Sebastien Faulks
Penguin Random House
Otago Daily Times, January 10th 2024
The villain of Sebastian Faulks’ 16th novel, Australian billionaire entrepreneur Lukas Parn, believes the development of self-awareness is what differentiated Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens: an evolutionary leap allowing us to make cathedrals and great art but also rendering us warlike and prone to psychosis and dementia. So, with suitably Technobro-messianism, Parn sets out to test his theory by covertly fertilising the ova of an IVF patient at one of his private clinics with a synthetically – generated Neanderthal sperm. The resulting child, Seth, is followed as he grows to adulthood to identify neurological and psychological differences from his fully-sapient peers, an experiment presumably destined to end in tragedy. I, however, can’t tell you because I didn’t make it that far.
Despite being described as “a spectacular examination of what it is to be human”, Faulk’s turgid, pseudo-science-laden prose and two-dimensional characters left me cold. Seth doesn’t see the point of art or anticipate the future, has a 6th sense for animals, is magnetically attractive to women, and generally fails to rise above the stereotypical ‘noble savage’. His fellow cast members are similarly flat and caricatured, and I didn’t care enough about any of them to stay the distance.
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