The Seventh Son

Sebastian Faulks

Hutchinson Heinemann, £22

Review by Rosemary Goring

With this, his 16th novel, Sebastian Faulks has come a long way from earlier titles, such as Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. For much of his career his gaze has been turned towards recent history, notably the First and Second World Wars. With The Seventh Son, however, he projects himself into the future, with a tale that, in the same vein as Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, addresses “what it is to be human”.

That phrase is found increasingly often on book jackets and film puffs. Fascination in the fundamentals of what makes us who we are is easy to understand. With advancing technology we are already inhabiting a world where the ground beneath our feet is not as firm as it once was.

Quite conceivably, within our lifetime – the narrative arc of The Seventh Son runs from 2030 to 2056 – “authentic” humans and hybrid species could be living side by side, the differences between us not immediately discernible.

With a journalist’s nose for a good story, Faulks takes his readers on an engaging and thought-provoking journey into the realm of “what if?” For his characters, of course, there is nothing hypothetical about it, as they gradually discover they have been duped into a situation never before experienced.

The Seventh Son, whose title hints at special powers, is Faulks in Mary Warner mode, probing the ethical pitfalls that lie ahead as we tamper with the human genetic make-up. The book opens with the cash-strapped academic Tallisa, a New York palaeoanthropologist, making the fateful decision to become a surrogate mother. She’s a coolly rational individual, whose line of work has led her to seeing all human beings “as primates first, Homo second and sapiens later if at all”.

At the time, she considers this a purely commercial transaction, a way to fund her postgraduate career. But, as she heads to London to be interviewed as a potential surrogate for history teacher Alaric Pedersen and his wife Mary, it is clear that, for good or for ill, this act will turn into a commitment whose ramifications she won’t be able to control.

That could be true even for the most straightforward of surrogacies. In Tallisa’s case, she has the misfortune to find herself at the Parn Institute, which is running IVF research in tandem with the NHS.

Its founder, Lucas Parn, wants to create a legacy like no other. Described as “an entrepreneur who – almost before his voice had broken, it seemed – had made a dozen fortunes from wave power and biotech”, he is a stock figure in the pantheon of billionaire techy geeks, whose reach and ambitions are global.

Parn’s intentions are not precisely evil. Rather, they are prompted by the sort of curiosity and God-like sense of power that leads children to pick the wings off flies.

Directing one of his staff to make a substitution to the sperm with which Tallisa is impregnated, he glibly rationalises this breach of trust as a giant leap for understanding humanity: “What we really need to know is whether other human species had the same faulty consciousness that we have. And if they had the upsides of it, did they have the downsides too.” By which he means Homo sapiens’s homicidal tendences.

What’s just been introduced to the test-tube – and the clues Faulks drops are so obvious this is surely not a plot spoiler – is the DNA of a Neanderthal. Thus, the baby handed over to Alaric and Mary is a living experiment.

“Ugly little bugger, isn’t he?”, says Alaric fondly, on first seeing him. And in time, the boy, named Seth, grows up “shorter and stockier than most… His heavy forehead and dark eyebrows made it look as if he was thinking things through carefully.”

There are many signals that Seth is unusual, including a second sense about when animals or people are about to appear, and a pronounced appetite for meat. This can be awkward in mid-21st-century society, where restaurants pandering to meat-eaters are rare.

Faulks has fun imagining the near future, where Talissa’s landlady in Muswell Hill is still fuming over Brexit and the austerity governments that have ruined the country.

In this version of the West, people no longer use the term “race” – “it’s unscientific”, Talissa explains - and the word ethnicity has been replaced by “Historic Habitat Adaptation and Drift”.

Recent killings at the White House are blamed on a group called Vector, “a mutation of QAnon and Make America Great Again”. As Talissa tells her landlady, who over the years has become a friend, “Vector made common cause with a few groups we’d all thought dead and buried. Fifth generation Ku Klux Klan types. It took some time. It was like raising the dead. But the coffins creaked open.” By now - 2031 – they are terrorising vigilantes.

Faulks’s writing always flows, and his characters are well drawn. Seth, as he grows into a young man, is no caricature, but a believable individual, as decent and intelligent as his mum and dad. Deftly explaining the science in conversations that manage not to feel like genetics lessons, Faulks’s grasp of the subject is confident.

There is a rather laboured, tutelary strand, involving Talissa’s boyfriend, which feels shoehorned into the story merely to make a scientific point. Yet where The Seventh Son falters is not in its underlying premise but the plot, which towards the end goes haywire.

When teaching history, Alaric strives to interest his pupils in what came before: “‘We’re a moment in a long and mysterious journey,’ he told them. ‘We can only understand where we’re going if we know where we came from. But we are not the terminus. Oh no. We are not Victoria.’ A promising new girl put up her hand. ‘Are we Selhurst Park, sir?’”

The Seventh Son straddles two worlds, encompassing the distant past as well as the future. In so doing, Faulks asks difficult questions about who and what we are, and whether we could ever justifiably alter our genes to remove the worst of our defects.