Ghost Species, by James Bradley

James Bradley OAM is a novelist, essayist, anthologist and critic.  I was prompted to buy his most recent novel Ghost Species after hearing him speak at the 2020 Melbourne Writers Festival, the one that pivoted online during Lockdown.  He spoke with Irish author Caoilinn Hughes (The Wild Laughter, see my review) on the topic of Crisis Literature, and their divergent views were interesting.  Hughes, writing about the GFC in Ireland, thought that time was needed in order to take a long view of events. Bradley, whose preoccupation with climate change features in Ghost Species as well as his other novels, said that it’s not possible to reflect on the past in the same way because things are changing all the time.

So Ghost Species is a novel ‘of the moment’ which also anticipates a dystopian future. I think I read it too soon after Sally Abbott’s debut novel Closing Down, (see my review) because I found myself comparing the two and finding the former more accomplished. I had also read Donna Mazza’s Fauna (see my review) which also explored the complications of bio-engineering when a commercial company, Lifeblood(R), offers incentives for women craving motherhood to join an experimental IVF genetics program using non-human DNA.  With the final elements of Ghost Species reminding me of the apocalyptic violence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (which I read ages ago before I started blogging, see a synopsis here), I didn’t feel that I was reading original ideas.

It might just have been my timing.  Readers whose reviews I follow at Goodreads think highly of this novel.

Ghost Species starts out with an Elon-Musk type of character called Davis Hucken setting up a secluded lab in Tassie.  His ambition is to reverse extinction in the hope that restoring the ecosystem with thylacines, mammoths and aurochs can reverse climate change.  He hires scientists Kate and Jay to assist with another project, which is to breed a Neanderthal in the hope that it might be possible to learn something from them.

Bradley doesn’t dwell on the technicalities of the project, and it all seems credible enough — except for the people involved.  Jay is keen from the outset while Kate is dubious.   Distrusting Davis’s charm, Kate asks why:

‘Because we can.  Because it gives us the chance to undo the wrong that was done when they were wiped out.  But also because we need them; the world needs them.  Look at the Earth, at what our carelessness has done to it. We can’t let that happen again. We need to be tested by other minds, other perspectives.  We need to learn from other eyes to see the world. Think what we could learn from them, from their minds.  Imagine speaking to another species!’

Kate shakes her head in disbelief.  ‘Without an evolutionary context, a community, they wouldn’t be another species, they’d be an exhibit, an experiment.  All we’d see when we looked into their eyes would be a reflection of our own hubris.’

Davis gives her an oddly blank look.  ‘Perhaps at first.  But you know as well as I do that the nature of life is to adapt, to change.’

‘Even if you could reassemble the genetic material, you would require human surrogates,’ says Jay.  ‘As well as human eggs. And I can’t begin to imagine how you’d get ethical clearance.  Human cloning is banned in almost every country in the world.’ (p.26)

So, credibility problem No 1: why would career scientists put their entire future employment at risk by getting involved in a project that is bypassing all the usual ethical research and IVF protocols for an outcome so flimsy, i.e. that they might learn something from a Neanderthal.

Credibility problem No 2 is the surrogate, again bypassing all the protocols and caricatured as having no feelings and taking no interest whatsoever in the baby she is carrying.  She vanishes out of the story as if she were no more than an incubator. (I kept expecting her to come back and demand to see the child.)

CAUTION: SPOILER ALERT

Credibility problem No 3 is that Kate unexpectedly bonds with the baby girl, (imaginatively named Eve) and because she is dubious about its future with the Foundation, she kidnaps Eve and hides out in a secluded shack where their isolation means little contact with anyone who might be suspicious.

Bradley solves credibility problem no 4 (why would the resources of the Foundation not be deployed to track down their very expensive investment?) when Jay turns up as Eve, apparently developing normally and achieving the usual milestones, nears school age.  It turns out that they were monitoring her all the time anyway, content to leave things as they were until now.  What’s different now is that the Elon Musk type character is becoming more erratic and the Foundation wants to avoid any scrutiny.  So Kate and Eve are set up in a congenial house where they live almost normally, with a little playgroup for Eve and lessons so that she learns to read. Nothing untoward happens except that the climate crisis escalates, and (sorry, this is a #Spoiler) Kate gets a brain tumour and dies.

So, now there’s a teenage Neanderthal behaving a lot like any normal teenager and refusing to cooperate, and the climate crisis has reached a point where societal norms are breaking down.  Does anybody learn anything from her?  Not that I can see, so what is the point?

Other reviewers were more impressed. See James McKenzie Watson at the Newtown Review of Books. Closer to my reservations about the novel is Roslyn Jolly at the Sydney Review of Books. 

I like Book Twitter: there are interesting bookish people there (though it still requires rigorous curating).  Last month I had a brief conversation about the limits of dystopian cli-fi with @MegBrayshaw (John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature at USYD) and @frippet a.k.a. Jane Rawson a.k.a. Queen of Australian Genre-bending Fiction.

Meg: I think we might be turning towards more experimental forms for the climate novel, and a less didactically hopeless model for representing it. We’ll see!

Jane Rawson: straight-up dystopias are over and things have to be more interesting in some way.

Jane and Meg know much more about dystopian fiction than I ever will, but it seems to me that in the 21st century it’s a problematic genre in a way that it wasn’t in the 20th century when dystopias were focussed on the problem of totalitarianism.  Ghost Species romps along, it’s easy to read, it has engaging characters and the settings in the Tasmanian bush are a reminder of what there is to lose.  But because none of the characters behave ethically, the novel doesn’t ever address the ethical questions that bedevil the whole problem of climate change (or potential nuclear annihilation).  Ghost Species doesn’t follow through to the logical questions that emerge from a rich man’s vanity project.   When we already know the solutions that could ameliorate the risk to our planet, and have known them for decades but have chosen not to act — ethically speaking — what is it that we can and can’t, should and shouldn’t do in this existential crisis?

James Bradley blogs intermittently at City of Tongues.

Author: James Bradley
Title: Ghost Species
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, (Penguin Random House), 2020
ISBN: 9781926428666, pbk., 272 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books, $29.99