Between Human Guilt and Hopeful Shadowplaces: Purity, Chemosociality and Multispecies Relations in Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker  

This paper studies the way Ned Beauman’s 2022 novel Venomous Lumpsucker negotiates ideas about human-animal relations, human guilt about the climate emergency, and ethics, arguing that the concept of purity and purism as theorised by Alexis Shotwell can elucidate pitfalls and potentiality in thinking about the way we relate to nonhuman-nature and ecology, as depicted in Beauman’s novel.
Venomous Lumpsucker is set in a bleak near future where both ecological preservation and extinction have been commodified in a complex and fraudulent system, which is emblematized by the concept of ‘extinction credits’ to be paid or earned for causing or preventing extinction respectively. The novel follows the adventure of two strangers from seemingly opposite sides of the nature preservation ‘market,’ Karin Resaint, a Swiss researcher tasked with judging the “intelligence level” of specific animal species, and Mark Halyard, a Danish “environmental impact coordinator” for the same company, who has been short selling extinction credits to make a quick buck on his employer’s funds.

The pair of unlikely companions is taken on a journey all over Europe in search of the last remaining venomous lumpsuckers, and find their beliefs challenged by a series of unusual encounters.

Thinking with the concept of ‘shadowplaces’ as theorised by Val Plumwood as places that “provide [the] material and ecological support [for the] global market” but often remain unseen, and the concepts of ‘chemosociality’ and ‘emergent ecologies’ as theorised by Eben Kirksey as a new sort of chemical relations and ecologies that emerge in polluted spaces, the paper considers the role of purism in conceptualisations of ‘wilderness,’ space, and habitats in the novel. It will be shown that the way we think about ecosystems and preservation is plagued by a purist thinking. Ultimately, the concept of ‘chemosociality’ is where subversion of purism and shadowplaces come together.

Ultimately, the paper shows that resisting the pull of purist thinking in considerations of both human-animal relations and ecological protection and preservation can open up a space of great potential and hope, and that Beauman’s sort of satirical, dialogical and imaginative fiction is instrumental in making this possible (139).