Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents, nor any idea of when it falls.

Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 292
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-241-00394-7
First Published: 16th February 2015
Date Reviewed: 25th April 2018
Rating: 5/5

In 1976, when Peggy was nine years old, her pianist mother travelled for work and her father abducted her (Peggy) and took her to a remote hut in Germany. Telling her her mother had died and the world had been destroyed except for the patch of land she could see from the hut, the two attempted to build a life in a tumbledown shack, the few preparations her father having made being not enough for the years ahead. Several years later – 1985 – and newly returned to her mother, Peggy recounts the years she lost as those around her try to work out the mystery of the person she calls Reuben.

Our Endless Numbered Days is a fine novel of survivalism, and the mental effects of extreme physical and emotional neglect and abuse. Set in decades past, the novel sports a particular beauty despite its often horrific contents, making for a book that packs quite a punch.

As Peggy is reporting on her past with the benefit of – albeit hampered – maturity (she’s now 17), the book has an interesting blend of things written with knowledge, and things that are left for the reader to see the reality of. (The characterisation in this book is excellent.) This is where the writing also makes its mark, mixing with the story-telling style and emphasising the horror – consider a scene in which the beauty of the writing somewhat obscures the madness of the father who comes back with the news that the world is gone, before the choice of his daughter to stir the fire means that she sees her passport burning, which she understands the meaning of but perhaps not as much as the reader does. Young Peggy is at times quite mature but the things she does not argue against are things that from the perspective of someone a few years older, or even some more mature nine-year-olds, are very obviously lies, which has an incredible impact.

And so the novel looks at manipulation and parental neglect, the extreme circumstances ever emphasising the situation. It is never said outright whether Peggy’s father is ‘simply’ manipulative or whether during his time he takes a turn for the worse, mentally, and it is partly this that makes the end of the book so full of impact, the semblance of the questions remaining adding to the gut-punch that is the final few pages; but there is also neglect by Peggy’s mother, Ute, that is almost ushered in, revealed incredibly slowly to the point that you see where obvious problems can obscure less obvious but no less problematic others.

Peggy’s mother is sometimes away and there is the issue of the family hosting the father’s survivalist friends. But more so there are issues in the way that Ute, a famous pianist, does not teach Peggy the piano – nor her mother tongue – and in fact actively dissuades Peggy from playing the instrument. Had Ute been more hands on, would she have seen just how far her husband’s ideas and practices had gone? (One thing the father does is make Peggy pack a rucksack within a certain amount of time and make her way down to the mock bunker basement.) Peggy’s dedication to learning how to play on a soundless, rudimentary, ‘piano’ brings to the foreground her strength to survive.

To go back to the writing, it can at times be magical despite its subject matter. The way seasons are used; the heatwave summer when Peggy plays in the garden and visits the overgrown and no longer used cemetery call to mind Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and the use of winter creates a beauty not unlike that found in Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child. There is indeed a slight feeling of magical realism not unlike that both earlier novels.

The only thing possibly missing is a little more time spent on the intervening years of Peggy’s time away; whilst it makes absolute sense that there isn’t all that much – it would be very mundane – there is a bit of a feeling of the narrative being sped up which has an effect on how much the time away seems to be when reading it, the 300 pages being spread over the before, during, and afterward. However as the narrative has a lot to do with the overall effect of the experience on Peggy’s development, it is far more niggle than active drawback.

Our Endless Numbered Days is a special experience, its themes and the ‘takeaway’ making for something, not necessarily the story itself, that will stay with you for a long period of time. The prose keeps you going through the difficult times and the few questions you will have at the end provide the opportunity to explore the story yourself and fill in the gaps left by the trauma Peggy goes through. It’s a fantastic feat of writing.

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