Guardian review (extract)The essence of the story is this: a cash-strapped academic called Talissa Adam agrees to become a surrogate mother for a childless English couple, Mary and Alaric. The procedure takes place at an institute run by rogue Silicon Valley tycoon Lukas Parn, a man not dissimilar to Elon Musk but minus the cage fighting and with an interest in the human genome rather than space exploration. At a key moment in the process, Lukas’s employees intervene in such a way that the child Talissa bears – whom Mary and Alaric name Seth – will grow up to be markedly different from other people.
The difficulty with discussing this experiment in detail is that the plot of the novel rests on a twist that it would be a pity to reveal. However, who Seth really is, how he differs from the rest of us, what his consciousness consists of and how he wrestles with the loneliness of being cognitively unique are the questions at the core of the book.
Faulks is an enviably graceful and economical writer. The early chapters of the book rip along with clarity and elegance. He conjures up the various worlds, brings the central characters vividly to life and keeps the story moving intriguingly forward.
As a speculative novel, set in the not-too-distant future, this excursion into Michael Crichton territory is a departure for Faulks. But given his résumé and virtuoso talent as a pasticher, who has contributed to the James Bond and PG Wodehouse canons and written a Dickensian novel about the banking crisis, A Week in December, you’d back him to succeed in any genre he chose.
However, at the end of this very melancholy novel, I couldn’t help thinking there was something bicameral about the book itself. On the one hand, there is the familiar pleasure of reading Faulks, the lusty observer of human biodiversity, who writes so well about work and sex and relationships, about messy interactions that are so rarely definitive, about individual complexity, loss and love.
And on the other hand, working alongside him, there is a brainy theoretician who includes long expository sections about human evolution, prehistoric anthropology and the nature of consciousness. It felt to me like this second, highly schematic intelligence overdetermined the shape of the book. It’s surely an odd – and unnecessary – coincidence that Talissa’s area of academic expertise is so precisely matched to the predicament of her surrogate child. The sad fate of her lover, Felix, seems engineered to permit reflections about schizophrenia and its roots in the evolution of human consciousness. These may just be peas under the mattress, but they contribute to a feeling that a conscious notion of theme has blocked the organic growth of the story and that The Seventh Son is at times a work of nonfiction masquerading as a novel.
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