Seed by Bri Lee – this propulsive, enjoyable eco-thriller is the novelist’s strongest but | Australian books

I opened Seed, Bri Lee’s new novel, hours after ending Trent Dalton’s newest, not anticipating they’d have a lot to say to at least one one other. My mistake. Both are tales of middle-aged males betrayed by their internal voice: two egos, each alike in fragility.

But whereas Dalton’s main man is ferociously self-critical, Lee’s narrator casts himself as a lonely soldier on the ethical excessive floor. “I was always doing the right thing,” he sulks, “and yet nobody was ever on my side”. The tougher he clings to his goodness, the extra pompous and petulant he sounds.

Two needy males: one insisting he’s terrible, the opposite insisting he’s not. Both are equally hungry for reassurance, but we’re anticipated to like the previous and pity the latter (an enchanting cultural paradox). Dalton indulges the self-pity (and expects that we are going to, too), however Lee dismantles it, and her novel is sharper for it. She has discovered her register: the self-deluded arsehole.

Lee’s debut novel, The Work, additionally centred on a pair of graceless egotists, however she by no means allow them to sprawl into their full and majestic awfulness; she shoehorned them right into a romcom as a substitute, neutered with a contented ending. In Seed, the creator lets her solid keep imply and messy. The containment this time is bodily: she locks them in a permafrost cage.

Welcome to Anarctos: a secret Antarctic seed financial institution, constructed after the second chilly warfare to interchange European vaults destroyed by Russian bombs. Each yr, a bunch 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 advantages. Their job needs to be routine, however safety protocols are slipping. Someone has smuggled a pet cat into the power – a purring biohazard. A thriller crate has appeared within the stock. The radio has gone silent. Even the penguins are stressed. Is somebody tampering with Anarctos, or is the menace nothing extra (or much less) than the scientists’ personal ever-whirring minds?

It’s a nifty premise for a thriller, and Seed gives precisely what it guarantees: a novel of friction and paranoia, of weaponised distrust and cloistered need. It’s claustrophobic and propulsive and wry – no straightforward stability. But what lingers is Mitch: a person turned septic in his personal distress.

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, although he’s nonetheless chasing the joys of the primary: the yr he met his now ex-wife, Kate. Seed opens within the aftermath of their cut up, and we meet him watching her, “belly distended” with one other man’s youngster. To Mitch she is ruined – “a creature of exceptional intellect reduced to a leaking mass of hormonal impulses”. A waddling “billboard” for every thing rank within the human situation; “a base mammal”.

These are ugly ideas from an unsightly place: humiliation and heartbreak curdled into rancour, disgust and superiority. But he can’t admit it, not but. For now, his fury attire itself as precept. Mitch is steadfast; Kate is a traitor. A breeder.

But Kate can also be the one pilot with the clearance to ferry scientists out and in of Anarctos. The month Mitch spends on the ice is a month spent ready for her amid the relics of their love affair. A month wherein her foetus grows and grows. In the darkish soil of Mitch’s thoughts, one thing else takes root: a wild hope that one thing between them could but be salvaged. It isn’t a redemptive hope, however a revealing one: it maps the form of his disgrace. Here is a person with planet-saving goals, who has develop into 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 on the crossroads of (no less than) three subgenres: outpost paranoia (movies akin to Solaris and Moon), polar horror (see the ice novels of Kim Stanley Robinson and Michelle Paver) and eco-dystopia (there are echoes right here of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind). It’s a zeitgeisty area of interest; Lee isn’t the one Aussie novelist this yr to set a story of psychological menace in a seed financial institution. Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, revealed in March, unfolds close by – and in addition within the near-distant future – on a subantarctic island off the coast of Tasmania.

Both are tales of procreating within the Anthropocene (the symbolism of imperilled seeds is hardly delicate). What does it imply to burden the world with kids, they ask, and youngsters with the world? McConaghy provides us a paean to parenting; however Lee resists. She has no tidy reply. Only the conviction that the query is price asking.

With Mitch at its centre, all sneer and misanthropy, Seed can’t fairly cross as a good-faith exploration of antinatalism. (Like Wild Dark Shore, it feeds the pernicious fable that an individual who doesn’t need kids should be secretly broken.) What it gives as a substitute is a personality examine in dangerous religion: the stress between what we consider and the way we behave, what we see and what we ignore, what (and who) we’ll betray to get what we would like. That’s what holds the novel taut.

Lee sustains that stress till the novel’s remaining pages: a final act that frustratingly, and spectacularly, undoes every thing she has so fastidiously constructed. But I’m inclined to disregard it. Seed isn’t an ideal e book by any means, however it’s rattling good enjoyable – snarky and spiky and refreshingly keen to be merciless.