The Evil Seed

Harris writes with the air of one who has glimpsed the abyss, and in her world the forces of light and dark move quite freely and believably. The mood and the Fenland setting will be familiar to fans of Lesley Glaister. The book shines with intensity enough to excuse any moments of pretension; the pace towards the end is marvellous. This feels like the root-stock from which run the tendrils of the supernatural in her later work such as 'Chocolat'. Or perhaps this book is the incomplete exorcism of those horrors. Cracking stuff - I was hooked.


re-Raphaelite   April 11, 2000
17 out of 21 found this review helpful

At several points, early on in 'Evil Seed', it seems as though Harris has written a typical 'student' novel, which does make your heart shrink with horror. Alice has a telephone conversation with her ex-boyfriend, Joe, which goes on for far too long, sinking into banality, the very thing that we seek to avoid when reading Joanne Harris. There is another instance in which The Stranglers' 'Strange Little Girl' is quoted. This may be snobbishness on my part, but I feel the song is too familiar to be mentioned at such length (although it's entirely right that Alice should mutter this song when she's hurrying after Rafe and Java at night). Of all Harris' characters, I regard Alice and Joe to be the weakest (although Joe does resonate powerfully later on). The balance of the narrators in 'Evil Seed' seems to be strangely awry. Because Alice's story was not narrated in the first person, like Daniel Holmes', she seemed more distant. Okay, so Daniel was writing in his diary, but since Alice is meant to be our contemporary, then she should be closer to us. In 'Blackberry Wine', Harris created a brilliant third person narrator in Jay, whilst 'Chocolat' and 'Sleep, Pale Sister' had excellent first person accounts. This is the only Joanne Harris novel where I feel that I could cut away at the entrails, whilst leaving the guts of the book intact, and it's probably no coincidence that this is her first novel.

I've said that Joe does become more powerful as a character later on, and I must once again note that there is always a certain amount of realism in Harris' magical fictions. It's true that I have encountered a couple of real women like Rosemary, and one of them was indeed a fellow student at Cambridge. I've seen Joe and Ginny's relationship played out in front of me before. She the weak fragile creature with seemingly endless powers of manipulation, he the protective man, reduced to quivering, nervous exhaustion: adolescent affairs driven into hormonal overdrive. It takes a brave author to tackle such themes. There is some perception that Joanne Harris is a feminist writer, perhaps driven by the image of the strong women in 'Sleep, Pale Sister' and 'Chocolat'. But this is to ignore the fact that she writes so well from the viewpoint of men. The depiction of Daniel Holmes' desires in this novel is startling. For a feminist writer, I feel, it would be too easy to see Rosemary/Ginny as victim. However, it is here that Harris' strong desire to tell a gripping story outpaces such blinkered dogma, and indeed, Daniel Holmes dismisses such beliefs when talking with his psychiatrist.

Joanne Harris has expressed some concern with the cover of this edition of 'Evil Seed' in the past, her fear being that the contents of the novel may be too strong for the hearts of the more mature readers commonly attracted by such twee artwork. To be fair to the artist, the cover is quite faithful to a passage in the book, it's just that the style is wrong: more Alice Farrell's 'Red Rose Romance' work, more 'Flower Fairy' than the darkness of the Pre-Raphaelites. Indeed, it seems as though the marketeers from Severn House have not fully read 'Evil Seed'. Yes, it is a Romantic novel - but it's Gothic Romance, not Mills and Boon! It is a work of tragedy, in which people die messily. This reverence of the Pre-Raphaelites is where Joanne Harris' fingerprints most show (she even seems to have named 'Inspector Turner' after Ruskin's nemesis). But after having read Harris' 'Sleep, Pale Sister', it seems, for a moment, that the Pre-Raphaelites are just tacked on here. (Perhaps there was a more concrete bridge between these two novels at one time?) However, if you do research into the paintings that Harris refers to in the text, such as Rossetti's 'The Blessed Damozel', then you come across the rather interesting history of Rossetti's model and wife, Elizabeth Siddal. She, like Elaine in Harris' novel, started out as a milliner. You've also got to admire Harris' use of Pre-Raphaelite parlance, since Elaine is quite accurately recruited as a model by an artist who refers to her as a 'stunner'. This is where Joanne Harris is so stimulating, why she is one of the most exciting writers around, because there is always so much texture to her work, layer after layer of rich detail.

The reason why Joanne Harris is concerned for the hearts of her older readers is because it soon becomes clear that 'Evil Seed' is a vampire novel. I've no doubt that fans of Buffy will devour this novel whole, but I do have concerns about inevitable comparisons with Anne Rice's work. Like 'Interview with a Vampire', 'Evil Seed' does contain an infant vamp. However, 'Interview with a Vampire' failed to move me and did not meet my expectations, and Harris creates a very different kind of bloodsucker. Joanne Harris has chosen her location wisely here in many ways. Since Cambridge is a university town, it is absolutely the right place for her shadowy monsters to remain hidden in plain view, since there are always new faces each year. However, there is nothing that reassures me more concerning the keenness of Harris' vision, than her description of the homeless. Certainly, the only thing that depressed and shocked me in early 90s Cambridge was the number of people living on the streets. Concentrated in the town centre, they seemed to outnumber those living in London. 'Evil Seed' is also Harris' most carnivalesque work. I don't think it's the blood and guts which frightens you, it's just that the prose makes your heart beat with so much adrenaline, so much pace, that your senses are liable to be heightened, to the extent that you will become very fearsome of the night...