Memory of Animals

I do this thing when I buy books where I will read the description at the bookstore, decide that I want to buy it, and then never read the description again. Then when I pick it up to actually read months later, I have no idea what it's about, but I trust my past self to have had good taste when I picked it up. And while I am not going to stop doing that, this is a wonderful example of a book where that strategy failed me.

In Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller, we follow Neffy, a woman in a tumultuous point in her life after being laid off from an aquarium job for releasing their octopus into the sea and being made to pay them back. Without any other goals, Neffy volunteers for a vaccine trial for a particularly vicious disease that's ravaging the world. However, just as the trial begins and she is given the vaccine (and the disease to ensure she is fully inoculated), a new extremely deadly and extremely contagious strain of the virus breaks out and plunges the entire world into chaos. After a 7 day stint of in-and-out sleep, Neffy wakes in the empty clinic to changed world as plagued people wander the streets and bodies litter the outside. She finds that four other trial participants have stayed in the clinic, Leon Rachel, Yahiko, and Piper, who did not end up receiving the vaccine or virus -- Neffy is perhaps the only one in the world who is vaccinated. The five of them start this new uncertain life in the clinic as they have to monitor food and water, emergency power while being careful to keep the unvaccinated isolated as pressures mount for Neffy to venture out for supplies. Also there's this plot of Neffy going back to revisit her memories of the death of her father.

I have had a sneaking suspicion for a while that dystopian books just aren't for me. I read The Passage, The Light Pirate, The Wall, even Station Eleven (which I enjoyed, but is my least favorite ESJM book), and all of them were some level of disappointment. So I don't know why I picked In Memory of Animals up but it followed the same route.

Overall, I'm just not quite sure what this book was trying to do. This was obviously written during the COVID pandemic, and relied heavily on evoking all too familiar feelings around isolation and avoidance, but beyond that it was a bit of a mess. We have this primary theme of struggling with letting go of what is lost to focus on protecting the people that you can now, and a secondary theme of regret at the death of Neffy's father when there's a chance she could have helped him. We sit extensively with Neffy and her stepmother Margot, and explore her complicated relationship with her mother and her lover/step-brother Justin. But none of these side plots really resolved into anything. And the medium by which we are diving into Neffy's memories is this overly complex introduction of "Revisiting," a VR like device that one of her fellow vaccine participants worked on that lets you vividly revisit memories of the past, which also introduces a not-fleshed-out theme of like.. addiction to Revisiting? It felt as if it was so sloppily integrated, and I wonder if it would have been better to just have Neffy ruminate on her past rather than introduce this overly complicated plot device that had no place in a dystopian story.

Aside from Neffy, the characters were all both flat and unpredictable. Their actions and reactions did not at all feel like the way real people would act. Their dialogue was stilted, and their decisions strange. However none of them really changed throughout the book. Even though they all grew closer to Neffy, and Neffy had a dynamic character arc, none of the other characters did which made following them tedious. And this makes me question why we spent so much time hyper-focused on the development of relationships between Neffy and her companions in a dystopian novel which had little else to say. If the story wanted to be about developing relationships in the midst of hardship, it should have left Revisiting behind. If it wanted to be about reconciling regret and grief in a world where there's nothing but that left, it should have not even included other survivors. If it wanted to be a tense dystopian story about struggling to survive, then it should have devoted more to that than the ending 50 pages.

Anyway, this just felt like a bit of a mess. Not terrible, I didn't NOT enjoy myself. I just feel like it was poorly constructed. But hey, if you're one of those people who loves dystopian fiction, you'll probably find something to like here; particularly if you liked The Wall. This is like a worse version of that.