Why would someone write so many letters to an octopus?

Claire Fuller’s first four novels have garnered her notable acclaim. Her debut, Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), won the Desmond Elliott Prize; Swimming Lessons (2017) was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award; and Unsettled Ground was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and won the 2021 Costa Novel Award. What a disappointment, then, to discover that her ­latest offering, The Memory of ­Animals, is a bit of a mess: a hodgepodge of weirdly disparate plot threads, all rather laboriously and unconvincingly cobbled together with cheap sentiment.

Like many recent novels, it takes inspiration from the pandemic, conjuring up a fictional plague – the “Dropsy” virus, which causes its victims’ organs to swell and damages their cognitive powers – resulting in similar containment measures to those used to battle Covid: lockdowns and a fevered rush to find a vaccine. Our heroine, Neffy, is one of a small number of volunteers who’ve enrolled in a vaccine trial, and the novel opens with her arriving at the unit in ­central London where she’s agreed to be sequestered for the next month; she and her fellow volunteers each sealed in their own room, like animals in a cage.

For anyone who misses the analogy, Fuller spends the rest of the book ramming it home in a series of letters Neffy writes to – wait for it – an octopus, which she looked after in her past life as a marine biologist. Yes, you heard me correctly: ­epistles to a cephalopod. What the point of these missives is, though – other than an opportunity for some pretty purple prose and an excuse to bombard the reader with facts that read like they’ve been cribbed from Wikipedia – I’m not really sure. It looks suspiciously like padding.

The vaccine trial has barely begun before a new variant rips through the ­general population, and society as we know it collapses. Bloated and bruised sufferers wander the streets in a fugue-like state as their memories leech away from them. It’s not quite 28 Days Later, but our real-life lockdowns look decidedly easygoing by comparison. Abandoned and alone, Neffy and four other volunteers are left bickering over their quickly diminishing stash of ready meals and wringing their hands. 

Luckily, one of them had the foresight to pack his “Remembered Reality” device – a pioneering piece of technology that allows those who use it to drift into a sort of trance and “revisit” their past. Not everyone can use it effectively, but Neffy has the knack, and quickly becomes addicted. No doubt we’re supposed to appreciate the irony that as the world around her loses its mind, Neffy’s delving deeper into her memories, but again it all feels too neatly manufactured. In reality, it prompts some pretty banal generalisations – “But don’t you think we can learn from the past? See things differently, or let it help us decide what we can do in the future?” Neffy asks a fellow inmate – and some more padding in the form of half a book of ­flashbacks featuring painful and complicated family dynamics.

Much here is familiar ground for Fuller; the set-ups are different, but each of her novels charts the intimate interpersonal relationships between a small group cut off from the wider world in one way or another. Our Endless Numbered Days features a forest-dwelling ­survivalist father and daughter prepping for the end of the world, while Swimming Lessons presents us with a family grieving the loss of a woman missing, presumed drowned. Then there’s the trio who inhabit the grand old crumbling mansion in Bitter Orange, all up in each other’s business in unhealthy ways. And most recently, the middle-aged twins who live in rural isolation in Unsettled Ground. 

All of which is to say that there’s potential in the set-up here – this group of strangers, “[fraying] threads tied together by calamity and shared need, each tugging on an end hoping to make the knot firmer but risking undoing the messy tangle”. Well-versed in writing worst-case scenarios, Fuller’s got more past form than many of the authors who’ve been dipping their toes in apocalyptic tales of late, but The Memory of Animals still feels leaden.

The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller is published by Fig Tree at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books