Recent Reading: Appleseed by Matt Bell

[This is an experiment. My recent reading roundup reviews have steadily been expanding past the point where it makes sense to lump them together, and I often leave them sitting unpublished for weeks while I amass enough for a post. This new format, then, is not a full-length review, but still a book that deserves more discussion than just a few paragraphs.]

Seamlessly marrying hard-headed climate fiction and magical realism, Bell's third novel is an unusual, thought-provoking entry in the growing subgenre, one whose powerful punch is unfortunately undercut by some of its core assumptions. The novel proceeds in three timelines. In the early days of the European settlement of North America, a faun named John Chapman (the name of the man better known in American folklore as Johnny Appleseed) travels the wilderness just beyond the fledgling New England towns with his human brother Nathaniel, planting apple nurseries which the brothers hope, in time, to sell to the farmers who will come along to tame the landscape. In the late twenty-first century, one of the descendants of those farmers, John Worth, is on the run from his former business partner, Eury Mirov, who has parlayed the drought- and heat-resistant agricultural technologies they pioneered together into power over most of the world's governments, establishing farms where "volunteers" surrender their citizenship in exchange for food and shelter, working towards Eury's vision of planet-wide geoengineering. In the far future, that geoengineering has had a Snowpiercer-esque effect, burying much of the planet under massive sheets of ice. The clone C-433 carries the memories of hundreds of predecessors who contented themselves with scavenging the frozen wasteland for the basics of survival, but decides instead to investigate his own origins, discovering a plan to resurrect the planet's biosphere.

Running through all three storylines is the conflict between the wilderness and what humans impose upon it. Chapman is neither entirely wild nor able to live openly among humans (besides fearing their violence, he has an allergic reaction to the ways that humans alter the natural landscape, to cleared fields and paved roads). He goes along with the apple-planting scheme to please his brother, who believes that by expanding into and transforming the wilderness, the European colonists are carrying out god's will. But he's also keenly aware of how every one of his encroachments takes away a little bit more of the landscape's wildness, of how what seems untamable will quickly surrender to the engine of human greed and expansion. 

Standing at the other end of the American experiment, John is the architect of the last gasp of that process of taming nature, having created artificial bees and drought-resistant apple trees. But, disillusioned with what Eury has done with these technologies, he now travels the abandoned American heartland seeking to rewild the landscape, destroying buildings and infrastructure in the hopes of erasing all trace of human interference. And as C-433 moves towards the bunker where the seeds of Earth and humanity's resurrection slumber, he undergoes a transformation, growing trees and insects out of his own body, and is finally forced to choose between the resurrection of the past and something entirely new.

Bell finds great nuance in each of these dilemmas. When the farmers that Nathaniel thought would make his fortune sweep across the American landscape, he's dismayed to discover that they have cheerfully left him behind, taking his trees without acknowledging their debt to him, the wealth of the land flowing instead to the powerful and connected. Eury's geoengineering project plans to cool the planet by seeding the atmosphere, but not to a degree that actually reverses climate change, because doing so might eliminate the political leverage she has over the world's governments. And when C-433 meets the long-preserved versions of John and Eury, they have taken into themselves the consciousnesses of all those volunteers who gave their lives for the promise of a new world—a resurrection that is also a consumption, echoed in the fact that the matter fabricators that created C-433 and his predecessors, and have allowed John and Eury to exist in the future, run on a biomass slurry, the pulverized remains of plants, animals, and people. 

Into each storyline, Bell also incorporates elements of the fantastical—the folk figure of Johnny Appleseed, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the biblical tale of the apple and the serpent—each cannily twisted into a new and unexpected form. Eurydice is both Eury herself and humanity as a whole, and perhaps not a lost love to be rescued so much as a shambling corpse to be outrun. In his nurseries, Chapman hopes to grow an apple that is explicitly likened to the biblical one. But instead of conferring knowledge, this is the apple of forgetting, the one that will not only make Chapman human, but allow him to forget that he was ever anything else. When that apple finally grows on C-433's body, it's implied that the forgetfulness it grants isn't of nature, but of humanity and its separateness from the natural world.

Through it all, Bell skillfully conveys the rich, interconnected web of life that human settlement and industry disrupt (shades of Powers's The Overstory here), and the airiness with which Eury and her company try to replace that complexity with technical solutions, at each step using the promise of a better tomorrow to justify scrapping the present world, and its inhabitants, for parts. Taken together, he carefully seeds the cynicism and despair that his characters end up feeling towards the very project of human civilization, arguing that consciousness inevitably seeks to overtake its environment, with calamitous results.

At the same time, there's something very blinkered about this argument, something that feels rooted in the whiteness and Western-ness of Appleseed's protagonists—a fact that Bell is obviously cognizant of, but ultimately chooses not to engage with. Different as they are, Nathaniel Chapman and John Worth's intentions towards the American landscape feel rooted in the same belief—their innate right to put their stamp on it. That belief is validated when John infiltrates Eury's geoengineering project with the goal of sabotaging it, eventually holding the fate of humanity in his hands. The "we" of the novel—the collective of humanity who have so thoroughly bungled their stewardship of the planet—often feels as if it's lumping together the powerless and colonized with the powerful and privileged, assigning them all the same guilt, and taking it as a given that the latter's mistakes were inevitable, a product of human nature rather than specific cultural assumptions. Lip service is paid to the possibility of other forms of land husbandry—Chapman observes that the original inhabitants of the territories he and his brother travel through have been pushed off, and John acknowledges that the landscape European settlers arrived in was not untouched, virgin territory—but ultimately those perspectives aren't given a voice in the novel. 

It's hard not to see Appleseed's baleful take on human consciousness as the frustrated flounce of a hegemon who has failed, and decided that it was therefore impossible for anyone else to succeed. That the best thing would have been not to try, and that having tried, it should all now be torn down. For all its apparent humility, there is a profound arrogance to this attitude, extending one's despair to encompass and even justify the deaths of billions—what if human extinction was good, actually? Much of the current conversation about climate change is concerned with the question of whether our arrival at this point was inevitable, or whether there are other ways of ordering our society that don't demand endless, unsustainable growth—as we've seen in fiction like The Ministry for the Future, or nonfiction like The Dawn of Everything. Appleseed feels out of step with this conversation, rendering an otherwise powerful novel discomforting for all the wrong reasons.