Book Review - Chana Porter's The Seep
The Seep by Chana Porter
Published by: Soho Press
Publication Date: January 21st, 2020
Format: Kindle, 216 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
No one knows what will happen when the aliens invade. Is it the end of the world? Or the beginning of a strange new one? Trina and her partner Deeba were hosting one of their epic dinner parties to usher in whatever the future would bring. They loved to find just the perfect pairings of guests to inspire new friendships that would last a lifetime. But this time was different because the very water they were drinking would change the definition of what a lifetime is. The water was making them one with the aliens. They were creating a symbiotic relationship that would make the world a better place. No more war or poverty or death. Those who killed themselves would never know the utopia The Seep had brought. With their new lives Trina becomes an artist and then a performer, any and all of her dream careers become a reality resulting in her becoming a doctor. While her wife Deeba makes magnificent films. Their lives are perfect, The Seep has made it so. Only Deeba sees the truth, Trina isn't happy, she hasn't been happy for some time. There's only so many times you can make love and watch TV and eat ice cream before it becomes stagnant. The Seep has given them the gift of long life and change and Deeba wants to change. She wants to shed the life she has built and start again. She wants to be reborn as a baby with Trina as her mother. Trina is destroyed by this revelation. They made a commitment to each other, to be there, to love each other forever in different permutations when they married. Trina never thought her love for Deeba would last, but it hasn't just lasted, it's grown stronger. She cannot live in a world without Deeba. But now Deeba is gone, being raised by a kind family in the south of France and Trina is an alcoholic. She doesn't go to work, she doesn't pull her weight, she is a blight on The Seep's perfect world. A chance encounter will send her on a journey. She must accept that things change or she must do what she's thought of many, many times before, and end her long life.
The Seep has pretensions to be something it's not. It wants to be a different kind of alien invasion story but ends up being nothing more than basic. A basic science fiction trope; aliens arrive and want to make us happy and perfect but they can't grasp that suffering is what makes us human. But Chana Porter could have taken it in a different direction. There are characters, like Deeba, who see that they could have a life without trauma and jump at the chance, even if her request of Trina is unconscionable. This could have sparked a conversation about humans and their belief that suffering is somehow part of the journey when it doesn't have to be. Instead we suffer through the misery of Trina's journey. We're trapped with a depressive suicidal alcoholic who can not come to grips with the fact that change is part of life. When Trina asks another character to never change they rightly respond that that's "a very cruel thing to ask of anyone." That line had a sort of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland vibe, a truth spoken to the ignorant in a moment of revelation on her journey. And that is why I didn't outright hate this book, there are moments that have brilliance and such depth that I want to explore them because the author didn't seem to understand where her focus should be in this short narrative. I'm thinking in particular when her friend and fellow performer Horizon says that his face isn't his face but that of his dead lover who was a person of color while he himself is really white. That revelation again goes back to what makes us human, what makes us who we are, and while exposing him is part of Trina's journey, there seems to be so much left unsaid about appropriation. I wanted the deeper parts of Alice's journey not the visuals of a hookah smoking caterpillar. And there are so many visuals of the utopia that allows grass to be carpet and people to have horns that the human message is lost. And I can't help feeling that these characters are just so insufferably entitled that I would have gladly read about anyone else. You don't care about them. They are loosely drawn and while the opening and closing dinner parties are assuredly written, I kept thinking, but I would never want to be there. I do not like these people and never will. They are too precious for words.
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