Jeff VanderMeer and Douglas Adams have more in common than you might think. While their fiction is tonally light-years apart, both writers share an impassioned concern for the environmental health of the planet on which we all live. Both have also looked at iconic trilogies that they’ve written and wondered, hey, what would happen if this had more books? In the case of Adams, that involves what the cover of Mostly Harmless dubbed “the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Trilogy.” And for VanderMeer, we have Absolution, a new installment in his Southern Reach trilogy following Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance.
It seems less than coincidental that Absolution is structured with three distinctive parts, each of which can be considered as a mirror to its corresponding book in the original trilogy. This novel’s second (and longest part), “The False Daughter,” especially feels like a surreal reflection of Authority, in that both play out like espionage novels that slowly mutate into something much more bizarre.
That said, finding the right word to describe Absolution isn’t easy. Much of it is set before the beginning of Annihilation; its first part, “Dead Town,” includes a caption noting that it’s set 20 years before the establishment of Area X, the ever-shifting transformed landscape where the Southern Reach novels are set. And readers of the original trilogy will find that several familiar characters show up here. So, you might say, it’s a prequel, right? The Hobbit to the Southern Reach trilogy’s Lord of the Rings, perhaps. (Given that there’s a character here named Smaug, one suspects VanderMeer has considered this himself.) Well… It isn’t quite as neat as all of that.
Readers of Acceptance will recall that its storyline already looped back to before the events of Annihilation, so Absolution feels less like a proper prequel and more of an expansion of the gaps left in the original trilogy’s already-sprawling narrative. And that’s before you factor in the ways that time and space are decidedly malleable in this setting—or, to bring things back to the aforementioned Douglas Adams, there’s a bit of (to borrow from a show he wrote for in the 1970s) “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey” happening here. And on top of that, there’s also Area X’s penchant for creating doppelgängers of certain characters. If you read this book expecting the narrative to mesh seamlessly with its predecessors like some sort of beloved Swiss watch assembly, you may be frustrated. In this case, the watch is more some uncanny biomechanical hybrid that’s slowly devouring your arm and your very sense of self. Which is to say: Absolution is a hell of a ride.
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Absolution
So: a novel in three parts. “Dead Town” follows Old Jim and the inhabitants of the Village Bar as they muse on an earlier biological survey of the Forgotten Coast and watch as the landscape around them turns increasingly bizarre. “The False Daughter” picks up on Old Jim—who, it turns out, has more ties to the world of espionage than were initially apparent—years later as he laments his estrangement from his daughter and teams up with another agent to attempt to unearth what, exactly, is happening to the flora and fauna of the region that would become Area X. And “The First and the Last” shifts perspective dramatically, focusing on Lowry—a man who has a significant role in the original trilogy—as he embarks on the first fateful expedition into Area X.
That shift in protagonists two-thirds of the way through the book is one of several ways that Absolution feels like a trilogy of novellas in places. Each part has a distinct structure, and one of the small pleasures of this book comes from seeing how VanderMeer is playing with the structure; the chapter numbers in “The False Daughter” are a particularly striking example of that.
“The First and the Last” contrasts memorably with the two Old Jim sections. While Old Jim is a somewhat familiar figure—a world-weary man left paranoid and alienated by his work—Lowry is something very different. He has a penchant for profanity and may well set a record for the number of times the word “fuck” has appeared in a novel. But for all of the mounting paranoia and body horror on display here, there’s also a decidedly bleak sense of humor running throughout the section. Lowry certainly considers himself to be the hero here—even saying so at one point—but VanderMeer includes a few hints that Lowry isn’t quite the uber-capable conquering figure he’d like to think he is. (This comes to the forefront when Lowry encounters—and completely misunderstands—a reference to the composer Franz Schubert.)
Both Lowry and Old Jim are, in their own way, memorable central characters, but it’s the pervasive sense of wrongness that enables certain scenes that sear into one’s memory. In the first part, one of the initial signs that all is not well in this place is the presence of shockingly white rabbits. Did I mention that these rabbits are carnivorous? Because they are. They eat crabs. And if you’re wondering how creepy the image of a bright white rabbit tearing through the shell of a crab can be, the answer is: incredibly creepy.
By the time we’ve gotten to Lowry, it’s eminently clear that he may not be the hero he believes himself to be, but he is very good at staying alive. One sequence, in which he watches as some of his team are devoured by their weapons, which have also begun to merge with their bodies, stands as one of the most disturbing passages VanderMeer has ever written. That section also includes evocative moments like this:
Undulating waves of wolves, but made of black liquid and slurping their way across like liquid lava fire, and no that wasn’t it but the sight defeated the eye like an eye defeated an ear and a tongue because he needed to see the enemy, not taste or smell them.
One of the running themes of VanderMeer’s work, which comes up in the Southern Reach novels as well as the likes of Shriek (An Afterword) and The Strange Bird is that certain transformations that might seem horrific can actually be grounds for transcendence. It also isn’t hard to find an implicit critique of certain types of authoritarian behavior here: that, essentially, if you venture into Area X seeking to control it, you might be doomed already. If there’s a running theme in these four novels of VanderMeer’s, it’s the gulf between knowledge and control. Can we, as a species, learn to understand something we find alien without attempting to dominate it? That’s one of the central questions of these books—and, not coincidentally, of our age as well.
Absolution is published by MCD.
Read an excerpt.
