Review of OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS by Claire Fuller

 4 Stars

Having recently read and enjoyed Claire Fuller’s latest novel, Unsettled Ground, I decided to read her debut book which received much acclaim.

The novel begins in 1985 in London; 17-year-old Peggy Hillcoat is home with her mother Ute and her younger brother Oskar after having spent the last 9 years with her father in a remote cabin in Germany. 

As she tries to reintegrate into modern life, flashbacks take the reader back to 1976 when Peggy is 8 years old.  Her father James, a survivalist, kidnaps his daughter and takes her to live in Die Hütte.  Shortly after their arrival, he tells her, “’The rest of the world has gone’” so she believes that she and her father are the only people alive.  The two have a difficult life, subsisting on squirrels, roots, and berries. Much of the book’s interest lies in how they manage to survive and how Peggy finds her way back to London without her father.

There are several interesting characters.  James seems to be an immature man who is easily influenced by others.  He acts impulsively.  Though he makes lists, he is really not sufficiently prepared for life off-grid.  He has an obsessive personality; for instance he becomes so pre-occupied with building a piano that summer and autumn days are wasted:  “We should have been gathering and storing food and wood for the winter and, too late, we discovered that music could not sustain us.”  He is moody; Peggy is attuned to his mood changes:  “I sat on the bed, chewing my nails, worrying about how my father was too happy and how long it would be until his happiness left.”  As the years pass, James mind obviously deteriorates.

Ute is absent from Peggy’s life for nine years, but in fact she is absent much sooner.  Ute is a concert pianist, and she largely abdicates her role as mother.  She seems to care more about her career than her daughter’s well-being.  She goes on a concert tour, apparently without saying goodbye to her daughter, and leaves her in her father’s care even though she has reservations about his survivalist activities.  She doesn’t even call to check up on James and Peggy.  It is noteworthy that, despite being a German pianist, Ute doesn’t teach her daughter how to play the piano or to speak German, so Peggy can’t even speak to her grandmother. 

Peggy is the narrator, but it becomes clear that she may be an unreliable one.  She mentions that she has been diagnosed with Korsakoff’s syndrome which is characterized by memory loss, confabulation, and hallucinations.  Emotions which she cannot process, she projects onto her doll Phyllis:  “At odd times I would remember with a jolt that Ute was dead, and Phyllis and I would crawl into the tent to cuddle until she stopped crying.”  She is subject to vivid dreams:  “I dreamed of two people frozen to death in their single bed, locked together in the shape of a double S.  When the spring sunshine crept under the door, the bodies defrosted and melted.  An unknown man came upon the cabin, hacking his way in with an axe through the stems of a thorny rose which bound the door shut.  I saw his hand, rough and hairy, reach out to pull back the sleeping bags, revealing faceless pulp, like the slippery guts of fish.”  Peggy also has a habit of bargaining to help her cope:  “If I drink this milk, Papa will say it’s time to go home” and “I told myself that if I caught the insect, Ute would not be dead and soon we would turn around and start going home” and “If I rocked for long enough, when I opened [my eyes] I would be able to stand and walk back through the trees into the clearing and hear the regular beat of the axe as my father chopped the wood.” 

There are some improbabilities that are problematic.  In nine years, Peggy and James encounter no one else:  “I had no idea this wind-worn woman, creased and bag-eyed, standing outside her barn with her cow on a rope, would be the last person I would meet from the real world for another nine years”?  Yet someone built a cabin which, though dilapidated, has a stove and basic furniture?  James’ lie that the world has been destroyed is never shattered by evidence like a plane?  Though Peggy does not speak German, wouldn’t she recognize the language from hearing her mother and grandmother speak it?

Reading this book is like constructing a complex jigsaw puzzle.  If attention is paid to details, the ending is not a surprise but a confirmation of the psychological damage caused by trauma.  I enjoyed the book and am quickly becoming a fan of Claire Fuller.