The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks

A CHILD WILL BE BORN WHO WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING

When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman’s child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences.

Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it.

Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention.

The Seventh Son is a spectacular examination of what it is to be human. It asks the question: just because you can do something, does it mean you should? Sweeping between New York, London, and the Scottish Highlands, this is an extraordinary novel about unrequited love and unearned power.

---

If you’re looking for the beauty and poignancy of Birdsong, then don’t expect to find it here. However, if you want something fresh, pacey and thought-provoking, then you’ll enjoy this latest novel from Sebastian Faulks.

The Seventh Son is set in the near future, where advances in genetics mean that the Parn Institute is in a position to experiment with the idea of what makes us human. Unfortunately, what they want to do goes against ethical and legal guidelines, and so it’s carried out secretively, without the consent of those involved. Without giving too much away, it’s a really interesting premise and one that made me feel invested in the characters from the start.

Faulks certainly knows how to create his charcters. Talissa, Mary, Alaric and Seth are all hugely likable characters. We don’t get much about the adults’ backgrounds, but there is a lot of love involved, and a sense of kindness and the drive to care for others, which provide motivation for many of their actions. And far from being painted as the ‘baddies’, there is a certain amount of apparent sympathy for the choices made by the Parn Institute, the main-players being perhaps driven by a sense of furthering our understanding of genetics for the collective good of mankind. Perhaps!

I feel like the current trend in fiction is to make novels about 100 pages longer than they really need to be, and found The Seventh Son to present a refreshing change. Faulks does not dwell on the ‘niceties’ of description and drawn-out dialogue in this novel, and at sometimes break-neck speed switches between scenes and often decades in the blink of a paragraph. This is one of the first novels this year that has left me wanting more, not less, and I found it a welcome change. The scientific backdrop of this novel, and its thirty year span, could easily lend itself to a tome but I’m grateful that Faulks kept it focused on the characters and plot in this instance.

There are scenes towards the end of the novel that made me feel rather uncomfortable, and the characters’ feelings weren’t outlined in enough detail to justify their actions. I personally feel that the story-line would have been stronger without these.

Thank you to NetGalley UK, Random House UK and Sebastian Faulks for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.