The Argumentative Narrator

This novel was inspired by two epochal events that took place at the dawn of the millennium and became entwined with each other. One was my wife giving birth to our first child. The other was the breaking of the code of the human gene. The Human Genome Project.

Each one of our 100 million cells contains six feet of DNA tightly wrapped up in our chromosomes. Reading the information encoded in the proteins of DNA is an awesome task: a typist producing 60 words a minute and working an eight hour day would take 50 years to write one person's whole sequence.

Typists are not required. For in the middle of the 20th century computer science met biology on the dance floor of academia, and here we are waltzing with them, gliding into a new age whose implications for the composition of future human beings are yet unfathomable. The re-engineering of plants and animals and ourselves throw up questions that the book's narrator, a self-made man in the vanguard of biotechnology, is forced to ponder when an experiment carried out amongst genetically isolated Amazonian tribespeople goes horribly wrong.

The book twists and turns through the narrator's relationships with his wife, his parents, his brother and sister, and his newborn son. John Sharpe is under siege from those around him, but he is bullish and cunning and eager to fight his corner. George Bernard Shaw said, 'The reasonable man responds to the world. The unreasonable man tries to make the world respond to him.' Sharpe maintains that the future waits to be conquered by those with the will to do so.

To paraphrase Flaubert, Mister Sharpe, he is me - in all, that is, but his opinions. In this respect every other character stood in for me, and I argued with the narrator all the way through the book. Indeed, we're arguing still. I have only to switch on a tape recorder:

Tim Pears: As scientists gear up to correct the crooked timber of humanity, and people like you encourage and fund them, I want you to tell me why you think it is that we can't accept ourselves the way we are.

John Sharpe:  What the hell are we?

TP: We're beautiful, flawed beings.

JS: Yes. I like that. That's right.

TP: We're not perfectible.

JS: Of course we are. Eternally so.

TP: Clearly I'm more cautious than you. As you know, I've studied aboriginal societies, cyclical cultures, that are able to replenish themselves. And I wonder:  is technological culture forced now to hurtle ever faster through space and time? Is there no limit to growth, even if certain limits are universally desirable? Will it never again be possible to stop still and say, 'here we are, this place is fine.'

JS: In a word, No. Wake up. That's a fantasy for fundamentalists and romantic fools.

TP: I refuse to accept that technology is inevitable. The Australians haven't built a single nuclear power station. They chose not to.

JS: Let me give you a piece of advice, mister writer: do more research before you hold something up as an example. Australia's one of the most polluted countries in the world. Anyway, this technology is different. It's information. There are no barriers big enough to keep it out.

TP: Perhaps the only barriers are taboos. As old taboos are broken, civilisation needs to replace them with new ones. Constant vigilance is required.

JS: Don't make me laugh. Taboos hark back to a prelapsarian state:  they're always about the threat of experience, man, they're attempts to keep experience at bay. And what life is possible if new experience is denied?

TP: A life recognisable as similar to the one we lead.

JS: Your restraint is pathetic. Don't you realise that in this relativist age of ours there are no moral absolutes? No? Wouldn't you agree?

TP: How could I not? There is only enlightened commonsense, undermined by eternal slippage.

JS: Ha! Listen: scientific breakthrough, new technology, enables a particular innovation, the prospect of which - designer babies, let's say - makes the weak uncomfortable. But then whoever desires and can afford the innovation (or reckons investment will earn good money) presses ahead and makes it happen.

TP: The once unimaginable is on the slide towards acceptance.

JS: Exactly! People come to accept, embrace even, what they once feared.

TP: I believe you're missing or ignoring a crucial fact. The moral squeamishness people feel is not only a shrinking from 'improving' ourselves -

JS: Hey, watch the emphasis. In the research I fund we're talking therapeutic, not eugenic, medicine.

TP: Indeed. Nor do people harbour only the suspicion that it will be the rich and powerful who order the templates of design. No, they suspect also that into the age of reason were smuggled the articles of a new, irrational faith - including the belief that technology will solve any problems caused by technology. 

JS: I don't see what else will!

TP: Because no-one could prove, even as mankind tottered over the brink of self-destruction, that Superman will not swoop to the rescue with a cure-all invention.

JS: And what's going to stop an asteroid hitting earth? Prayers?

TS: Wittgenstein said something like, Science will answer every question - except for the important ones.
JS: That view is not only naive, it's irrelevant. The questions science doesn't answer are a waste of time asking.

TP: Are you going to get tautological?

JS: You're already being obtuse!

TP: If there's one thing I believe, it's that the future will take care of itself, if we would only let it be.

JS: Listen: You want to know for whose benefit the future will be designed? You're right: look at the designers. Go ahead. There is no innovation without men and women in possession of the arrogance, the courage, the hubris to fly towards the sun.

TP: They're the people we fear.

JS:  We! Can't you taste it?

TP: What?

JS: In the air. An impatience.

TP: An impatience?

JS: With people like you. With your futile resistance to the inevitable, the enthralling future. Don't you see that to cease saying no, to run out of the choking dust of the naysayers to the head of the pack, would be, for timid souls like yourself, a liberation.

TS: Caution is the one thing we need.

JS: Mankind has been waiting two million years for the chance to shape itself. We're going to waste no more time.

TS: Not one generation?

JS: Seize the day. Listen, you jerk: I know you'll have the last word. But do me one favour.

TP: What's that?

JS: You make yourself feel better by reducing me to a complete materialist, but hey - don't deny me all sense of the sacred.

TP: It's difficult, John. I do try. Almost fifty years ago - around the time Crick and Watson identified the double helix of DNA - Christian mystic and biologist Teilhard de Chardin wrote this (if you'll allow me to quote) of human ambition: 'Thought might artificially perfect the thinking instrument itself; life might rebound forward under the collective effect of its reflection. The dream upon which human research obscurely feeds is fundamentally that of mastering, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities, the ultimate energy of which all other energies are merely servants; and thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world.'

JS: Sharp guy. Or to put it another way: 'God created the world in six days. And on the seventh He said, "Oh, what the hell? I'll finish it some other time."'

TP: De Chardin believed there to be barely discernible difference between scientific research and adoration.

JS: He's damned right.

TP: The humble scientist, exemplar of our age. The trouble is that mankind is in a rush to carry the baton from God. We hope and pray that Icarus will not be the one to grab it. We know in our hearts that he will.

I switch off the tape recorder. Sharpe was right, I did have the last word. But he needn't worry: it's only on paper.

2002