Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller review – a post-apocalyptic debut with a twist (original) (raw)

Post-apocalyptic scenarios of being the last person alive on Earth are standard fare for Young Adult literature, but that familiar trope is given a twist in a debut novel that brings to mind such unlikely bedfellows as Thoreau’s Walden and Emma Donoghue’s Room.

In 1976, eight-year-old Peggy Hillcoat is the daughter of unconventional parents – concert pianist Ute and her young husband James, who spends his time with “retreater” friends, planning how they would survive come the inevitable nuclear war with the Soviets. Just hot air, everyone thinks, until a marital crisis pushes James into drastic action. Taking Peggy with him he flees abroad, deep into the forests of Germany, where he has been told about a remote hut – “Die Hütte” – that is ideally situated and kitted out for long-term survival.

At first he tells Peggy they are on holiday, but then he uses a particularly bad storm to concoct their own personal apocalypse. “‘I went over to the other side of the Fluss,’ he said. Steady drips of water punctuated his words with a hiss each time they dropped on to the hotplate. ‘To see the damage from the storm. It’s worse than I imagined.’ He sniffed. ‘The rest of the world has gone.’”

The novel is told in flashback, with the opening chapter, and others that follow, giving us Peggy, now aged 17, back in London with her mother, and a younger brother she never knew she had, trying to find a way back to normal life after nine years off the grid. What powers the book is the tension it builds between the fantasy of a return to nature – something shared by many of us – and the psychological damage wrought by someone who decides to turn that fantasy into reality.

The sections detailing Peggy and herfather’s efforts to make a life in the forest will appeal to anyone who remembers Jean George’s My Side of the Mountain, the story of a boy living wild in the Catskill Mountains. Fuller’s writing seems to respond to the changed sense of scale Peggy finds in her new existence: a grasshopper that has hopped on to her hand “sat there like Joan of Arc in its armour and helmet, large amber eyes downcast and saintly”. And when taking in the landscape as a whole: “Die Hütte was held in the mountain’s embrace: two arms wrapped around us, pulling us back from the river like an anxious mother, whilst we hid in a crease in her skirts; an insignificant wrinkle in a mountain range that spread as far the horizon. Beyond the river the wooded land rose again to another ridge, and after that I could see only blue sky.”

At first life is good. Father and daughter set traps to catch squirrels, gather mushrooms and roots, and start a small vegetable garden. James even constructs a soundless piano, with moving keys, so that Peggy can learn to play – a task that becomes an obsession, and takes up time he should be spending preparing for winter, which means they nearly perish from cold and malnutrition.

The book faces a problem of pacing, however. Nine years is a long time, and the gradual naturalisation of this post-nuclear family calls for a slower narration than Fuller allows, in part perhaps because she has structured the novel around the withholding of information. The flashback chapters only work if we are held in suspense about how Peggy’s “life in the woods” ends up, and how she makes it back to civilisation, so the reader has to play along with her forgetfulness or repression of the facts. It is only a couple of dozen pages from her father’s wilful annihilation of the outside world to Peggy’s discovery of boot tracks in the snow that show they are not alone, that her daddy has lied to her. In the end, the gripping but melodramatic family drama played out, long-distance, between Ute, James and Peggy, is more important to the book than the season-by-season drama of survival in the wild.