In 2015, novelist Claire Fuller debuted with Our Endless Numbered Days, the story of a girl kidnapped by her survivalist father and raised in the wilderness, where she’s led to believe they are the only two people left alive after a nuclear apocalypse. She has gone on to create other such potently enclosed worlds in books including Bitter Orange and the Costa novel prize-winning Unsettled Ground, often using that same rural remoteness to enhance the feeling of isolation and its accompanying sense of slow-burn jeopardy.
Her latest, The Memory of Animals, is set largely in London and yet takes her preoccupation with characters cut off from the rest of society to another level. Within a few short chapters, the apocalypse that turned out not to have happened in Fuller’s first novel really has taken place, although its trigger is not bombs but a deadly pandemic.
Neffy is its protagonist, a 27-year-old marine biologist who enlists in a paid trial of a vaccine against the so-called dropsy virus. She becomes perilously ill, but the vaccine appears to work. It’s already too late, however: when she arrived at the clinic, reports were already circulating of a fast-acting variant that impacts memory and the brain, and by the time she pulls through, the staff have deserted the building, packs of dogs roam eerily silent streets and there’s no internet, phone service or television reception.
The situation has disintegrated so rapidly that most of the other volunteers have not received the vaccine. A sketchily depicted quartet of young Londoners has chosen to remain in the clinic regardless and as the novel’s pacy beginning settles into a stretch of becalmed days that constitutes the bulk of the narrative, Neffy becomes embroiled in their volatile dynamics.
Despite some promising themes and motifs, this is an uneven novel. In part, that’s a reflection of the characters’ states of mind: they’re in shock, clinging to relics of the world they knew. With supplies running low, Neffy, the only one with potential immunity, feels pressure to go and forage. She senses that the others have a plan she’s not privy to and she’ll discover more secrets besides.
It keeps the pages turning, enabling Fuller to ponder the choices we make in order to survive, but like her survivors, scrolling through old photos on their defunct smartphones, she’d rather look to the past, bidding us to wonder why Neffy needed the trial fee so badly and dropping hints of something illicit in her relationship with the lover who tried to talk her out of it. There’s also the altogether more surreal matter of why she is writing letters to an octopus she once cared for in an aquarium.
The letters are one of two rather gimmicky devices that Fuller uses to reveal the mess Neffy has made of her young life, the other being the prototype of a device called a “Revisitor”, which allows users to relive memories with virtual-reality-like intensity, handily brought along by one of Neffy’s new clinic companions.
Close attention to the world around her has always been a magnetic strength of Fuller’s work. A literary late-starter, she originally trained as a sculptor and the settings she crafts generally have a powerful physical presence. Here, the clinic is intentionally bland, but as Neffy “revisits”, her father’s hotel in Greece rises mirage-like from the page, shimmering with longing and regret.
Still, in light of the gruesome devastation that fills the city, never mind pressing questions of food and fresh water, it all feels a bit self-indulgent and Fuller’s insights into motive and meaning are too thin.
The timing of this book’s publication suggests it was written at least partly during Covid lockdowns, when we were all getting a taste of the tense, sealed-in scenarios that Fuller’s fiction ordinarily probes with such mesmerising acuity. Could that be why it seems to struggle with forward momentum? When the plot does finally advance, it’s with a discombobulating lurch that skims over far too much, leaving the reader wishing they could borrow Neffy’s Revisitor to fill in the gaps.
• The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
