I opened Seed, Bri Lee’s new novel, hours after finishing Trent Dalton’s latest, not expecting they’d have much to say to one another. My mistake. Both are tales of middle-aged men betrayed by their inner voice: two egos, both alike in fragility.
But while Dalton’s leading man is ferociously self-critical, Lee’s narrator casts himself as a lonely soldier on the moral high ground. “I was always doing the right thing,” he sulks, “and yet nobody was ever on my side”. The harder he clings to his goodness, the more pompous and petulant he sounds.
