Scream for Absolution
Jeff VanderMeer’s sometimes frustrating, frequently harrowing return to Area X.
Absolution
A Southern Reach Novel
by Jeff VanderMeer
MCD, 464 pp., $26
IT HAS BEEN TEN YEARS SINCE LAST we saw Area X. (Or six, if you count the movie, which I do not, not because it is not a good movie, but because it is not exactly Area X.) Ten years since Jeff VanderMeer took us to that haunted patch of Gulf Coastline; ten years since The Southern Reach Trilogy (all published in 2014), VanderMeer’s Weird Fiction magnum opus; ten years since we first saw, with the biologist, “the tower, which was not supposed to be there, plung[ing] into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.” Returning there now is at times revelatory, at times frustrating and necessarily anticlimactic, at times like a journey to holy ground; a rhizomatic pilgrimage to some subterranean and fungal Santiago de Compostela, slimy with mold and home to many crawling things.
In Annihilation, the first book of the Trilogy, we followed the unnamed “biologist” on an expedition (purportedly the twelfth) into the beautiful and terrible world that is Area X, past the “border” that only hypnotized people can pass through safely, watching in horror and delight as she and her companions underwent physical and psychological changes, encountering squirming, sermoniacal words grown from living vegetal matter into patterns on the walls of the tower.
In Authority, we saw the strangled fruit of that expedition, as the inadequate and secrecy-obsessed government organization (only ever called Central) running the expeditions tried to gain some measure of control over the scientists and bureaucrats who had been forever changed by their proximity to Area X.
In Acceptance, we accompanied some of the surviving scientists and bureaucrats as they traversed the “border” once more and met an old lighthouse keeper who has become, in the Area’s new, psychedelic state, a central part of the story.
Now, in Absolution, VanderMeer takes us back to Area X and the Southern Reach, and it’s very much the same sort of thing. Just as the 2014 trilogy was divided into the three parts, so too is Absolution divided into three parts. First, in “Dead Town,” twenty years before the “border” came down, we learn about a team of biologists that traveled to the Coast from the perspective of “Old Jim” as he prepares for his own mission. Second, in “The False Daughter,” eighteen months before the “border” came down, we follow the misadventures of Old Jim himself as he is sent to the Coast to keep an eye on Central’s operations there. Finally, in “The First and the Last,” one year after the “border” came down, we follow the famous first expedition into Area X—which was always described in the original trilogy as a catastrophic, existential failure.
VanderMeer’s prose bubbles with impossible but compelling images that evoke the complex irrealities of the domain at the center of the book:
Down in the depths, rising, and by the river’s bank he looked out on the ravens that were not ravens and the rocks and the green canopy, resting there as vessel, candle, flame, and the branches of the trees were opening and opening up to reveal, far off, the two mountains and the green light in the cleft between them as if it had always been there, waiting, and he’s always known that, too. He could hear a distant hum or music or chanting and it came from both the water and the air, as if both were full of invisible lives that made sound through the branches, through the river reeds and moss.
These are flavors and textures that will be familiar to readers of the earlier books, and Absolution is deeply intertwined with the Trilogy on the levels of form and content, as well. Lowry, the expedition member we spend the most time with in “The First and the Last,” was a minor but important character in both Authority and Acceptance; Whitby, the bizarre scientist from those two books, plays a significant role in Absolution; and the shadow of the spymaster Severance family looms large over the entire text. Readers of Authority will chill to see the familiar appearance of a surprise horde of white rabbits that appear where and when one least expects it. Further, as VanderMeer complexifies Area X’s already complicated relationship with time, he unsettles the order in which things occurred, both in Absolution and the Trilogy.
