James Bradley OAM is a novelist, essayist, anthologist and critic. I was prompted to buy his most recent novel Ghost Species after hearing him speak at the 2020 Melbourne Writers Festival, the one that pivoted online during Lockdown. He spoke with Irish author Caoilinn Hughes (The Wild Laughter, see my review) on the topic of Crisis Literature, and their divergent views were interesting. Hughes, writing about the GFC in Ireland, thought that time was needed in order to take a long view of events. Bradley, whose preoccupation with climate change features in Ghost Species as well as his other novels said that it’s not possible to reflect on the past in the same way because things are changing all the time.

So Ghost Species is a novel 'of the moment' which also anticipates a dystopian future. I think I read it too soon after Sally Abbott's debut novel Closing Down, (see my review) because I found myself comparing the two and finding the former more accomplished. I had also read Donna Mazza's Fauna (see my review) which also explored the complications of bio-engineering when a commercial company, Lifeblood(R), offers incentives for women craving motherhood to join an experimental IVF genetics program using non-human DNA. With the final elements of Ghost Species reminding me of the apocalyptic violence of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which I read ages ago before I started blogging, see a synopsis here), I didn't feel that I was reading original ideas.

It might just have been my timing. Readers whose reviews I follow at Goodreads think highly of this novel.

Ghost Species starts out with an Elon-Musk type of character called Davis Hucken setting up a secluded lab in Tassie. His ambition is to reverse extinction in the hope that restoring the ecosystem with thylacines, mammoths and aurochs can reverse climate change. He hires scientists Kate and Jay to assist with another project, which is to breed a Neanderthal in the hope that it might be possible to learn something from them.

Bradley doesn't dwell on the technicalities of the project, and it all seems credible enough — except for the people involved. Jay is keen from the outset while Kate is dubious. Distrusting Davis's charm, Kate asks why:

'Because we can. Because it gives us the chance to undo the wrong that was done when they were wiped out. But also because we need them; the world needs them. Look at the Earth, at what our carelessness has done to it. We can't let that happen again. We need to be tested by other minds, other perspectives. We need to learn from other eyes to see the world. Think what we could learn from them, from their minds. Imagine speaking to another species!'

Kate shakes her head in disbelief. 'Without an evolutionary context, a community, they wouldn't be another species, they'd be an exhibit, an experiment. All we'd see when we looked into their eyes would be a reflection of our own hubris.'

Davis gives her an oddly blank look. 'Perhaps at first. But you know as well as I do that the nature of life is to adapt, to change.'

'Even if you could reassemble the genetic material, you would require human surrogates,' says Jay. 'As well as human eggs. And I can't begin to imagine how you'd get ethical clearance. Human cloning is banned in almost every country in the world.' (p.26)

So, credibility problem No 1: why would career scientists put their entire future employment at risk by getting involved in a project that is bypassing all the usual ethical research and IVF protocols for an outcome so flimsy, i.e. that they might learn something from a Neanderthal.

Credibility problem No 2 is the surrogate, again bypassing all the protocols and caricatured as having no feelings and taking no interest whatsoever in the baby she is carrying. She vanishes out of the story as if she were no more than an incubator. (I kept expecting her to come back and demand to see the child.)

My rest of my review contains minor spoilers, so visit with caution at https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/10/08/ghost-species-by-james-bradley/ ( )