I think of the conversation I had with Rachel about the space station and the zoos. Maybe some of the animals might have got out, but I know that most, if not all of the lab octopuses won’t have been so lucky. And I begin to list the animals I can think of that live in aquariums: the sea urchins, and rays, and the starfish, and on and on until I make myself stop, and I think instead about what Rachel asked me. I can’t take her with me if I do decide to go. I can’t save her; I can barely save myself.
Set against the backdrop of a global pandemic, The Memory of Animals asks pertinent questions about freedom and responsibility: examining not only how we treat one another but how we treat the other creatures of the Earth. Weaving together three narrative threads (one in the present day and two from the past), author Claire Fuller maintains tension by dangling mysteries that don’t get untangled until the very end, and I was glued to the page — both wanting those answers and savouring the ride. This is more than a COVID novel — even if many of the situations will feel familiar to the reader — and like all good fiction, it drills down on what it means to be human; what it means to be humane. Spoilerish from here. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
How will they keep us in, I wonder, if we threaten to leave? Will they lock us in, and how ethical would that be? I will have both the vaccine and the virus, and I will stay. I could kid myself that I’m doing it to save the human race, but honestly? I’m doing it for the money.
Neffy is a twenty-seven-year-old marine biologist, and out of a job and deeply in debt, she makes the desperate decision to volunteer for a vaccine trial as the Dropsy virus (much more contagious and lethal than COVID) spreads across the globe. Ten healthy young people have been sequestered in a lab with the understanding that they will be given an otherwise untested-on-humans vaccine followed by the virus itself, and if they survive, they’ll be given a huge (unspecified to the reader) payday. Neffy is made very sick by the injections, and when she comes out of her fever a week later, she discovers that the London outside the lab has not weathered the pandemic well, and as the four other test subjects still locked in with her were never given the vaccine or the virus before the lab staff ran away, they have to wonder if she is the only immune person in the world. And what would that fact mean for them as a group? Or the world?
As they agree to wait out the quarantine period that they had signed on for (maybe there still is someone in charge out there who will come to rescue them), Neffy learns that one of the others has brought the prototype of a device (The Revisitor) that allows a person to become deeply immersed in their own memories. Much of the novel is made up of her trips to the past, and as we witness long scenes from Neffy’s childhood and later family life, we eventually learn the real impulse behind her volunteering for the trial.
In the third narrative strand, Neffy writes a series of letters to “My Dear H” while in quarantine. These tell the story of her career as a marine biologist, and as she describes the lifelong connection she has felt to octopuses, it becomes clear how often she was uncomfortable performing experiments on them or even keeping them (bored and depressed) in captivity. These bits not only point out the irony of her own confinement (and the irony of her having access to a memory machine during a pandemic that erases memory), but will eventually answer the question of where her debt came from.
“But don’t you think we can learn from the past? See things differently, or let it help us decide what we do in the future?”
“Humans are useless at learning from their mistakes. We just have to keep making new plans,” Piper says.
Neffy is a complex character, but the more we learn about her past, the more understandable her behaviour becomes; Fuller’s use of this three strand narrative works really well to maintain interest and organically answer questions the reader has about Neffy from the beginning — character, plot, and format get full marks. Although the debate about freedom and responsibility has been stirred up by the pandemic we all recently went through, I don’t know if The Memory of Animals truly brings anything new to the table. On the other hand, this was a very believable account of one young woman’s journey, well told, and I’m looking forward to reading more reviews from readers who are more familiar with Fuller’s work.
