The Seed Collectors by Scarlett ThomasSoft Skull Press (Counterpoint), 2016 (Originally Canongate, 2015)

The Seed Collectors is the sort of book that starts with a family tree, which signals that it’s probably going to be a sprawling family drama, which is not generally my favorite kind of book. And it is a sprawling family drama, sort of, with emphasis on the drama and a darkly satirical mood, but it’s also about the self and desire and people looking for enlightenment and/or fulfillment and/or oblivion in the various ways that people do. I am a little conflicted about it: I found it a whole lot of fun to read, and very hard to put down, but there are ways in which it’s a bit of a mess (there’s a lot going on, a few loose plot threads, and I really don’t know how to feel about the ending). It definitely has not displaced Our Tragic Universe as my favorite Scarlett Thomas book, but it’s the sort of book where I finished reading and then kept mulling over it.

Early in the book we learn that Oleander Gardener has recently died: she ran a successful yoga/meditation/wellness retreat called Namaste House, and her relatives (largely her great-nieces and great-nephew) are wondering who’s going to inherit it. Much of the family has a botanical bent: Charlie works at Kew Gardens; his sister Clem (short for Clematis) makes documentaries about plants; their cousin Bryony isn’t particularly into nature, but is married to a nature-writer. We get snippets of these family members’ lives: Bryony and her husband James and the kids, Holly and Ash; Clem and her husband Ollie puttering about at home; Charlie going on a date. We also meet Fleur, who has lived and worked at Namaste House since she was young, and learn that her mother, Bryony’s mother, and Clem and Charlie’s mother were “famous botanists,” or “famous-ish” ones, or, rather, “famous-ish mainly for disappearing while on the trail of a miracle plant that never existed, or possibly killed them all” (5).

Also early in the book, we hear Clem being interviewed on the radio, talking about hapaxanthic plants and how they “put all their energy into flowering—or, in other words, attempting to reproduce—and there’s nothing left for anything else. Their roots wither and die.” (4). Hm. Are we only talking about flowers here?

The narration of The Seed Collectors jumps from character to character, shifting focus and letting us learn things about all of them. We see Bryony (who overindulges in food, wine, and shopping), Charlie (who is pretty insufferably self-centered), Ollie (who is a professor and distressed by his inability to have children), Fleur (who’s the most self-aware and likable of the bunch) and more: Bryony’s daughter Holly (who’s very good at tennis), a pop star client of Namaste House named Skye Turner, and even a robin in the garden (whose vocabulary is quite idiosyncratic). Interspersed with the character-focused bits there are also bits about mysticism and enlightenment and oh, the seed pods of that miracle plant, which does turn out to exist, and is indeed deadly, but has quite an interesting effect before it kills you. The mysticism is largely focused on the idea of a cosmic unity, everyone being the same/everyone just being different aspects of one another, which makes the narrative style make sense: if there is this unity, then of course the robin in the garden has a bit of the story, along with everyone else.

I like how this book mixes humor and loveliness in with everything else: there’s some satire-of-academia bits that are great, a passage about a malfunctioning electric toothbrush display that made me laugh out loud, a rant about how annoying the keyboard-effect noises on phones are, a magical book that’s on the edge of twee but isn’t, a description of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern, and bits like this: “They walk around the end of the pier, where Bryony gets a text message welcoming her to Belgium. This happens all around the coast here. More often it’s France, which at least you can see from the end of the pier. This is usually funny enough to tell people, but she’s too hungover, and Granny won’t understand anyway” (190-191). Or this: “The doorway to Fleur’s cottage smells of lapsang souchong, black cardamom, and roses, which is a bit how Fleur herself smells, although with Fleur there are layers and layers of scents, each one more rare and strange than the last” (75).