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\n Seed<\/p>\n
As indelible images go, the hollowed eyes of a petrified seal succinctly elicit the chill of Bri Lee\u2019s second novel, Seed, following 2024\u2019s The Work. \u201cIt was rare, but it did happen that a single creature\u2019s internal compass would \u2026 drag itself far from the water and into the dry valleys, towards the desert and an inevitable death alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lost deep into the continent\u2019s frozen heart, this ill-fated mammal now functions as a wayfinder. Its arrested gaze observes the secret location of the Anarctos Project, a biodiversity-preserving seed vault not unlike that at Svalbard. That name resembles \u201cAntarktos\u201d, the title of an H.\u200aP. Lovecraft sonnet that in turn inspired John W. Campbell\u2019s novella Who Goes There?, aka The Thing from Another World. But Lee\u2019s concerns are not about aliens.<\/p>\n
Only lightly speculative, Seed is set in a near-future in which encroaching collapse has spurred a growing antinatalism movement and reboot plans such as Anarctos. It\u2019s here that biologists Mitchell and Frances spend their summer. Mitchell\u2019s ex Kate, a heavily pregnant helicopter pilot, drops them off. They broke up when she chose to pursue motherhood. \u201cI should be mad at her,\u201d he says to Frances. \u201cYou are,\u201d she retorts.<\/p>\n
A cantankerous narrator, Mitchell is an unusual way into the story. Prone to bouts of casual misogyny, he\u2019s not a million miles from the subject matter of Lee\u2019s memoir, Eggshell Skull. He discovers a slinky cat shortly after arrival and names her Nansen, assuming she\u2019s a peace offering from Kate. Frances isn\u2019t impressed he keeps this contaminant. The humans have their own perfunctory arrangement: they leave their bunk doors open at night.<\/p>\n
Halfway through, the vault\u2019s radios are suspiciously down and Kate fails to pick up the biologists when their time is done. Did she leave Nansen, or is someone else here? Strongest in its back half as their paranoid anxiety erupts, Seed is a touch didactic in its exploration of moral quandaries and existential concerns. That\u2019s partly down to Mitchell being a clumsy narratorial tool. Through his eyes, Frances, a woman of colour who has cast off her overbearing mother\u2019s religious shackles, is\u00a0even more thinly sketched.<\/p>\n
If Seed\u2019s big ideas don\u2019t quite coalesce at the level of character, it\u2019s nevertheless an eminently unnerving read. Drawing on Lee\u2019s month spent in Antarctica, the novel\u2019s sense of isolating place and panic is formidable. As the doomsday clock runs down, one last flourish of hope revealed in the pacy finale is, like that icy seal, both beautiful and grim.<\/p>\n
Summit Books, 304pp, $34.99<\/p>\n
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\n Seed<\/p>\n
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