I don’t have children. I feel that they would interrupt my reading time. A houseplant is easier. Less rewarding, perhaps, but it’s unlikely to intrude upon my hopeless attempt to devour every book on Earth before I die. Nor, if A Botanical Daughter is anything to go by, will I find it necessary to provide said plant with a roster of victims so it can murder them all.
No, I take it back. A houseplant is not always easier. Noah Medlock’s historical horror occurs largely in an isolated Victorian glasshouse: a place of overheated, constricted fertility. This glasshouse is both home and prison for CHLOE, the botanical daughter in question, an essentially amoral creature constructed out of corpse and plants (and all caps). CHLOE, made up of species and parts, is inescapably reminiscent of another monstrous hybrid: the creature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
In fact, A Botanical Daughter can easily be read as another take on the Frankenstein story, even if it is not precisely a retelling. Consider what Shelley’s work might have been if Victor Frankenstein had taken his parental duties seriously, and made genuine and ongoing attempts to socialise his creature into being, well, a less homicidal companion. Frankenstein has always been an argument on the nature of monstrosity, and it’s hard to read it and not conclude that dear old Victor was the worst monster of the book, selfish and weak and cowardly and irresponsible as he was.
It’s much easier to be a mad scientist—even a selfish, weak, cowardly and irresponsible one—when rich and isolated. Gregor, the Victor analogue of A Botanical Daughter, is indeed rich and isolated [1]. He is, in fact, isolated on several levels. He lives in a remote, rural corner of Buckinghamshire. His parents died in a house fire that destroyed the family home, and instead of rebuilding he prefers to live and work in the massive glasshouse that still stands on their estate. He’s the laughingstock of the horticultural world, having been humiliated at an exhibition for his fungal displays. And he’s gay.
His lover, Simon, also lives in the glasshouse, where he has his own workroom devoted to taxidermy. Inside the room, woodland creatures are stuffed and posed in all sorts of satirical ways, and Simon has the rather disturbing habit of removing organs from the little corpses and preserving them in jars as a means of controlling his emotions. Don’t want to look at an uncomfortable truth? Store some eyeballs in a jar. Glass and preservatives cure everything. (Or is it sympathetic magic and embalming fluid? Probably best not to ask.) Their relationship, naturally, is secret, given the laws and culture of late Victorian England. A family is formed, however, when Gregor takes advantage of all this isolation and looking away to create a botanical child for the two of them to share.
This creation, admittedly, begins with a far less horrendous intent than Victor Frankenstein’s. On receipt of a fungal species sent from Indonesia, Gregor notes that it has formed a symbiotic relationship with an orchid, and is capable of sufficient environmental manipulation that it can adjust light and shade levels for the orchid’s benefit. This is instinct rather than intelligence, but Gregor wants to see if he can amplify that instinct. He does this by introducing ecological complexity into the existing relationship, using the fungus to link a number of different species together, creating a sort of symbiotic network. Surely the Royal Horticultural Society will regret their treatment of him when his botanical advances are published!
This would all be well and good, except for the fact that Gregor is a mad scientist, and they can never leave well enough alone. I admit to sympathy. Mad scientists just want to know how things work. Their methods may be unusual—they may be downright demented, in fact—but demented is usually interesting. I’ll forgive a lot for interesting. Luckily for Gregor, there’s a convenient corpse just lying about. A young woman called Constance has been buried as a suicide in an out-of-the-way place, and she’ll make the perfect experimental substrate. Hinge her joints with Venus flytraps, propagate her cadaverous skin with a mixture of moss and honey and buttermilk. Crack open her ribs and fill her veins with agar jelly, just nutritious enough for the fungus to take hold. It’ll be fine.
It’s a very beautiful image, a plant-girl—even early on in her development, when she is lacking anything resembling consciousness or intelligence, and just lying there twitching. That image overrides all else: Gregor may talk of carnivorous plants and fungi and earthworms living in the ribcage, but my reading brain skims over all that. It sees CHLOE, constructed from Constance and an entire ecosystem of other organisms, in terms of the floral. It’s fair to say that the presentation of A Botanical Daughter encourages this perception of a more acceptable sort of beauty. Just look at the cover. CHLOE’s features remain largely intact, and present almost entirely as human. Her skin is a pale grey-green, not the vibrant green I would more commonly associate with moss. Botanical additions to her figure seem to occur on her back rather than her front, and the bulk of the vegetation is where her hair would otherwise have been. Cover-CHLOE might as well be wearing a floral crown, an implicit underlining of her young and appealing state.
Except, of course, for the fact that she’s dead.
Or mostly dead—the floral-fungal ecosystem is reanimating her in parts … except for her brain, which was removed during the propagation process. Innocent and brainless, that’s CHLOE. The first of those applied as well to Constance, who it turns out was not guilty of suicide at all, but was murdered for her own homosexual behaviour. In fact, Constance’s lover Jenny is Gregor and Simon’s housekeeper. Upon discovering her employers’ plant-based procreation, she becomes CHLOE’s governess as well.
