Book: Wake up
Author: Tim Pears, (Bloomsbury, £16.99)
Book: Middlesex
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides, (Bloomsbury, £16.99)
In Douglas Adams's 1980 novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, as Zaphod Beeblebrox and friends take their seats at the restaurant of the same name, they are greeted by an ingeniously engineered bovine waiter: "Good evening. I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" It had been decided, the cow explains to its would-be consumers, to "breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am." Twenty years on, the possibilities of genetic engineering-clones, Frankenfood, animal-human organ transplants-continue to generate a stream of fictional meditations on the implications of a post-evolutionary future, though few have been as entertainingly succinct as Adams's walking, talking steak machine.
The 1980s and 1990s saw an upsurge in the number of novelists and playwrights venturing across the Two Cultures border. They returned from the science side bearing metaphors, plotlines, ideas and analogies. Neutrinos, superstrings and wave-particle dualities started cropping up in the works of Tom Stoppard (Hapgood), Martin Amis (Night Train), Ian McEwan (The Child in Time), Michael Frayn (Copenhagen). The mind-expanding sublimity of particle physics and mathematics-what Amis called the "whizz-bang factor"-was seen to bring a reflected glory to the world of literature. The involvement of such serious authors as Amis, Stoppard and McEwan was also seen as proof that fiction about science need not be science fiction. The distinction between the two modes could be made as follows: the primary aim of science fiction is to elaborate and embroider upon the rational premises of science, and ponder possible future implications for humanity. The point of science "in" fiction, however, has been to use the metaphors of science to illuminate human situations and reactions, and to scrutinise how science's findings might cause us to re-evaluate our selves, and the selves of others.
English male novelists, Lucy Ellmann remarked acidly in the 1990s, had become convinced they shouldn't write about "life, the world, the Universe, their mothers, or anything else until they'd read a few books on black holes." But since the late 1990s-in the wake of the human genome project and the GM food scares -biology, and genetics in particular, has been taking over from particle physics as stimuli for literary contemplation of the human condition.
Biologically modified fictions, of course, go all the way back to Frankenstein in 1818. Until recently, however, most genetics plots veered towards science fiction. In 1966, Frank Herbert set Dr Svengaard, the geneticist hero of his novel The Eyes of Heisenberg against the evil Optimen clones; two decades later, in Greg Bear's Blood Music, Americans were dissolving into a brown, vegetable-like substance, thanks to the exploits of an irresponsible geneticist. And, famously, in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1991), greedy venture capitalists and irresponsible dinosaur enthusiasts plunged into a disastrous and implausible scheme to reconstruct dinosaurs from DNA stored in prehistoric mosquitoes.
Since the beginning of the 1990s there have been a scattering of serious literary works about cloning, from Fay Weldon's The Cloning of Joanna May (1990) to Eva Hoffman's The Secret (2001); but, perhaps most notoriously, the idea of "metaphysical mutation" in Michel Houellebecq's Atomised suggests that there is something in biotechnology which specifically suits the novelist's imagination. Two new genetic fictions offer an idea as to where this may be leading.
John, the narrator of Wake Up by Tim Pears, is a small-town, amateur version of the figure that Crichton so reviled in Jurassic Park: the businessman scientist. After failing to qualify for postgraduate research, he has gone into potato wholesaling, turning the family greengrocer business into Spudnik, a massive, modern concern. Two successful decades later, he and his brother embark on a project to genetically engineer medical vaccines into potatoes. Partnered by a biotechnology firm, John and Greg have sponsored human trials in the Venezuelan jungle for this wonder-potato.
John's discovery that two volunteers taking part in the trial have died provides the novel's framing device, as he drives endlessly round a ring road, forever postponing his arrival at work, when he will have to break the news to his brother. John's life story and philosophy supply the main plot: his lower-middle class origins, his climb up the social ladder, his relationship with his upper-class but impoverished new-age wife, Lily, his love for his son, John Junior. There are also some less appealing details: the fact that he sleeps with his younger sister Melody, that he visits prostitutes, his ruthless, evolutionary obsession with the idea of progress, even though it has left him (literally) going round in circles. John's most attractive characteristic-his love for his baby son-only intensifies our sense of his egotism. John Junior, he finally reveals, is exactly that: a clone of his father.
But Wake Up is not a polemic against the reckless steamroller of progress and its hard-nosed human prophets. The two dead Venezuelans, it turns out, were part of the trial's control group and therefore had not eaten the modified potatoes; the new technology might have saved their lives. Moreover, John's ideological opposite number, his bohemian wife, fails to produce a consistent case for environmentalism. Her Fair Trade cottons easily give way to Nicole Farhi and the bourgeois comforts that new money can buy. In John, Pears has created a convincingly ambivalent amalgam of the forces driving the quest to control life: greed for money and power, combined with a desire to improve things.
If the structure of Wake Up resembles an individual strand of DNA-John's life story enclosed within his unending circuits round the ring road-Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, traces the progress of the double helix through several generations of an intermarried family: One Hundred Years of Solitude with evolutionary consciousness. The grandchild of first-generation Greek immigrants to Detroit (like Eugenides himself), Calliope Stephanides's DNA has packed a surprise that isn't revealed until she reaches puberty. Recurrence of a recessive family gene has left her a hermaphrodite, at first glance female but harbouring inside not a womb but a "crocus": a tiny, hypospadiac penis. Aged 41, now living as a man, "Cal" decides it is time to start playing the muse about his genetic past.
The story begins in 1922, with his grandparents' flight from Asia Minor after the Turkish invasion. Calliope's grandfather Lefty facilitates the return of the family's recessive gene in his own progeny by marrying his sister, Desdemona, while they sail, as orphaned exiles, to America. Only realising the potential medical consequences of her actions after pregnancy, Desdemona is racked with anxiety for the health of her two children. But all appears to progress normally, even after Desdemona's son Milton adds to the inbreeding count by producing two children with his first cousin Tessie: a son and a "daughter," Calliope.
Her maternal duties performed, Desdemona retires almost permanently to her bed, where she waits for something to go wrong. After 14 years of Calliope's life-years that take in the Detroit race riots of 1967 and a fretful puberty during which she fails to grow breasts or menstruate-her complex biological status is finally exposed and she falls into the clutches of Dr Luce, an ambitious New York sexologist. Fleeing her well-meaning parents and Dr Luce's plan to feminise her surgically, Calliope runs away to San Francisco, where she reinvents herself as a boy and earns a crust as Hermaphroditus, an exhibit in a sex club freak-show. When the club is busted by the police, Calliope (now "Cal") is finally forced to return to her/his family. Desdemona's reunion with her now-grandson prompts the confession that provides the genetic clue to Cal's ambiguous gender: "In the village, long time ago, they use to have sometimes babies who were looking like girls. Then-15, 16-they are looking like boys!? It's all my fault? The priests say even first cousins never should marry."
Eugenides has turned the Stephanides epic into a genetic detective novel, building up to the rediscovery of the faulty gene while the layers of intermarriage accumulate with each generation. In amongst the twists of the double helix lies sharp writing on the human condition: the immigrant experience, the pleasures and horrors of puberty, the anthropology of suburbia. Pears and Eugenides prove that literary engagement with genetics is good for more than science fiction.
