The writer as prophet. Imagination as a prelude to reality. Today it seems like a powerful dystopian novel born of the pandemic, but when the covid burst into our lives in March 2020, Claire Fuller (Oxfordshire, 1967) had been writing The Memory of Animals (Impedimenta/Les hores) for months, which today she presents in the Finestres bookstore.
Long before personal protective equipment populated our imagination, she already had her characters isolated in a hospital, five young guinea pigs testing a vaccine to deal with the lethal pandemic that was causing chaos in the world, mutations included. Only she took the effects further, to a world that falls apart and puts her five characters in successive dilemmas to survive. Together or apart.
Freedom and guilt, fear and survival, are mixed in the novel with two ingredients that function as a metaphor. The love that the protagonist, Neffy, one of the volunteers for the test and a marine biologist, feels for the friendly octopuses. And above all, a revolutionary invention, the Revisiter, which allows us to vividly recover the fragments of our past that we desire and that at a time when the future is uncertain works almost as a refuge. A drug.
“I started writing the novel in September 2019 and when Covid hit I had already gone a third of the way. It started happening and there I was writing about it. It was a very surreal feeling and I stopped for a while. We all began to reconsider what we did, what our lives were like, whether they were useful. Who needs writers? Who needs books? For a few months I put the novel away and thought I should retrain as a nurse. But I realized that people need stories. They got them out of trouble then. And I returned to the novel,” she recalls.
There were, he acknowledges, fragments of the covid that entered. “Once I knew what our pandemic was like, I wanted to make it worse, I didn’t want to make a mirror. But I did wake up to the news in the morning and take notes on the terminology. And the symptom of losing the sense of smell turned out to be very useful: it makes Neffy realize what really happens when hers returns,” she reveals. And he confesses that he has read “many novels about pandemics, dystopian fiction and the end of the world. I enjoy them a lot. I like to know what the worst thing that could happen is. And it comforts me to know that we have not reached that worst point in fiction,” he smiles.
“I like,” he continues, “to give my characters as little as possible and see if they survive. Take things away from them. Put them in the worst possible situation and see how they work together. Or not. At what point does society fall apart? Practical issues often lead to changes. “When you run out of food, something has to change.” And she says that she has seen The Snow Society and that stories like that “give hope to humanity: they have to do terrible things, but it’s about surviving together.”
But in addition to survival, the book, he reasons, talks “about memory and its loss, about what we do with our past. We can learn from it, but can we apply it in the future?” “Maybe,” she muses, noting that Neffy changes. Slightly. Would Fuller also use the Revisiter if it existed? “Definitely. And I know he would visit him again. My children are in their twenties. When you have small children you hold their hands, you walk down the street, they sit on your lap, you read to them. At some point, there comes the last time they sit on your lap, hold your hand. And it goes unnoticed. He would go back to those moments to understand what they were.”
Finally, he points out, The Memory of Animals talks, he says, about captivity – that of these young guinea pigs, that of the octopuses, that of the humans in their lives – and freedom, “if you can free yourself or need Someone do it.” “Maybe we always need a leader. Someone strong who many people follow without necessarily listening to what he says,” she reflects. And she points out that her novel was not looking for any political metaphor about a world that looks to the past, Brexit included – she is touched because in Barajas the guard told her that that line was not for her, but for Europeans – but she thinks it is good that it should be done and is “hopeful about the upcoming British elections.” “But I look at the US, which the UK seems to be lagging behind, and I worry about Trump.”
