'When scientist Kate Larkin joins a secretive project to re-engineer the climate by resurrecting extinct species, she becomes enmeshed in another, even more clandestine program to recreate our long-lost relatives, the Neanderthals. But when the first of the children, a girl called Eve, is born, Kate finds herself torn between her duties as a scientist and her urge to protect their time-lost creation.
'Set against the backdrop of hastening climate catastrophe, Ghost Species is an exquisitely beautiful and deeply affecting exploration of connection and loss in an age of planetary trauma. For as Eve grows to adulthood she and Kate must face the question of who and what she is. Is she natural or artificial? Human or non-human? And perhaps most importantly, as civilisation unravels around them, is Eve the ghost species, or are we?'
Climate change is something that is becoming harder and harder to ignore, something that isn't just a vague threat that exists in some undefined future, but something that we're seeing the effects of on an almost every day basis. As such, more and more books are turning to this topic, exploring the effects that a changing world is having on society, of asking what could come next for humanity if we don't try to do something to stop our destruction of the planet.
This is the world in which James Bradley has set his new novel, Ghost Species, a world where we know that climate change is a very real thing, something that is going to have a huge impact on our lives, and the lives of our children. Whilst the governments struggle to figure out what to do private corporations have started to step in to try and make a difference, one of these, The Foundation, has decided that whilst they're going to try and do what they can to slow down global changes they can't pretend that it's the same world anymore, and have to look for more extreme solutions. In this case, those solutions are reintroducing extinct species.
Okay, at this point you're probably thinking this sounds a bit like Jurassic Park, and whilst that's a very obvious comparison the story is very, very different. The Foundation isn't interested in creating creatures for entertainment or profit, instead setting their sights on making a real difference. They're trying to bring back animals that existed in more extreme versions of the world and putting them in the wild to try and slow down some of the changes that are going on. Mammoths, Tasmanian Tigers, Aurochs, giant Elk, there's no shortage to the types of creatures they want to bring back.
However, there's one species they want to recreate most, one that could make one of the biggest changes to the world, and one that is the most controversial; Neanderthals. It's thing project that scientists Kate and Jay find themselves brought in to work on. Recreating an extinct animal is one thing, but another branch of humanity presents a whole new challenge, and the two of them are instantly drawn to the project.
I thought this was going to be the focus of the book, the team working on creating this new (old) version of humanity, but it actually went through this pretty quickly, cover the course of a few years withing a chapter or two, until we got to the birth of the first Neanderthal, Eve. This is when the book revealed it's real focus. It wasn't the story of a world on the brink, or a tale about scientists working to save the world, it's the story about the love a parent can have for their child, and about what it means to be human.
Realising that Eve would only ever be seen as an experiment, that she would never be shown the love and affection that she needed, Kate makes the decision to take Eve, running away from the facility with nothing but what she can carry with her. From this point on the book focuses on Kate and her 'daughter', and the struggles she faces raising her whilst hiding away from the Foundation.
The book makes several time jumps throughout the narrative, moving forward a few years every tie, showing Eve getting older. To begin with we follow Kate, watching this story unfold through her eyes as she tries her best to raise her child and give her a good life, all whilst worrying about her, about if she's going to be okay, if she's going to be the same as sapient people, and how the world will react to someone who looks and acts so differently. It's through Kate's perspective that the audience, and several characters, come to see Eve as human. Others refer to her like she's different, not quite human, and it's through Kate's insistence, her love for her, that people come to ignore their initial misgivings and see that this is a child, as human as you or I.
The last third of the book changes things up when Eve hits her teens and the perspective shifts over to her, and we see that whilst Kate sees Eve as a normal human girl, she herself struggles with how she fits into the world after she learns the truth of who she is and how she came to be. This is the part of the book that was easily the best, not only because we got into Eve's head and really learned how she felt, but because this was the point where the climate change had really ramped up, and the effects were impossible to ignore.
Now Even didn't just have to figure out what she thought of herself, or how she fit into a Homo Sapien world as a Neanderthal, but in a world that was falling apart. A world where drugs and medical supplies were becoming scarce, food was low, and people were having to flee across country to find safe places to live.
In some ways it seems like The Foundation was right, as it was in these latter stages of the book that Eve seemed to begin to find some kind of happiness, where she began to feel confident in who she was, whereas the rest of humanity was failing. It seemed like she was better prepared to survive in this changing world that we were. But despite this, she never seems truly content, her past experiences, her losses and the truth of who she was weighing heavily upon her.
I was a little angry at James Bradley for ending the book the way he does, for getting me so invested in Eve and then just ending the story. I wanted to spend more time with her. I wanted to see what happened next. I wanted to make sure she was going to be okay. I connected with her in a way that I didn't think I would. I'd seen her go from an idea, to a miracle baby, to an amazingly layered young woman. I laughed with her, and cried at her tragedies. She was an amazing person to get to read about, and I didn't want that to end.
James Bradley took a concept that I thought would be about spectacle, much like other stories where extinct species are brought back to life I thought that Ghost Species was going to be about spectacle, that perhaps this was going to be a story to explore the dangers of this science and the hubris of man. Instead, it became a story where the people mattered most, where the focus wasn't science out of control or the desolation of the planet, but about the love people have for each other, and how even at the end of the world that's still one of the most important things.
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