Consumption, Survival, and Legacy in Seaweed Rising
Devyn Andrews
Book Review
A review of Rob Magnuson Smith’s Seaweed Rising (Sandstone Press). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.
Before the story even begins, Rob Magnuson Smith’s genre-defying novel Seaweed Rising seems to outline its central artistic purpose in its epigraph, an energizing, aptly-selected Melville quote:
“We feel the floods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters,” begins Smith’s chosen passage from Moby-Dick. “[S]eaweed and all the slime of the sea is about us!”
In the epigraph’s source material, these lines of dialogue belong to Melville’s Father Mapple, as he delivers a sermon on the biblical story of Jonah and the Whale before a congregation of New Bedford sailors. Father Mapple argues that each of the Book of Jonah’s four chapters –(“four yarns,” as he appropriately calls them)— serve as a “deep sealine,” allowing us to “sound” the “depths of the soul” as we follow Jonah far down below the ocean’s surface. With the rhetorical flourish of first-person plural/present tense, Mapple syntactically submerges his congregation (and, consequently, us as readers) in this “kelpy bottom of the waters,” arguing that valuable lessons can be gleaned from this story of a man who survived—leagues below the sea, in the fish’s belly—by the strength of his faith.
In two short sentences, Smith positions his gem of a novel within the wider literary tradition of oceanic tales and seafaring stories, calling to mind the ancient, rich, and primordially-soupy themes of purpose and survival, narrative and connection, virility and compulsion, madness and legacy, pregnancy, potential, and change—of men inside fish and oceans inside man.
Plus, of course, seaweed. Tons (and tons!) of seaweed.
Set mainly in the Cornish port town of Gweek, Seaweed Rising follows Manfred, a hobbyist algae collector and instructor of remedial college English, and Nora, former windsurfer and employee of the edible seaweed company which has recently set up shop in Gweek’s former fish processing factory. The two are brought together by their mutual interest in (possibly, obsession with?) algae at a farmer’s market where Manfred tries a sample of Nora’s purple dulse; later, they begin a romantic relationship, discovering their shared love of a field guide called The Future of British Seaweeds based on the work of mysterious phycologist (algae scientist) Mary-Margaret Dennison.
As their relationship progresses, Manfred and Nora find themselves navigating a world slowly but surely encroached upon by rapidly-proliferating (and maybe even sentient) algae, as numerous species of red, green, and brown seaweeds appear on beaches thousands of miles away from their usual habitats. Manfred begins conversing with a washed-up bullwhip (a rope-like kelp species) that he has kept alive in his bathtub, finding himself tasked with managing the seaweed’s increasingly insidious demands; meanwhile, Nora struggles against a strange compulsion to visit an ancient underwater cave system off the coast of Spain, home to a kelp forest where life itself is rumored to have originated. What follows is a strange and unpredictably journey which moves through settings as variable as an ethically-questionable psychiatric hospital, an underground algae archive, and a Pequod-esque survey boat on a research expedition into remote Arctic waters.
Written in third person and alternating chapters between Manfred and Nora’s points of view, Seaweed Rising is an almost unclassifiable novel; Smith weaves these threads of narrative together with wit, originality, and poignant insight into the hopelessly interconnected state of our contemporary world. Equal parts a psychologically-driven character study, climate fiction, and maritime adventure, the novel probes the ways in which globalization, capitalism, and technological advancements come at a cost to ourselves and our environments.
Refreshingly, Smith challenges the notion that humans are Earth’s dominant life forms as he affords his seaweeds with an insidious, creeping agency. Nora learns from an algae expert that seaweeds are “expanding their range… They’ve come ashore, and placed themselves in everything from cosmetics to fertiliser.” There is a sense that Smith’s algae are not only conscious but coordinating their encroachment onto land and into the human body, and the idea that seaweeds are excitedly awaiting the downfall of humanity is a strong reminder of the ever-changing earth’s indifference to human presence and survival.
But besides this clear connection to climate-related issues including changing coastlines, melting ice caps, and disrupted marine ecosystems, Smith’s seaweeds also highlight a kind of existential anxiety about consumption and the permeability between the self and its environment. Throughout the novel, Manfred and Nora find themselves frequently compelled to ingest seaweeds, though it is unclear whether humans or algae are driving this consumption. At one point, Manfred looks on at a small algae sample called Rosy Dew Drops, which seems equally as interested in him: “Let me love you, it seemed to say with its dancing motions… [Manfred] leaned in closer. He would eat it. They would fill each other’s vesicles.” Echoing recent research on the pervasiveness of environmental contaminants like nanoplastics or PFAS (“forever chemicals”) in the human body, and reflective of the intangible yet relentless bombardment of information and advertisement that plagues our contemporary, late-stage capitalist existence, the ambiguity Smith explores between who (or what) is consuming whom is productively nuanced, offering a refreshingly smart take on the often-oversimplified eco-fiction genre. Almost as if (in an ominous line often repeated throughout the novel), there is “[n]o stopping until we become them. Or they become us.”
If the white whale, that singular and terrifying leviathan, is to be read as a multivalent symbol of purpose, madness, evil, faith, divinity (etc.) fit for Melville’s 19th century world, then Smith has appropriately fractured and refit this metaphor, splintering the monster into countless, stalwart (and sometimes-microscopic) organisms to better reflect life in the 21st. Ultimately, Seaweed Rising renders an increasingly globalized, precariously entangled world on the brink of takeover, where antagonists are not only externally ubiquitous but inextricably imbedded inside us all.
Seaweed Rising
Rob Magnuson Smith
Sandstone Press
308pp
$25
Devyn Andrews lives in Chicago and is a graduate of the UIC Program for Writers. She is an Associate Prose Editor for West Trade Review, where she also contributes book reviews. Her work has further appeared in L’Esprit, Chicago Review of Books, Cutthroat Magazine, Memezine, and elsewhere.
L'Esprit Literary Review 