There are many nightmarish scenarios in James Bradley's new novel,Ghost Species,so to paraphrase at least one of them does not give the game away.
The main character is a Neanderthal female,Eve,who has been genetically engineered as part of a tech billionaire's ambition to re-boot our planet's deep-time ecosystems from a Bond-ish facility in remote Tasmania. When baby Eve develops a fever,however,one of her geneticist-creators,Kate – who has grown maternally attached to the baby – is confronted with the complicated ramifications of the situation.
James Bradley's Ghost Species enlists the current fascination for futurist tropes.Janie Barrett
Because Eve has not co-evolved with modern human viruses it is unknown how she will cope with even the smallest sniffle. As the fever rises Kate is forced not only to endure the normal anxiety of a young mother but also the torture that Eve's life could be over and that she would be,in the most complex way,entirely responsible.
There ensues the most affecting emotional scenario of the novel,thus reiterating a point that Bradley made inClade,that when the end-days come the weirdest thing will be how simultaneously strange and also normal it will all seem.
But who's to say? As it turns out,Time with a capital T is a key character inGhost Species – not by virtue of the way the novel is built,it being constructed via a linear storyline that follows Eve into young womanhood,but in the polytemporal concept of bringing an ur-human back to life in the midst of a 21st-century climate breakdown.
Without irony Bradley personifies the deep past through the character of Eve,while also making the recursive and often nostalgic nature of current posthuman movements melodramatically explicit.
As the cracking of the Antarctic ice sheet proceeds a few thousand kilometres south of the action,and as our excessively infrastructural lives go into mock-operatic freefall,the return to some kind of primeval post-electrical existence turns out to be tailor-made not for cartoonish hypertech billionaires or regenerative neo-peasants but for the technologically concocted young noble savage that is Eve.
Yes,she is at home in nature,she is broad-browed,excessively strong,and her"fox-brown eyes and tawny hair give her the look of a forest creature". What's more,when push comes to shove she kicks like Jackie Chan and growls like a wolf.
In some ways,then,this rather Netflix-ish tale is designed to be a bit of a hoot as it enlists the current fascination for futurist tropes and ticks many of the boxes of an already highly mediated impending disaster. But there is an uneasy layer to this,as the book feels like it teeters on the edge of packaging up the components of a decidedly real planetary predicament for its own generic ends.
In this sense it is a novel in which nearly every human character is gasping for nuance or depth,even as the earth's biome is being effectively killed off by our complete failure to ameliorate the heating climate,leaving the planet teetering on its axis.
As an experienced and yet agile novelist,an intelligent critic,and also a writer of YA fiction:Bradley is steeped in all manner of interesting and speculative narrative strategies,and may well have chosen the approach here to get his sense of urgency about the climate crisis across to a wider audience.
Perhaps,then,ifGhost Species was more ironically self reflexive,or if it was not being presented as the most prophetic kind of literary fiction,it would not feel quite as problematic as it does. We do not,after all,expect the same level of fidelity to our deepest existential realities from pulp fiction as we do from novelists of the calibre and heft of Laszlo Krasznahorkai,Alexis Wright or Patrick Modiano.
Whatever the case,we do have to ask whether or not our tendency to be continually distracted by the often facile representations of ourselves that have become a staple of profit-driven mainstream entertainment is in any way connected to our inability to forgo our addiction to over-consumption.
If the tragic but nevertheless clear-skied realities of the lockdown have shown us anything it is surely that,along with an urgent shift to clean energy,kicking those habits of consumption,and the inevitable dumbing-down that goes with them,is what our besieged and increasingly furious Mother Earth is asking of us right now.