The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks – A Wild Cat Hides In Your Pet
The Seventh Son is a 2023 novel by Sebastian Faulks, a sci-fi story set in the near future, about a human genetic experiment and its aftermath.
As an aspiring writer I often look at the websites of literary agents. A lot of them will say they are interested in promoting under-represented or diverse voices. Reading The Seventh Son I thought those agents might be interested in signing Seth, the book’s central character, who is unique in having some of humanity’s distant past implanted in his DNA. Ironically, however, Seth looks like someone the agenting world would presumably feel is over-represented – male, white, middle class, Oxbridge educated. Seth even takes the name Ken as an alias. I saw the Barbie movie recently. There are lots of different incarnations of Ken but they are all Ken. This book, supposedly about a unique individual, is actually more about how much people share.
I once visited the British Wildlife Centre in Kent. One of its jungly enclosures housed a wildcat. An information board described the wild cat as endangered, before qualifying this with the admission that wild cats are so genetically similar to domestic cats, that it’s hard to say if wild cats are endangered or doing very well in a slightly different guise. Seth, the central character of The Seventh Son reminded me of that wild cat, a lonely individual, maybe one of the last of his kind, who nevertheless is hard to tell apart from millions of other individuals who are doing very nicely, thank you.
As for the science in the book, some of it is made up. However, I did do a bit of reading and found the book might reflect a reasonable scientific position in a general way. Chris Stringer, a leading authority on ancient humanity suggests that former human species might have been absorbed into present Homo sapiens.
“If you add up all the Neanderthal DNA in the world today in everyone you could probably reconstruct 40% of the Neanderthal genome….” (Quoted in IFL Science, Why Are We The Only Surviving Human Species? 31 Dec 2024.)
So even if some of the science is fictional, my feeling is that there is a reasonable basis for Seth, who is unique in his recreated DNA and yet can easily pass as a normal person rather than being some kind of Frankenstein’s monster. A lost wild cat can be there in today’s domestic pet.
The Seventh Son is an interesting book, relevant to our times when the book industry, along with culture in general, is fragmenting into different enclosures. Rather than a book for everyone, there is more of a feeling that everyone must have their own book. The Seventh Son is a bit of a corrective to that, using human difference as a way to show what humanity shares. It reads like a thriller, carrying a reader along. And that reader could be a generic, white middle class man with a university education, or some other one-of-a-kind individual. There is much more of an overlap between those two people than we usually allow.
