APPLESEED

Is Matt Bell honest with himself? A literature professor proposed this big question in the movie, The Whale. Is it a big question that riddles throughout Matt’s latest novel, Appleseed? I’m wondering why the author picked an apple seed to be planted all over America by a human brother, Nathaniel, and his brother, Chapman, half human/half faun in lieu of other fruit. I’m joking about the apple, but it is a good source of fiber and antioxidants. Haha. This is a very confusing past, future, and far-future breakdown and rebuilding of the earth due to climate change and other abuses of mother earth. I really don’t know who Matt thinks or blames in this novel for sure, but it’s spelled out in two thoughts: Man and or a future Amazon-type company. Certainly not the brothers planting apple trees in the past with the idea of a profit ten years later when the trees start producing fruit. Will Matt’s Amazon store (Earthtrust) start buying up each state one by one? She wanted to be authorized to control everything in the world. “She wanted, in those more idealistic days, for the world to choose this together,” On page 99, we read, “But after the global economic collapse, the wars everywhere abroad and the secession and sacrifice at home, the worsening climate disaster, and the collapse of the worldwide food supply?  Maybe now Eury didn’t need anyone’s permission, for anything. She did business in every country, and her security forces administered failing and failed states worldwide; she controlled more than enough land to build whatever she wanted whenever she needed. Now the world’s governments couldn’t risk standing up to Eury Mirov, to Earthtrust. Will Eury build a spaceship in the future to leave Earth for good? Was this novel written as a defensive plan against the offense of Musk, Bezos, and Branson? Haha.

We haven’t talked about Eury’s ex-partner, John, who is a one-man wrecking crew working against Earthtrust and is eventually captured and forced to sign papers into a type of indentured service to one of Earthtrust’s working farms. He has to sign over his citizenship, his right to vote, his right to own property, and his Bill of Rights on a ninety-nine-year agreement in exchange for a leased home, a fixed wage, safe food and clean water, and loss of freedom outside his assigned compound. Will he stay there? Then to make this story more complicated, we go into the far future where a lone cyborg is trekking across the Iceland of western America in search of any left/over mankind with the quest to reset the Earth. His name is C433 because he has rebuilt himself 433 times. This was not my kind of story. I hate novels that jump back and forth between past and present no less adding the far future. What did I like? Well, mainly his ability to write lines that pleased me.

 The author’s prose is uniquely entertaining; such as on page 134 when Chapman, the half-human, who is in the forest alone, and enjoys the forest’s babble: “Chapman’s ears truly have begun to hear more; with no one to talk to, mostly his tongue lies dumb in his mouth. (note; that was a great line). He listens for the smallest forest voices, the clicking language of squirrels and rabbits, the chatter of mice in the underbrush; he hears hawk chicks exploring their nest, woodpecker eggs hatching far above his head, hidden in holes pecked into towering trees. A breeze wafts by, a local wind suffused with local smell-something floral, something overripe, something rotting-moving through these woods and only these woods, present one day and gone another. If these trees were cut down, he thinks, this particular breeze would be cut down too; If different birds chirped and tittered here, then the breeze would carry new sound; if there were no bears or skunks wandering the swamp, then the breeze would lack their musk, its most potent texture.” Wow! Such a big deal out of something so small! Matt Bell is a native of Michigan, who teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: You are probably asking,” Why did I give this novel four stars?” Well, it’s a good question since I really didn’t like this novel, although the writer follows most of the creative writing rules.” My main beef is that I hated the story…thus bad grades for the plot, but he did use Good versus Evil as a strong theme. But he didn’t make me shed any tears over his character development. I’m not going to care for his cyborg since the writer himself rebuilds him 434 times! Haha. Am I going to cry over the feelings of a half-human, half-faun that spends all day planting apple seeds? One of his biggest sins was that he didn’t catch my interest. His setting was in three eras, which I hated. But his style of writing and his dialogue were outstanding, These two elements took his novel out of the three-star puddle and landed him in the four-star pond. Just so you know. Haha.