I opened Seed, Bri Lee’s new novel, hours after finishing Trent Dalton’s latest, not expecting they’d have much to say to one another. My mistake. Both are tales of middle-aged men betrayed by their inner voice: two egos, both alike in fragility.
But while Dalton’s leading man is ferociously self-critical, Lee’s narrator casts himself as a lonely soldier on the moral high ground. “I was always doing the right thing,” he sulks, “and yet nobody was ever on my side”. The harder he clings to his goodness, the more pompous and petulant he sounds.
Two needy men: one insisting he’s awful, the other insisting he’s not. Both are equally hungry for reassurance, yet we’re expected to love the former and pity the latter (a fascinating cultural paradox). Dalton indulges the self-pity (and expects that we will, too), but Lee dismantles it, and her novel is sharper for it. She has found her register: the self-deluded arsehole.
Lee’s debut novel, The Work, also centred on a pair of graceless egotists, but she never let them sprawl into their full and majestic awfulness; she shoehorned them into a romcom instead, neutered with a happy ending. In Seed, the author lets her cast stay mean and messy. The containment this time is physical: she locks them in a permafrost cage.
Welcome to Anarctos: a secret Antarctic seed bank, built after the second cold war to replace European vaults destroyed by Russian bombs. Each year, a group of scientists spends a lonely month on the ice, cataloguing new deposits. This time the job has fallen to Mitchell (Mitch) and Frances, colleagues with benefits. Their task should be routine, but security protocols are slipping. Someone has smuggled a pet cat into the facility – a purring biohazard. A mystery crate has appeared in the inventory. The radio has gone silent. Even the penguins are restless. Is someone tampering with Anarctos, or is the menace nothing more (or less) than the scientists’ own ever-whirring minds?
It’s a nifty premise for a thriller, and Seed provides exactly what it promises: a novel of friction and paranoia, of weaponised mistrust and cloistered desire. It’s claustrophobic and propulsive and wry – no easy balance. But what lingers is Mitch: a man turned septic in his own misery.
Lee’s narrator Mitch is an avowed and vocal antinatalist, who reveres Antarctica for its lavish indifference to human life (“The apathy of the landscape was its bliss”). It is his sixth stint on Anarctos, though he is still chasing the thrill of the first: the year he met his now ex-wife, Kate. Seed opens in the aftermath of their split, and we meet him watching her, “belly distended” with another man’s child. To Mitch she is ruined – “a creature of exceptional intellect reduced to a leaking mass of hormonal impulses”. A waddling “billboard” for everything rank in the human condition; “a base mammal”.
These are ugly thoughts from an ugly place: humiliation and heartbreak curdled into rancour, disgust and superiority. But he cannot admit it, not yet. For now, his fury dresses itself as principle. Mitch is steadfast; Kate is a traitor. A breeder.
But Kate is also the only pilot with the clearance to ferry scientists in and out of Anarctos. The month Mitch spends on the ice is a month spent waiting for her amid the relics of their love affair. A month in which her foetus grows and grows. In the dark soil of Mitch’s mind, something else takes root: a wild hope that something between them may yet be salvaged. It is not a redemptive hope, but a revealing one: it maps the shape of his shame. Here is a man with planet-saving dreams, who has become a poster boy for “incels” – a realisation he makes with humour and grief: “I had the sad, cold love of a twenty-year-old misogynist and all I wanted was the warmth of my wife.”
Seed sits at the crossroads of (at least) three subgenres: outpost paranoia (films such as Solaris and Moon), polar horror (see the ice novels of Kim Stanley Robinson and Michelle Paver) and eco-dystopia (there are echoes here of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind). It’s a zeitgeisty niche; Lee is not the only Aussie novelist this year to set a tale of psychological menace in a seed bank. Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, published in March, unfolds nearby – and also in the near-distant future – on a subantarctic island off the coast of Tasmania.
Both are tales of procreating in the Anthropocene (the symbolism of imperilled seeds is hardly subtle). What does it mean to burden the world with children, they ask, and children with the world? McConaghy gives us a paean to parenting; but Lee resists. She has no tidy answer. Only the conviction that the question is worth asking.
With Mitch at its centre, all sneer and misanthropy, Seed can’t quite pass as a good-faith exploration of antinatalism. (Like Wild Dark Shore, it feeds the pernicious myth that a person who does not want children must be secretly damaged.) What it offers instead is a character study in bad faith: the tension between what we believe and how we behave, what we see and what we ignore, what (and who) we’ll betray to get what we want. That’s what holds the novel taut.
Lee sustains that tension until the novel’s final pages: a last act that frustratingly, and spectacularly, undoes everything she has so carefully built. But I’m inclined to ignore it. Seed is not a perfect book by any means, but it is damn good fun – snarky and spiky and refreshingly willing to be cruel.
Seed by Bri Lee is out now in Australia (A$34.99, Simon & Schuster)
