Off-Target by Eve Smith

 

"Don't cry.

"It'll happen, Susan. We just need to be patient."

My fingers clench. I am so sick of these phrases:

Give it time.

Just keep trying.

Relax, it'll happen.

He pads up behind me. "Really. It's going to be OK."

Nearly four years. Forty-seven cycles of Big Fat Negatives. In what messed-up world is that "OK"?"

"There's a lesson there.

Nature has no moral code. No ethical qualms about collateral damage.

It's about survival: of yourself and your progeny.

That's it".

Off-Target by Eve Smith is a dark speculative fiction, set in the near future.

Teacher Susan Rawlins and her husband Steve have been trying for a baby for years, without any success. Steve is egoistically insisting on doing it the "natural" way only, on the grounds that his life was nearly ruined when his ex-wife and he tried to conceive using the IVF. Having being nearly bankrupted before by the costs of the IVF, Steve is dead set against going that route again.

The tension between the two is building up. To distract herself from the gloom, Susan agrees to come to the musical festival in Oxford with her colleague Marty.

Susan who enjoys her G&T a bit too much, gets drunk and reckless, and has a one-night stand. Soon afterwards she finds out she is pregnant. Susan is torn. Here is her chance to have the longed-for baby, but her husband will most likely leave her, if and when she reveals the truth.

Susan's best friend Carmel offers a possible solution. She knows just the right people who would help with the cutting-edge DNA-altering procedure. The ethical and moral dilemmas put aside, Susan goes to one of the Eastern European clinics to edit the foetus's DNA, including the health modifications to remove any possible health problems in the future. 

Dr Stakhovsky, an unscrupulous genius of the HGGE (human germ line genome editing), explains, "It's not dissimilar to correcting a complex polygenic disorder: same basic editing principles, same AI. Just a few more algorithms". This controversial procedure is illegal in the UK, and "regulators in the UK insist it would be "highly irresponsible" to relax the rules, warning these procedures could have "far-fetching, unknown impacts".

In desperation, Susan decides to go through the procedure. Steve doesn't need to find out. Ever.

When her child is born, Susan names her Zurel after a rare tulip.

Eleven years later, her daughter displays the selective mutism and challenging behaviour. Susan is terrified, "Could this be happening as an indirect result of the edits? Some kind of... change that might have presented symptoms later...? A - what do you call it - "off-target effect?" The doctors claim there is nothing physically wrong with Zurel. There is some other explanation, but what might have caused the problems?

The world is shaken by the reports of young people having mental problems and a wave of suicides among them. There is something in common with all these young people, they have all being subjected to the gene editing procedure. Susan believes her secret is safe. But how long can this secret last?

"Fiction is a very useful place if you have questions rather than answers", says Kamila Shamsie in a recent talk to Pankaj Mishra (see The Guardian, Saturday/Books, 19/02/2022).

After reading Off-Target by Eve Smith I have more questions than answers too, mainly where do you draw a line between genetic editing and eugenics.

The authors might be understandably fond of their characters, and thus not necessarily impartial, while as a reader I can be as judgmental as I want. Susan's decision is unethical on so many levels.

She wants to keep her man at all costs. And he is not exactly a gift. Selfish, controlling and manipulative. 

It's not easy to relate to any of the main characters, they all seem to be ego-centric and unscrupulous. You feel sorry for the child, but even she is hard to warm up to. 

Off-Target is a heady mix of sci-fi and thriller, thought-provoking, disturbing and pacy. It's a gripping tale with plenty of twists you don't want to miss.

Genetic engineering has been explored in fiction before, from Aldous Huxley to Margaret Atwood, from Robert Crichton to Dean Koontz, from Kazuo Ishiguro to Suzanne Collins, and many more. These days it is more topical than ever. How far do we go to play God?!

I was thrilled to attend the Off Target book event at the local Waterstones. This was the first local event after the beginning of the pandemic, and I hope there will be more to come. 

Eve Smith read extracts from her book and answered the questions from the audience. She talked about the writers who have inspired her and what were the initial ideas for Off-Target.

The creepy doll's head installation was created by Patty from Waterstones.