THE MEMORY OF ANIMALS, a novel by Claire Fuller • Book Review

A Novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Coralie Loon
THE MEMORY OF ANIMALS (Tin House Books)

We’re all familiar with the sense of exhaustion and collective grief that seeped into our bones during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the pandemic is still not over, we have been able to recover and continue with gratitude for the things that went right: a successful vaccine campaign, virtual attempts to connect to one another, and eventually, a return to normalcy. Once the metaphorical gates opened, I swore I would never consume another piece of fiction that had anything to do with a deadly pandemic. I broke this promise for Claire Fuller’s 2023 novel, The Memory of Animals, and I’m glad I did.

The Memory of Animals is novelist and short fiction writer Claire Fuller’s fifth book, and another dive into the themes of isolation, crisis, and memory, which she also explores in Our Endless Numbered Days (2015) and Unsettled Ground (2021).

In The Memory of Animals, the fictitious epidemic Fuller imagines doesn’t give much grace to the inhabitants of its world. The disease, nicknamed “dropsy,” is apocalyptic, wiping out almost everyone in the world save for the main characters. The novel is narrated by Neffy, a young marine biologist who writes a series of love letters to an octopus from her past. Neffy signs up for an experimental vaccine trial, agreeing to live in isolation for the duration of the experiment. When her reaction to the vaccine doesn’t go as intended, she wakes from a half-alive fever dream days later to find that the world has gone into an emergency lockdown—seemingly everyone has either disappeared or died. With the nurses having abandoned the clinic and the outside world suddenly void of human life, Neffy must join forces with the other living patients to survive.

Something Claire Fuller excels at is striking an intentional balance between her characters’ sense of dread and the small mundanities of everyday life. Tensions between Neffy and the other vaccine trial patients (Leon, Rachel, Yahiko, and Piper) are as you’d expect for a post-apocalyptic setting. They disagree and argue, even to the point of physicality. But they also exist as humans seeking a distraction from loneliness. When it seems like there’s nothing to live for, they throw themselves a party (with water instead of vodka).

At its core, The Memory of Animals is a post-apocalyptic story about isolation, adaptation, and the role memory plays in the human (and animal) pursuit of freedom. Fuller plays with memory in two distinct ways: through Neffy’s letters to H, an octopus she set free from an aquarium she worked for, and through the Revisitor, an experimental technology Leon introduces that allows Neffy to re-experience her own memories.

The novel is littered with morsels of information about octopi, but it often feels like more than information. Reminiscent of the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher, Neffy doesn’t just see the octopus through a scientific lens, but as a soul with the capacity to feel and think. When she was an assistant in a study involving the mutilation of octopus arms, she recounts defying protocol to soothe the creature:

“I let the pieces of severed arms stick themselves to me, against my wrist, up my arm, tasting, feeling. I hoped it might comfort them in their distress and confusion. Larry found me sitting on the floor of the cold room with part of an arm on my neck. When he removed it, the arm had given me a love bite.”

Through her letters, Neffy twists us in these knots of horror, revealing her only way of surviving the destruction and isolation she has witnessed. She resorts not to detachment, but to intimacy. When she sets H, the last octopus, free, she does it as if she has no choice. For her, there is no life outside of freedom.

Neffy’s letters to H are not just a call to the past and to a life outside of the epidemic, but to a being who also understands the horrors of captivity.

Neffy and Leon’s sessions with the Revisitor allow her to relive her memories directly, introducing complex relationships with people from her past. These memories become a repose, a form of escapism from the unpredictability of a post-apocalyptic climate. I personally didn’t find the memories she revisited very interesting or vital to the story—I was more interested in her role as a scientist and her relationship with the octopi. The Revisitor itself, however, was an interesting antithesis to the “dropsy” disease, which causes people to lose their memories. Her flowering addiction to revisiting memories feels inevitable, an ache to leave the isolation of the present moment as far behind as possible.

The constant regurgitation of the past makes for a messier story and a greater sense of distance between the reader and the apocalypse. It also makes for a story that acknowledges human desire beyond the apocalyptic stage. It’s a wonderful reminder that the present moment doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it’s the same world that was home to everything we knew and loved, before things changed.

When Neffy finds out that some of the contagious test subjects had been locked in their rooms, she is horrified. She relates to the diseased like she related to the octopi, knowing the risk of “contamination” could never justify treating someone as less than human. “Does freedom win over containment,” she asks H, “even with all its risks, including death?”

Despite its setting, The Memory of Animals refuses to give up its desire for freedom—it wrestles with bleakness, the fear of loneliness, captivity, and death. It touched (at times too closely) the parts of me that have not fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. While the ending felt a little rushed to me, it left just enough unsaid. Claire Fuller makes sure the reader knows that something survives, that there is some piece of humanity that cannot be fully killed. Her novel is an unrelenting cry for compassion for all that is human and animal, even in the moments when connection feels hopeless.

Coralie Loon is a writer, artist, and recent graduate from University of California Davis, where she majored in English/creative writing and sociology. As an undergrad, she had numerous poems published by Open Ceilings and was a staff writer for The California Aggie. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and enjoys songwriting, walking in the rain, and crocheting.