Folks, serendipity has shined its beautiful face upon me. I rarely read several books so closely together that tackle themes that resonate strongly with me, while each successive work expands on them in different ways. If you don’t follow my work in particular, I urge you to take a look at The Dark Beyond The Stars and Purgatory Mount reviews. Both works flirted with similar themes around the value of life, human and non-human, and the search for some form of atonement in how we’ve treated life. In comes Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman, with a very strong synthesis of these themes set in a dystopic future where states and companies are issued “extinction credits,” in a bid to slow down the accelerating loss of biological diversity.
Thousands of species are going extinct every year, but luckily capitalism has answered the call and created systems to slow down, or even profit off the extinctions. Within that industry, there are a set of biobanks tasked with recording the behaviors and biologies of countless species in the hopes of resurrecting them sometime in the future. However, an immense cyber attack wipes out all of the data within the banks, sending the price of extinction credits sky-high. Mark Halyard made a bad bet, squandering some of his company’s extinction credits to pay off his own exorbitant eating habits. He sets off on a quest to find the venomous lumpsucker fish, recently destroyed by autonomous miners by his company, so that his financial crimes may go undetected by the company. He enlists the help of Karin Resaint, an animal cognition specialist, who also has an interest in finding these fish as they may help her overcome her existential dread. Will they find another population of lumpsuckers or will they have to add another tick to the growing list of casualties?
Venomous Lumpsucker is a weird book to convince someone to read. I only caught wind of it after reading Gautam Bhatia’s breakdown of the 2023 Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist. It’s a bleak novel that spends a lot of time detailing how the capitalist system would recuperate and exploit the shackles governments try to place on it. It’s a novel that dives into the grief of realizing how quickly we are willing to sell the other species of the planet to make a few extra ten thousands. How people, who would normally be fighting such a crass system, get pulled into its clutches and that no good can come of it, but someone has to provide a eulogy. It has a cynical satirical quality to it that is genuinely funny, but it takes a while for it to latch on. There is a bit of a mystery that keeps the reader moving that is punctuated by increasingly bizarre, funny, and ultimately sad reveals.
The story itself is an adventure of sorts as the two main characters travel the globe to find a remaining pocket population of the venomous lumpsucker for their own reasons. It’s a merry chase that has them visit various parts of the world, revealing the myriad ways the extinction credits system is used for profit. There are long deep dives into how various corporate, governmental, and non-governmental entities exploit the system, both to keep themselves afloat, but also to earn those beaucoup bucks. Interspersed between these long conversations are intimate character moments as the protagonists and some side characters get the spotlight after facing a destructive truth. I think an easy criticism would be that the narrative can feel contrived to navigate these systemic explanations, but I found it compelling watching two people adrift in a system that cares for them even less than the money it can make from driving species extinct. There are conversations that explore the inherent meaninglessness of their project crashing against their own personal significance. It’s what most people would describe as “Alex’s kind of book.”
The characters themselves are also a bundle of joy. I related heavily to Karin’s view of the world and the atonement quest she finds herself on. It is logical, cold, and in some ways headed in the wrong direction. Her musings on the nature of insect populations and the way she sees the world as a series of beautiful accidents really resonated with me and hammered home the sad path we’re careening down. Her maudlin observations are counterbalanced excellently by the human golden retriever Mark, who is on a mission to eat every good bit of food he can find. He wants to just enjoy life and if that means a few species have to die as a result, well that’s the breaks, especially if they don’t taste good. His blundering through life was a joy, and he just hit the perfect notes of oblivious and dumb but with a good heart that needed prompting. The way their two perspectives interweaved doesn’t necessarily inspire hope, but they make one want to go down fighting.
What I found most profound was how well Beauman navigates the various ways people would game the system. From middle manager scumbags to thoughtful ornithologists, to effective altruist psychos, Beauman manages to make this about the system, and not the individuals within it. It would have been easy to state “humans bad,” but the sheer array of people involved whether they work to do communal good, or gain personal fortune dispels that narrative. People are working with what tools capitalists have provided, and while a valiant effort was made, the tool is shit. But folks push forward anyway, trying to find whatever refuge they can. This is made even more apparent by Beauman’s writing which feels very much like a nature documentary. It’s told from an informed third-person perspective, but the voice has a level of conjecture that applies psychoanalysis to many of the side characters it focuses on. It has a pondering tone that heightens the feeling that you’re watching an anthill function. It provides enough distance to see the system from a bird’s eye view, while being close enough to see it as a future we are careening towards.
There are many fascinating discussions I want to have about events that occur within this book. It is darkly funny, and while it took me a while to appreciate the humor (I took a lot of the first half very seriously), I was cackling through the latter half. There were too many moments that felt absurd enough to be real, and it just hit a very specific region of my brain. I will say it’s probably not best to read this if you’re already in a pretty dark mood, but if you need something where climate change and humans/capitalism’s effect on the environment is front and center, Venomous Lumpsucker is waiting for you.
Rating: Venomous Lumpsucker – Eat your vegetables, and save some room for the heartbreak.
-Alex
