls an uncanine fashion. Its markings make it seem almost heraldic, but its gaze belongs to neither familiar category of predator: Lev describes the regard of a mammal that is neither canid nor felid as peculiar. The animal is not merely a doglike substitute; its appearance and movement resist easy classification.

Lev keeps two thylacine analogs, part of his interest in competing schools of thylacinery and their warring genomes. The passage gives no account of how the analogs were made or what their genetic differences are. Instead, their existence is folded into the texture of Lev’s life, where high technology and private hobbies coexist with the old, decaying house and its inherited connections. Netherton even wonders what the animal’s droppings might be worth, an irreverent thought that brings the creature into the same speculative world of value and possession without explaining or reducing it to that value.

At the House

The Thylacine’s first appearance establishes a reciprocal attention. It turns and seems to stare at Netherton through the kitchen window; he wonders whether Dominika might be watching him through a feed from the animal’s eyes, while also suspecting that she dislikes him and has withdrawn somewhere in the house. The possibility is left uncertain. The scene does not establish that the animal is remotely controlled or that it carries a camera; rather, its unsettlingly direct gaze prompts Netherton to imagine a technological observer behind it.

Later, when Netherton and Lev are eating, the Thylacine appears at the glass door in the darkness. Netherton says that “Gordon wants in,” but Lev corrects him: “Tyenna.” The correction makes the animal’s individual identity concrete while exposing Netherton’s habit of imposing the wrong name on it. Lev adds that she is not allowed in the kitchen when they are eating. The rule is domestic and ordinary, yet the animal’s silent presence at the glass turns a household boundary into a small scene of negotiation: she is close enough to join them, but the threshold remains closed.

Another brief encounter gives the creature a more openly social, if still ambiguous, presence. As Netherton prepares to leave the conversation with Lev, he sees the Thylacine upright on its hind legs on the small patio, gazing in at them. Lev follows his gaze and greets her as “Pretty boy.” The animal is again watching from outside, but the exchange treats it as a recognizable household presence rather than a passing spectacle. Netherton, by contrast, is distracted by his wish for a drink and his thought of walking through Lev’s collection; the animal’s watchfulness and his restless human concerns occupy the same scene without resolving into a shared understanding.

In the Car

The Thylacine accompanies Lev into a Mercedes, preceding him into the vehicle with claws ticking dryly on the pale wood. It regards Netherton beadily and yawns, opening a jaw noticeably unlike a dog’s: the shape is compared to a small crocodile’s, though it opens in the opposite direction. The dry click of its claws and the unusual mechanics of its mouth sharpen the bodily difference already suggested by its striped flank and stiff-tailed movement.

Netherton greets it with “Hyena,” again substituting a familiar animal name for the creature Lev has identified as Tyenna. The misnaming is comic, but it also sustains the passage’s central uncertainty: the Thylacine is close enough to familiar animals to invite comparison, yet repeatedly refuses to fit those comparisons. Its presence in the car carries that uncertainty out of the house, making it a companion to Lev while remaining an object of wary observation for Netherton.

Narrative Significance

The Thylacine is presented through small, concrete actions rather than an explanation of its design or function: watching through a window, standing at the patio door, waiting outside the kitchen, and entering the Mercedes ahead of Lev. Those repeated acts give it a degree of presence independent of the human conversation around it. It is not simply a symbol with a fixed meaning; the text lets its gaze and bodily peculiarities remain partly opaque.

At the same time, Netherton’s uncertain speculation about Dominika’s perspective and his repeated animal misidentifications show how readily the human characters project interpretations onto a technologically altered creature. Lev’s precise correction, Tyenna, offers a counterpoint: the analog has an individual name and a place in the household, even when Netherton sees only an unsettling, hard-to-classify predator. That tension between engineered familiarity and animal opacity is what makes the Thylacine memorable in these scenes.