Paul Hamann-Rose, Genetics and the Novel: Reimagining Life Through Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) 243 pp. £99.00 Hb. £79.99 eBook. ISBN: 9783031531002
In 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick unveiled the double helix structure of DNA, some marvelled at the molecular blueprint of life, while others speculated about the stories it seemed to contain – a biological narrative of human life encoded in every cell. In the twenty-first century, this intersection of genetics and storytelling has taken on a new dimension, as literary scholars are increasingly interested in how the story of human life (in its individual as well as collective occurrence) is captured in literary writing. The contemporary novel increasingly signposts its engagement with the ethical, existential, and societal questions posed by advances in genetic research. It is within this vibrant interplay of scientific and literary enquiry that Paul Hamann-Rose’s Genetics and the Novel: Reimagining Life Through Fiction positions itself, offering a compelling exploration of how genetic discourses have shaped, and continue to shape, the contemporary novel’s negotiation of biological and biographical narratives of life. In following Clare Hanson’s Genetics and the Literary Imagination, Hamann-Rose’s work can be seen as one crucial step in the evolution of the scholarly discourse on the relationship between genetics and literature.[1] While Hanson assesses the response of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first- century British literature to the rise of neo-Darwinist scientific discourses such as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Hamann-Rose’s focus on how the form of the novel enables the excavation of several genetic imaginaries. In its aesthetic, narrative, and formal curiosity, the book stages itself productively in the tradition of Watson and Crick’s enquiry into the formal organisation of DNA, while also presenting a comprehensive overview of the state of the field.
Across four chapters, the book investigates the representations and formal implications of the manifold ways in which genetic discourse appears within the writing of Simon Mawer, Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, and Margaret Atwood. By showing ‘how the novel refracts genetic discourses and evaluates their real and imagine impacts on human and nonhuman life’, the book makes its interdisciplinary potential explicit and champions the critical impact of literary scholarship on scientific thinking (9).
It ambitiously opens by proposing a new genre of writing: fictional genetic life writing. Deriving this from Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf, in which ‘the protagonist’s account of his own life conjoins biological and biographical dimensions’, Hamann-Rose constructs a compelling reading of the novel’s mobilisation of fictional life writing and the protagonist’s interest in the origin of modern genetics in the context of his own history with achondroplasia. Fictional genetic life writing thus represents a compelling literary form that combines (auto)biographical narration with explorations of genetic relationalities, for example through the staging of biological and biographical parallelisms between protagonists and historical figures. The second chapter focuses on McEwan’s Enduring Love and Saturday; both novels which Hamann-Rose argues are engaged with question of chance and genetic determinism. In its informative reading of McEwan’s interest in scientific discourse across individual works, the chapter builds an impactful expansion to literary scholarship on McEwan. Combining sophisticated knowledge of genetic research with narrative and ethical implications of the texts, Hamann-Rose showcases how literature, in conversation with other disciplinary knowledge(s), can reflect and critique scientific developments.
The third chapter delves into A. S. Byatt’s quartet of novels (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman), where Hamann-Rose explores the use of genetic metaphors to examine the relationship between biological reality and artistic representation. Byatt’s work is analyzed for its sophisticated interplay between language and the materiality of life, highlighting how genetic discourses infuse her narratives. The chapter provides a nuanced reading of Byatt’s engagement with genetic science, offering a significant contribution to literary scholarship on Byatt. Ultimately turning his attention to futurist representations of genetic discourse, the final chapter presents a timely and critically ambitious reading of Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. In its concurrent deployment of ecocritical, posthumanist, and geneticist approaches to Atwood’s texts, the book examines the genetic modifications depicted in the trilogy, such as the creation of new species and the manipulation of human genetics in the context of the Anthropocene. The chapter particularly highlights how the novel form engages with the ethical implications of Atwood’s literary world both critically and creatively. In doing so, Hamann-Rose’s overall argument ‘that genetic discourses of life have enabled an aesthetic self-reflection of the aesthetics of life in the novel’ (231) culminates successfully and impactfully.
One of the strongest aspects of Hamann-Rose’s writing is the nuanced reconciliation between his own interpretative approach and previous literary scholarship. For example, introducing his analysis of McEwan’s Saturday, Hamann-Rose notes that in previous interpretations – mostly focused on the novel’s post 9/11 or trauma framing, or its overt engagement with consciousness and neuroscience – brief discussions of genetics exist, yet have been relegated to merely represent the ‘protagonist’s scientific outlook’ (102). By tapping into these critical openings, the book succeeds in introducing a literary-interdisciplinary perspective for some of the most canonical works of literary fiction of the twenty-first century. While Hamann-Rose’s exploration of genetic imaginaries is undoubtedly comprehensive and insightful, one could argue that the book might have initiated a more expansive dialogue with Josie Gill’s earlier work on the fraught history of racial genetic determination.[2] If, as the book contends, the works chosen by Hamann-Rose trace a history of literary fiction’s engagement with genetic discourse, the misuse of such discourse is surely one moment in cultural history that has created literary responses and warrants critical attention.
In its blending of literary and philosophical analysis with a sophisticated understanding of the history of genetic science, Genetics and the Novel offers an innovative perspective on how novels engage with and critique scientific paradigms. By proposing new conceptual frameworks and thinking ‘through’ genetics, the book not only broadens the scope of literary scholarship but also enriches interdisciplinary dialogue between literature and science.
While the Human Genome Project has reached its conclusion, breakthroughs in gene technology, epigenetics, and synthetic biology promise the emergence of new narrative possibilities that will be mobilised to make sense of the shared biographical and biological web of life. This book will have laid the important groundwork for putting these discourses under the literary electron microscope.
Sandro Eich, University of St Andrews
[1] Clare Hanson, Genetics and the Literary Imagination, Oxford Textual Perspectives, First edition (Oxford University Press, 2020).
[2] Josie Gill, Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel, Explorations in Science and Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
