Children have an intrinsic tendency to believe what they are told. Their impressionable minds make them more likely to fall for pieces of fiction that parents occasionally present to them as the truth. These lies are considered benign in the greater scheme of things. But what happens when those lies transcend small fibs necessary to preserve the innocence of childhood and edge precariously close to deception? This is what Claire Fuller attempts to explore in her Desmond Elliott Prize-winning debut, Our Endless Numbered Days. Our protagonist, Peggy’s father passes on his apocalyptic fantasies to her as facts and tells her that the entire civilisation has been annihilated and they are the last two people left behind.

The story is set in London in the 1970s when hippie survivalist movements were gaining momentum as a result of political instability with rumours surrounding that Russia was starting a nuclear war. James, Peggy’s father, spends his days lounging around with his other survivalist friends who call themselves North Londoner Retreaters. They have frequent altercations about the nature of the impending apocalypse, the best provisions to stockpile and the perfect bug-out location in case of such a calamity.

Peggy’s mother, Ute, who is a famous pianist and presumably the sole breadwinner of the family, is absurdly nonchalant about these bizarre meetings. She dismisses them as boys’ games which she soon comes to regret when one day, while Ute is away on one of her concerts, James takes Peggy with him to a secluded, ramshackled cabin in a remote German forest which he names Die Hütte. Peggy, the unsuspecting eight-year-old that she is, readily believes when her dad tells her that they must confine themselves to this secluded land in order to survive and if they venture beyond these arbitrarily set boundaries, they would fall off over the edge of the world, what he calls The Great Divide.

A tale of apocalyptic paranoia and survival

In the nine years she has spent off the grid, she and her father lived a life of physical extremes amidst their meagre supplies. They subsist on squirrels and rabbits and struggle to tackle the vagaries of the weather in the ruthless terrain. A dishevelled man, Reuben, whom Peggy finds later in the depths of the forest, is the only companion in their desolate existence, and Reuben plays a pivotal role later on. In this dual narrative, the story is told in flashback after a traumatised Peggy returns to London and grapples with readjusting to normal life with Ute and a younger brother she never knew existed.

The book reads like a counterpoint to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which was a testament to the spirit of parental love and will. On the contrary, James voluntarily exiles Peggy from the world without any concerns for her holistic well-being; his myopic vision of survival more than once leads them to the jaws of death. He is a man with delusional and psychotic tendencies who is slowly losing his grip on reality while stubbornly holding on to his fantastical notions. His unrelenting idealism keeps them afloat for a while but when he realises just how ill-equipped he is and how futile all his strategising was, his descent into madness is inevitable.

Peggy’s complex, incongruous relationship with her father is intricately captured. She is at once repulsed and in awe of him. Her mother comes across as a bit self involved, partly due to her taxing profession. James is the one who keeps Peggy engaged by concocting outlandish tales and devising seemingly innocuous games like mock drills in their backyard to prepare for the looming Armageddon. This might be why Peggy is not the least bit suspicious before following her father unquestioningly to an obscure forest that will be her home for a great many years.

“My father and I settled into a routine: a pattern of rising at daybreak; an hour or two of work — chopping wood, collecting kindling; breakfast; an hour of piano; my father’s trek to the river and back up for fresh water; gathering food and eating it if we were successful; an hour or two of free time; more work and food and piano; and when the sun set we’d get ready for bed. The rhythm of our days cocooned me, reassured and comforted me. I slipped into it without thought, so that the life we lived — in an isolated cabin on a crust of land, with the rest of the world simply wiped away, like a damp cloth passed across a chalked blackboard — became my unquestioned normality.” ­— Excerpt from the book

Peggy’s initial unwavering optimism and faith in her father’s plan starts to wane until she is caught in a survival loop of emotional paralysis and dissociation. Her acclimation to conventional city life would understandably be anything but seamless which is tenderly portrayed in the novel. She is disoriented and struggles to familiarise herself with routine sight and sounds — a consequence of spending most of her crucial, formative years out in the wilderness. She suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress which is cleverly depicted in the novel’s subtext. The reader only realises the true extent of the trauma Peggy has suffered after reaching the devastating ending and piecing together all the clues that are peppered throughout the story.

The narrative is propelled by vivid imagery and skilful depiction of abstract emotions. Fuller’s expertise is apparent in how she lucidly paints scenes of the capricious landscape. She effortlessly combines images of idyllic graphic scenery with those of symbolic foreboding. The river is described as a “silver ribbon threaded through a green blanket”. The picturesque details of the wild are strikingly marked — “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 as the horizon. Beyond the river the wooded land rose again to another ridge, and after that I could see only blue sky.”

There is an underlying fantastical quality to the writing — Peggy’s grandmother’s constant advice to her to stay away from the wolf, how she imagines Die Hütte to be a gingerbread house but which she later comes to perceive as a witch’s house where she “half expected a trail of breadcrumbs to lead off into the trees that pressed in from both sides”. These allusions to fairytales play well against the recurrent theme of the book about the illusory nature of subjective reality. The book itself reads like one of the warped Grimm brothers’ fairytales where the fantastic mythical settings (in this case the spellbinding scenery) are a smokescreen to disguise the morbid reality.

There is a slight discrepancy with spacing out the narrative evenly in flashback. The time jumps are abrupt at times. However, that might be due to the difficulty of condensing nine years in a dual narrative.

Returning to nature is a utopian fantasy we all indulge in from time to time. Fuller’s oxymoronic titled story examines the psychological ramifications of a man’s decision to materialise these fanciful ideas.

The writer is a Karachi-based freelance writer and critic.

Our Endless Numbered Days
(FANTASY)
By Claire Fuller
Tin House Books
ISBN: 978-0241003947
386pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 17th, 2016