Torn Between Three Worlds: On Matt Bell's "Appleseed"
Matt Bell | Appleseed: A Novel | Custom House | 2021 | 480 Pages
“What does the world want, what is the world still capable of becoming? How else is the agency of the world made manifest? In the slow shaping of a glacier, a behemoth of ice pushing mountains before its weight? Or in the profusion of life, the splendor of bounty and beauty that so many peoples have been convinced must be proof of some god, some higher purpose to existence? Are evolution and its abundances the expression of the world’s will, or only the artifacts of its indifference?”
Appleseed, Matt Bell’s epic novel, reads like a “How Not To” manual for humanity’s salvation: from capitalism’s threat to democracy, the towering Jenga-like global climate crisis, profit-driven science, and the dangers of ideological principles such as America First and Manifest Destiny. The book primarily follows three characters surviving three very different renderings of the world, separated by dozens of centuries. Each tested, in their own way, by the pressure of family and personal relationships, loyalty and obligation, love and the unforgivable, as well as the selfish and selfless limits of the human spirit.
In the eighteenth century, Chapman, a horned faun straight from Roman mythology, embarks across the Ohioan Territory with his human brother, Nathaniel, planting apple orchards from which they intend to profit, anticipating the pioneering world-spirit to come. Through Chapman’s faunish instincts we see the true splendor, beauty, and joy of the untouched—nature left to its own magic. But it is the competing will of his human half that perceives this same beauty as an obstacle to dominate and domesticate. Chapman is torn between two worlds: the natural and the unnatural. Or perhaps Chapman is torn between three worlds: the natural, the unnatural, and the supernatural, as he is pursued by forces of the magical world from which he was born and has subsequently betrayed:
At the sight of Chapman, each of the figures howls in an inhuman voice, shaking loose a tangled veil of thick dark hair, the wet mass falling over her face and shoulders, her naked torso. As wild a creature as the faun is, he’s not half as wild as these three. All three women are fleshily voluptuous, ripples of seductive fat flowing over powerful muscles, mountains of engorged breasts, and a sunken valley of belly, skin slick as damp rot, looking the spongy consistency of poisonous mushrooms. Their tangled manes cascade to their hips, they wear no clothes except the mud of the swamp and whatever bleak things they might feed upon: wet smears of rabbit ichor and robin yolk, the blood of fox pups dragged loose from buried dens.
Witches, Chapman nearly screams…
Flash forward to the late twenty first century: the world has been irrevocably ravaged by the climate crisis. America, like many countries, has sold large parcels of its territory to Earthtrust, a corporation helmed by Eury Mirov, akin to a second coming of Jeff Bezos. Earthtrust is the dominant global source for food by way of genetically modified plants and animals grown in Volunteer Agricultural Communities engineered to sustain earth’s new conditions. Today, as groceries stock plant-based meat alternatives made in labs, plants designed to bleed, do we sit somewhere near the precipice of the world Bell anticipates?
Change does come in Appleseed, but too-little, too-late, in the form of John. Eury’s childhood friend, former lover, and co-founder of Earthtrust turned defector and activist, John travels the desolate western United States destroying the ruins of human civilization—bombing dams, bulldozing roads, and leveling buildings—in a futile attempt to “rewild” the planet. Eury and John approach salvation antithetically: Eury is willing to sacrifice and exploit the present to will her vision of a sustainable future (in the form of a technological re-cooling of the earth), while John is more nihilistic, attempting to disrupt the Earthtrust monopoly and reduce humanity’s footprint so the earth eventually may reclaim itself. “It’s easy to cast Eury as the villain of our story,” John says, “but tell me: Which of us was the greediest? The woman who wanted to be humanity? Or the man who tried to become the world?”
Finally, a thousand years after John, we are introduced to the hybrid C-432—the last remnant of humanity—as he scouts a glaciated America for any biological life beneath the ice. Many iterations of C have been tasked with collecting these remains to be recycled (via a device known as “The Loom”) into a purified form of biomass from which C can reprint local flora and fauna. However, the ice has hindered this process and much of the collected materials—natural and artificial—are recycled with each iteration of C himself in a painful and slow dissolution. C is constantly reprinted to repeat his own futile task, returning each time as a further amalgamation of human, plant, animal, and human-made material:
An assumption built into the Loom: any creature remade of many different materials remains itself. At the device’s heart waits a domed stage, a hump of closed steel rigged by a series of extruder arms, each extruder outfitted with a rotating plate of printer heads capable of spinning out organic bioinks, inorganic plastinates, coils of various metals. Soon, after the recycler finishes processing C-432, the dome opens, its interlocking lids sliding apart to expose a shallow pool of blue-white liquid heated to body temperature, temperature of the body about to be made.
C serves simultaneously as the evolution of the world’s will (that is, the world’s agency as expressed by humanity) and the only sentient artifact of earth’s literal cold indifference. It is on one such scouting mission that C makes a remarkable discovery, leading the hybrid man on a treacherous quest across the vast American tundra to a location that he believes holds the answer to repopulating the earth and restoring humanity once again.
The splendid fragility of earth’s bounty is signified through the novel’s repeating depictions of the apple. Chapman hopes to discover a special one from the many orchards he’s planted that will turn him human. For John, the apple is a sickly reminder of his complicity in Earthtrust’s rise and a world lost to climate change (John engineered robotic “nanobees” after the extinction of the honeybee in order to pollinate the first “super orchards,” whose apples taste like a memory that has been misremembered). And for the many iterations of C, the apple is a secret message that, once decoded, may unlock C’s self-purpose and trigger a system reset that will deliver earth back to its former edenic state.
In service of these entangled narratives and ambitious themes, Bell’s prosaic lyricism is especially noteworthy. The rich and vivid sentences of Appleseed are as visceral and sensuous as the landscapes Bell paints; landscapes that suffer annihilation across centuries at the hand of industry, greed, and exceptionalism. Take, for example, these two descriptions of the apple from Chapman and John, respectively:
It’ll be ten years before these trees bear fruit, but as he plants Chapman imagines them already past their flowering, each tree’s apples offering fresh wonders of touch and scent, texture and flavor: the skins might be red or yellow or green, dark-mottled matte or shined clear as glaze; the flesh moon pale, jaundiced, browned as if rotten. Only a few seed-grown apples are ever sweet; the others are destined to be peppery spicy or puckeringly sour, some repulsively bitter spitters.
and,
The perfect-looking apples he picked during his orchard shifts, heavy and round, with unblemished red skins: Why hadn’t he tasted one as some of the other workers had? Maybe he already knew what he’d feel between his teeth: a new fruit made to survive new seasons, a product pushed until it’s no longer what an apple is meant to be… [T]he apples in this pie are something else, something worse, a mockery of what an apple had become over its thousands of years of human interaction. A generation or two from now, no one might be left who remembers the taste of what John thinks of as a real apple.
The contrasts between these passages highlight how humanity evolves its own definition of “civilization.” From eighteenth-century fur trappers, to the reprinting of recycled dead Bison into climate-resilient beta copies, to a manufactured Ice Age, Bell shows us the costs of living with a narrow, immediate, and self-serving worldview.
Part Greco-Roman myth, part American folklore, part sci-fi epic, and all literary heart, Matt Bell’s Appleseed serves as a timely warning cry for our collective, fragile future, showing us the violent shades of the Anthropocene, and what might happen to the wild, natural world when the unnatural manifests a fabricated natural.