Unfortunately, this means that Absolution also inherits many of the original problems of the Trilogy. Annihilation, the shortest of the three books, is generally understood to be the best, with its commitment to the tight point of view of “the biologist” and its ability to pose a thousand complicated questions without feeling the need to answer any of them. (Weird Fiction, the genre that claims VanderMeer as a modern patron saint, is nearly always better at asking questions than it is interested in answering them, and the same could be said of VanderMeer himself in both the Trilogy and Absolution.) The second book, Authority was, alas, mostly a slog: Although a psychological expedition into the Southern Reach is a fascinating concept, VanderMeer could not quite manage to invest its antiseptic corridors and nebulous conspiracies with even half the dread and wonder of Area X itself. Acceptance was uneven, struggling to tell three different stories of varying interest, but it was nevertheless, to my eyes at least, generally successful.
In Absolution, we repeat that same structure—with all the shortcomings and the strange, haunting beauty that characterized the original Trilogy.
“DEAD TOWN” IS BOTH THE SHORTEST part of the Absolution triptych and the best, doubly mirroring Annihilation. In it, we find Old Jim, in preparation for his mission, going through files and concatenating the various peculiar and contradictory accounts of the members of the biologists’ mysterious expedition to the Forgotten Coast twenty years before Area X’s border came down.
VenderMeer tells this part of the story in summary but lyrical language, pausing to liberally quote the members of that expedition, which leaves it feeling like more of an arresting non-fiction account than a Weird Fiction story. The documentary style of narration is a Weird Fiction storytelling method that goes back at least to Lovecraft; recall that The Call of Cthulhu is an account written by a man who never actually encounters the Great Old One or any of its ravening followers, but is instead piecing the story together from three separate accounts of bizarre encounters with octopoid statues and febrile cults. It’s a popular approach in the genre because it works: It allows the writer to assemble a coherent account out of the incoherent ravings of those who have encountered something truly maddening, with the narrative tension being maintained through the unsettled researcher’s struggle to piece together what could possibly have provoked all these gibberings. VanderMeer can provide us with so many scraps and then leave us to speculate about what actually happened.
After dark that night, some observed that the invasives shed a slight phosphorescence against the pall of night. “Their quivering bodies as they foraged at dusk appeared like luminous smudges of ghost,” Team Leader 2 wrote, uncharacteristically poetic.
This became a contested observation, an opinion shared by only some of the expedition, and not by Team Leader 1. But most agreed that, from the start, they “congregated in tight proximity after sunset,” so that the rabbits took on the appearance of “wide swathes” or “rags” of white that in their “persistence of movements similar to shoals of fish” seemed to “glide across” the dark ground, to and fro, back and forth.
Yet the second—and longest—part of Absolution, “The False Daughter,” is a slog much like Authority. It is a thudding record of failures: Old Jim tries and fails to make sense of the biologists’ expedition, 18 and a half years earlier; tries and fails to unravel both Central’s machinations and the peculiar things happening around the Coast; and tries and fails to cope with the sudden appearance of a woman who is almost certainly not his long-missing daughter.
Thankfully, Old Jim is a more interesting guy than was Authority’s protagonist, so it works better than Authority. But “The False Daughter” is still too concerned with the invisible, Kafkaesque intrigues of the mysterious Central agency that is ostensibly in charge of both the later investigations into Area X—and is apparently involved in the Area’s creation in the first place. (No spoilers: This has been known since at least Acceptance.)
Once things get going, though, “The False Daughter” produces some of the more viscerally upsetting images in the text and, indeed, the entire series, as when one poor, doomed fellow screams as “the sides of him rippled as they liquified and fell splashing and thick in streams and pools of nothing like flesh, to feed the holes, which throbbed and hummed green now, come alive in a way that made them seem like too-regular tidal pools on a sheet of rock next to the sea.” I mean, good Lord.
The third part, “The First and the Last,” is told from the perspective of a Central agent, Lowry, as he embarks on the first formal expedition into Area X, sometime prior to Annihilation. Like Acceptance, “The First and the Last” bites off more than it can chew—possibly because it (admirably) does not want to wrap all of the saga’s questions into a neat little package. Acceptance sought to tell three stories at once—not unlike Absolution as a whole, rendering Absolution both a microcosm of the entire Trilogy and a macrocosm of Acceptance. But it got lost along the way.