As much as I enjoyed this book—and I really did, it was fantastic—the relationship between Jenny and CHLOE never quite came together for me. I think it was because it was so largely separate from Jenny’s relationship with Constance. And yes, Constance is dead before the book begins, so there’s little there to analyse bar Jenny’s happy memories. But as the novel progresses, the expected conflict never appears, because Jenny never realises that Constance has been transformed—that her body has been forcibly adapted—into CHLOE.
On one level this is understandable. The CHLOE that Jenny sees and spends time with and comes to love is not Cover-CHLOE, that sanitised plant-maiden. Put a floral crown on Constance, shade her skin a pale grey-green, and of course her beloved should be able to recognise her. Actual CHLOE, however—covered over with ecosystem and held together by fungi, her brain removed, her voice box replaced—is in no way identifiable. Perhaps if her foliage was shaved down so closely to skin that the bone structure of her face was easily visible, then there might be some shade of similarity enough to spark suspicion. But there isn’t.
On another level, though, it does seem a wasted opportunity—especially as there seems to be a part of CHLOE that inclines towards Jenny, that recognises her on some level and comes to love her (again, or in return). How much of that is conscious on CHLOE’s part I don’t know. What is conscious is Gregor and Simon’s decision to keep the part-identity of their daughter from the woman they’ve hired to look after her. This seems especially egregious as it was only through Jenny that Gregor found out about Constance in the first place. He noticed her mourning, extracted the story from her—along with the location of the grave—and went out with a shovel, ready to unearth.
It’s a very deliberate exploitation of a much younger, much less powerful figure. Both Gregor and Jenny are marginalised by their sexualities, but Gregor is wealthy and educated. Moreover, he is her employer. Jenny, on the other hand, is very young, uneducated, and impoverished. She has no recourse in their professional relationship, and her employers not only use her grief as resource for raw materials, but actively keep the knowledge of CHLOE’s origin from her. That she never knows enough, never understands enough, to confront them about this really quite horrible betrayal strikes me as a missed opportunity. I kept waiting for it and never got it.
What makes this absence all the more insidious, I think, is that, when Gregor discovers that Jenny and Constance were in love with each other, he weaponises that knowledge, comparing his relationship with Simon to that of both girls—and earning Jenny’s loyalty thereby. He tells her that they both understand what it is to live in a homophobic world: “We know what it is to love ‘wrong’, and to lose for it. We’re closer than family now. We are shield-siblings in defence of our lives and our loves.” This, despite the fact that earlier in the book he had straight-up lied to Jenny’s face about CHLOE’s construction:
Sentimental sod that I am, I made her look human. I suppose I could have made her look like anything at all! But she does look, as you say, like a girl. Which might upset a certain kind of unimaginative person. That’s why we need to keep her locked away and secret. To protect her, and us, from people who wouldn’t understand.
Now, I can argue that Gregor and Simon have their own ambiguous and periodically conflicting attitudes towards CHLOE, especially as she gets more dangerous, and that would be true. I can also argue that, even so, their ongoing lies to Jenny are an attempt to protect their botanical child. That would be true, too. As a reader, however, I want the drama. I want the narrative pay-off of their choices and of their manipulations. I want the narrative to engage with class in the same way that it does with sexuality and gender, but—moments of lip-service aside, as when Jenny defends the recently laid-off gardeners—the novel never quite gets there.
Recall, if you will, Victor Frankenstein’s unwillingness to play parent to his creature. Gregor and Simon are more open-minded, with some hiccups along the way, and I can’t help but think that this is one area where gender, especially, does come into play. Constance was a grown woman, but CHLOE is referred to as a “little girl.” She’s tucked into bed. Sometimes she’s strapped into bed. She’s forcibly confined to the glasshouse because she can’t be trusted with freedom. When she protests, in broken English, her body is pried open and the apparatus that allows her to speak is wrenched out of her. There’s a very fucked-up sense of family here, as CHLOE is infantilised in a way that Frankenstein’s creature never is.
This is part of the horror of A Botanical Daughter, and it’s done very well—I found it the most disturbing part of the entire novel. As much as I query the book’s unresolved power politics, this aspect of it is in fact so unsettling that I wonder if it may even be deliberate on Medlock’s part. If so, bravo, because it underlines the horror of the novel, and of its probable inspiration Frankenstein, with a brutal and cutting effectiveness. The layers of disturbance resonate throughout the text, and the accompanying sense of confinement—of restricted and constantly monitored fertility, of exploitation and exhibition—never goes away. The monstrous hybridity at the heart of the book is tidied up, idealised, and confined forever in the family home by her fathers, compromised as they may be.
Their choice may prevent a lot of death. There’s no more murder, and no more biological invasion. There’s even time for reading, as the botanical daughter adapts to her hermetically sealed fate. All her fathers need to do is water her.
A houseplant may indeed, in the end, be easier.
Endnotes
[1] He is presumably named for Gregor Mendel, who famously spent a very long time analysing pea plants for their ability to pass on genetic information. [return]