Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach trilogy, is equal parts science-fiction, horror, and philosophy. It’s well-written, but I don’t think it’s for everybody. I’m pretty sure it’s not for me anyway, but I don’t think that makes it a bad book.
The book starts out with four scientists arriving in “Area X.” We’re never told exactly what happened there, because the government is keeping it under wraps. All we know is that several expeditions have gone in, and very few people made it out. One group committed suicide. Another murdered each other. Several people from the last expedition came back home, but since they all died of cancer a few months later, technically they didn’t make it out either.
We never get any of the characters names. The government has encouraged them to stay away from names, and won’t say why. But we as the readers never even get the main character’s name, or her husband’s name, or one single name in the whole book.
That’s all very chilling, but the chills in the book are spaced pretty far apart. Most of the time we spend inside the main character’s head as she thinks about her childhood, her career, her husband, and how much she doesn’t trust the psychologist of their team. We hear a lot of the same information over and over, until it gets a bit tedious. There are interesting tidbits all throughout, but it’s very cerebral and introspective.
Another big chunk of the book is taken up by the words the team finds growing (yes growing, like a fungus) inside a strange building. Steps lead down, for a very long time, bringing them closer and closer to whatever put the words on the walls. I started to get nervous, in a good way, wondering if this might play out like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, where a building swallows the characters up, leaving them wandering in insanely endless hallways that change the moment they aren’t looking.
That would’ve been nice, but no. They’re just steps. They go down, or they go up, and there’s something not very nice writing on the walls, but there isn’t that awful feeling of being lost in a dark place that doesn’t fit into reality.
And when I finished it, I looked at the last page, and said “Huh. Okay…?”
I definitely don’t “get” this book, and I feel like I’ve missed something. Vandermeer hands out some answers, but not all the answers, not even close. It’s more than just the fact that this is the first book of a trilogy. Lots of books leave you hanging so you’ll want to read the next book. This did the opposite: I’m so perplexed I don’t want to read any more.
I kept waiting for a climactic resolution, but I guess this isn’t that kind of book.
I think it’s more about the main character discovering who she is when she’s in the middle of a situation that has no context to anything she’s ever known. The lack of names means everyone is judged by their actions alone, with no qualifications, no pretense. Without all our labels, we see who are we at our core, even if everything else about us changes. We only think we understand what’s going on around us, it’s really just a comforting illusion of control. And what we were looking for the whole time turned out to be the wrong question.
Or something like that. I’m guessing here.
Have you ever read a book that’s been translated into English? That’s what this felt like. Vandermeer actually has a wonderful command of the language, but there’s a strange quality to the dialog. It feels like someone having to think too hard about what they’re trying to say.
Not that Vandermeer didn’t know what he was trying to say. I think he said it exactly the way he wanted to. I didn’t understand it, but for all I know that’s probably the point.