The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller

Someone on the podcast Sarah's Bookshelves recommended The Memory of Animals pretty persuasively, so I ordered it from the library and then proceeded to not read it for nine weeks. And it's due tomorrow, so I had to get to it. 

Teffy lost her job working with the octopuses at an aquarium. There's a pandemic and things are getting pretty bad, so she signs up to be a volunteer in a clinical trial for a vaccine for the Dropsy virus. But the trial doesn't go well and Teffy and four other volunteers watch out the windows as London falls into chaos. Meanwhile, there's technology that allows Teffy to relive her memories and she spends more and more time in the past. 

Weird combination of octopus book (see The Soul of an Octopus and Remarkably Bright Creatures) and pandemic book (see Station Eleven and Hamnet). The bit about reliving memories was weird, too. I mean, the book is weird. Like so weird that it's borderline incoherent? 

Okay, the parallel is that the survivors are like animals in a cage. The volunteers for the experiment are like the experiments on octopuses that Neffy witnessed. Fine. (I mean, let's not get into whether or not animals have a choice about it and the humans absolutely could have either not done the experiment or left the hospital when things got dodgy, but let's let Fuller have the parallels.) The additional parallel is that something something memory something something octopuses don't have a brain. I don't know. It's weak. Here's the conversation I imagine happened.

Author: It's about survivors of a pandemic.

Agent: And...?

Author (thinks about Sy Montgomery and Shelby Van Pelt): And the main character works with octopuses.

Agent: What makes it unique?

Author: AND THERE'S VIRTUAL REALITY MEMORY.

Oddly enough, I didn't hate this book. But I don't think it says as much as the author thinks it says. The characters are oddly flat, the writing is fine, but not spectacular, and I honestly want to figure out who it was that recommended this on the podcast and never really trust them again. Read Station Eleven if you want pandemic lit. 3.5/5 stars

Things I looked up:

Roberts radio (page 10) - Roberts is a British company that makes cool looking retro radios. The company has been around since 1932, so presumably the radios they make were once cutting edge. 

Crittall windows (page 10) - Windows with gridded metal frames. 

Antipaxos (page 24) - A small island in Greece. It's almost embarrassing how often I have to admit my lacking my knowledge of geography is. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

I can just make out the shape of her, the arch of her hat. (page 76)

It was something I'd looked forward to, enjoying the feeling of being the one the loud handsome man was waving his hat at, as though we both might have been almost famous. (page 132)

Piper isn't wearing her hat and for the first time I see her hair - undercut at the sides and top styled up. (page 233)