by Corrine Watson
June 6, 2023
Corrine Watson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlotte, NC and is Reviews Editor for West Trade Review. Her work has appeared in Wretched Creations, the Southern Review of Books and F(r)iction. Follow her on Twitter @CorrineWatson6.
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller; Tin House Books; 288 pages; $27.95
Claire Fuller’s latest novel, The Memory of Animals, dives into a reality not far off from our own, where the world is facing a global pandemic. Although Fuller’s narrative takes a much darker turn than our experience with the Covid-19 pandemic, the parallels are clear as the narrative explores quarantine and isolation. Rather than focusing on the world-wide ramifications of the collapse of society as we know it, Fuller illustrates the nuances of survival as well as the pitfalls of remembrance as a form of escapism.
The novel follows Neffy, a marine biologist, who has volunteered to be one of the first humans to receive the vaccine and be exposed to the virus to study its effectiveness. After a bad reaction that nearly kills her, Neffy emerges from her fever to find that a highly contagious variant has wiped out the population. Although hospital staff and most of the volunteers left as soon as things took a turn for the worse, four volunteers remained to wait out the chaos. Whether it’s waiting for a military rescue, a sign of safety, or just waiting for the food supply to run out, it’s clear that their finite plans have no stable foundation, but the hospital, with its generator, food, and resources, isn’t the worst place to be.
The characters are, for the most part, restricted to their own floor and isolated in their rooms, but Fuller is able to create tension in the ways the characters’ fear, paranoia, and grief for what they have lost threatens to tear apart the tenuous bond that ties them together. As the others fight over their survival plans, their new reality, or trivial things like the date, Neffy sees “how fragile their little grouping is. Fraying threads tied together by calamity and shared need, each tugging on an end hoping to make the knot firmer but risking undoing the messy tangle.” Even Neffy, who often feels like the outsider in the group and has a trepidatious trust in them, finds herself thinking, “I have a terror of being alone, in this building, in London, in the world — I don’t want to be Rachel’s final girl. The last human. I want to be with the others, back with Rachel, Leon, Piper and Yahiko.” Through this, Fuller captures the messiness of relationships that are formed out of circumstance as well as survival. As the characters manifest their own trauma responses, Fuller masterfully illustrates the nuances of their desperate need to find some form of comfort whether it’s from people, possessions, or memories and they often fall short because what they want most is to return to the normalcy of their pre-pandemic lives.
While staying in the hospital is a form of self-preservation as they avoid the virus and the violence of desperate survivors, it’s also a way to avoid the full scope of their new reality as some of the only survivors of a fallen world. When she’s alone with her thoughts, Neffy often relates her isolation and confinement back to fun facts about animals and most often an octopus named H, who she writes letters to in her journal. While the octopus obsession and additional interludes to provide detail about Neffy’s past is a bit of a distraction, Fuller uses this to illustrate her deep empathy for animals and her sincere discomfort with their captivity, which often turns back into a metaphor regarding her own confinement. As Neffy begins to feel trapped within her surroundings , she considers leaving the hospital to go find her family. While she’s free to go at any time, her confines are also her refuge now that the outside world is filled with unknown dangers and harsh realities she isn’t ready to face. When she looks out her window, she sees “a piece of litter blow slowly from one end of the alley to the other. Its meandering journey is a tale of doubling back and indecisiveness, while all the time having no choice but to be pushed forward because the invisible wind says to go back is only an illusion.” Although she feels the pressure to move forward, Neffy is afraid of the changes that await her.
Neffy’s fear of facing reality leads to an addicting form of escapism as she begins to form a dependance on a device called the Revisitor, which Leon invented to allow users to relive their memories. We follow memories both good and bad as Neffy remembers moments with her loved ones. These events follow chronological bursts that concisely summarize the narrative of Neffy’s backstory. As Neffy builds a dependance on the Revisitor, she says, “I know I need to stop Revisiting; the joy of being with people I love again, so alive and vital, has begun to be overshadowed by the pain I feel returning to reality.” Fuller is able to use Neffy’s escapism to illustrate what was lost to the pandemic and perhaps ask what we owe to the dead. If it’s not the perseverance to live on, maybe it’s holding on to their memories as long as we can.
While this might be an underwhelming example of dystopian fiction, as the novel places a significant focus on the past rather than the collapse of society, The Memory of Animals does stand out in the new wave of pandemic literature in the ways it captures the emotional toll of isolation and utilizes remembrance to illustrate what was lost. Fuller also masterfully captures the ways people compromise or maintain their humanity in desperate situations as characters’ struggle with their conflicting need for self-preservation and desire to find a sense of safety and belonging with other people. Through this novel, Fuller has created a heartwarming portrait of what it means to find hope at the end of the world and carry on, not only for those you lost, but for those you found in the aftermath.
©2023 West Trade Review
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Finding Hope at the End of the World: Escapism and Self-Preservation in Claire Fuller's The Memory of Animals
FICTION REVIEW
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