The Seed Collectors isn't an easy book but it's rewarding. Thomas's experimental edge is thoroughly in evidence, and sharply honed, across the interweaving voices of the messily human, frequently unlikeable and (taking everything into account) impressively vivid characters whose lives, families and desires entangle across the novel's back-story and events; Fleur, Clem and Bryony are all intriguing and real-feeling (although I struggled to empathise with Bryony), and Charlie, Ollie and Holly likewise.
Many parallels are drawn between all of that human-ness and the (unsentimentally survival-driven) propagation of plants in nature, to which Thomas commits particularly in how she treats sex and reproduction - invariably with a flavour of domination and roughness to it, Nietzschean in its drive, heavily cross-pollinated between nearby families, and on occasion taking place between family members themselves. The book teems, and you can feel the craft in it; I've thought she had something brilliant to her since my first encounter with her writing - via PopCo - but this one shows how seriously extremely good a novelist she has become.
An aside: birds figure quite differently from plants, whether in the robin's ecstatic point of view or the transcendence - a loaded word here, given its thematic importance to the novel - that the goldfinches seem to point towards.
Many parallels are drawn between all of that human-ness and the (unsentimentally survival-driven) propagation of plants in nature, to which Thomas commits particularly in how she treats sex and reproduction - invariably with a flavour of domination and roughness to it, Nietzschean in its drive, heavily cross-pollinated between nearby families, and on occasion taking place between family members themselves. The book teems, and you can feel the craft in it; I've thought she had something brilliant to her since my first encounter with her writing - via PopCo - but this one shows how seriously extremely good a novelist she has become.
An aside: birds figure quite differently from plants, whether in the robin's ecstatic point of view or the transcendence - a loaded word here, given its thematic importance to the novel - that the goldfinches seem to point towards.