By contrast, “The First and the Last” gets lost in the strengths and weaknesses of its own protagonist: Lowry is coping with the tremendous stress associated with this expedition by downing a heroic quantity of pharmaceutical-grade amphetamines. This makes him something other than an objective observer of the facts, either before the expedition or during it. His innate foul-mouthedness and his drug habit also gives him an annoying tic: he deploys the word “fuck” about eight times a sentence. Consider the first paragraph of his section:
Just twenty-four fucking hours until they crossed the fucking Border and nothing Lowry didn’t know, for fuck’s sake, that Jack hadn’t told him, and he didn’t know anything, fuck. Not for fucking real. The world felt like it was in shackles and the only fucking way to deal with that shit was to become so abso-fucking-lutely free he could claim his existence as an act of fucking defiance.
This tic diminishes as the part continues—for reasons both in-story and, one must assume, stylistic—but it’s tiresome and distracting from the jump. Pity poor Bronson Pinchot, who is performing the audiobook narration (as he did Authority and much of Acceptance): There are only so many ways to variegate these sentences when spoken aloud. (Lowry starts to think of this tic as “his fucks,” which amusingly lends his part of the story the sense of an elaborate “I have no more fucks to give” joke. But regardless, no one gives a shit about all his fucks.)
So Lowry is a weird, gross little guy. But it’s his status as perhaps the most broken amongst the imperfect vessels that Central has sent into Area X that makes him such a delightfully frustrating viewpoint character once things start to properly hit the fan inside the “border.” Weird things are surely happening in Area X; we’ve been here before, we know some of its tricks, we have even seen some footage from Lowry’s expedition in previous books. Yet how many of the weird things we are seeing on the page in “The First and the Last” are happening in quite the way we see them? To what extent is Lowry’s amphetamine-addled mind manufacturing new peculiarities or investing what he is seeing with idiosyncratic significances?
Throughout the Southern Reach saga, a pervasive problem with Area X is that it muddles scientific instruments that attempt to objectively record what is happening; so it is appropriate that our best view into Area X itself in Absolution is through the lens of a man who is anything but objective. When Lowry looks at Area X’s famous lighthouse and sees “a séance-searing gush-fountain of aquamarine cum spurting from some giant, protean dick,” while the rest of the expedition sees other things, is this because Lowry is just too tweaked out for reality? Or is it because he is disconnected enough from ordinary human perception to see things more for what they really are? Or is it some other thing?
Central has always sought to catalog Area X—to try to reduce it to human understanding, measured by dials—and Area X has always resisted Central’s efforts. Yet, perhaps because of Central’s own inherent inability to trust its members or to avoid making everything more complicated than it has to be, the organization has also apparently never sent anyone through the border who isn’t deeply broken. What would happen if, instead of Lowry or Old Jim or the original biologist, all very strange people whose minds have been shattered by drugs and tragedy and the tremendous weight of Central’s mandated hypnotic suggestions—what would happen if Central just sent a few ordinary researchers into Area X? Normal people? Would they return with a coherent understanding of Area X’s mysteries, or would they never make it past the “border” at all, too moored to our understanding of reality to survive the journey?
How can a writer, deploying human language, describe the indescribable Thing that is Area X? How can a writer pace out the bounds of a place which is, by definition, immeasurable? VanderMeer’s efforts to evoke similar feelings about Central’s bureaucracy remain largely unsuccessful, but his painting of Area X is as arresting as ever.
Absolution, like the rest of the Southern Reach series, is frustrating and flawed, but it nevertheless sticks in the back of your mind like a burr on the leg of a deer, or like a tapeworm ingested alongside so much rotten meat, or like a house centipede, skittering through the walls of your home, always staying just out of sight.
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