If you thought you might be one of the last people on earth, how would you behave? That is the test that Claire Fuller sets for the narrator of “The Memory of Animals,” which takes place in the near future as a deadly virus is bearing down on humanity.
“I could kid myself that I’m doing it to save the human race,” she says, “but honestly? I’m doing it for the money. The money I owe to the aquarium for their octopus.” But no one does something so dire merely for the money, as another volunteer observes.
As those who swooned over the documentary “My Octopus Teacher” know, and as Neffy tells us, “It is possible to fall in love with an octopus.” Neffy, it seems, learned this at a tender age, snorkeling off a Greek island — where her father remained when Neffy and her mother returned to London, setting up a childhood split between the cool reality of England and the magical land of warmth and myth.
Much of this we learn from a series of mysterious letters, addressed to only “H,” that Neffy composes while confined to the facility where the vaccine test is being conducted — and through another device Fuller cleverly works into the increasingly complicated relations between the volunteers — at least the few who are left once things go disastrously awry. One of them, Leon, has developed a process for allowing people to relive their memories , which works particularly well on Neffy.
Meanwhile the virus is mutating into an even more virulent variant, stranding the trial participants at the BioPharm facility, interrupting the proceedings, scattering the staff and leaving Neffy as the only one of the remaining five volunteers who has been given both the vaccine and the virus … and survived.
Imagine a “Lord of the Flies” where everyone on the island has opted in; or a “Breakfast Club” where anyone who leaves dies: Relationships will form and deform and character will win out.
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