Re-read review: The Southern Reach Trilogy (including 'Annihilation'), by Jeff Vandermeer
I've written previously about my 'problematic fave', HP Lovecraft. So imagine my delight to discover in 'Annihilation' a Lovecraftian story told from the perspective a xenophile rather than a xenophobe. The narrator is 'the biologist', an unnamed female ecologist who approaches the mysteriously altered landscape of "Area X" with an attitude one could describe as: "This is creepy, but not horrifying. So the universe is full of forces and entities that don't care about humanity? What else is new? I want to know more about this place." Area X is clearly dangerous; All previous expeditions have come to grief in various ways. But it is also lush and full of life, lacking any human pollutants. The life they find is seriously weird at times - some of the animals have oddly human characteristics, for instance - but the biologist has always felt more at home with nature than with people, so she deals with that with more equanimity than the rest of the team.
The later books follow up on this tale from different perspectives. 'Authority' focuses on John Rodriguez, AKA 'Control', and is more of a spy story. Control has been appointed the new director of the Southern Reach, which oversees research into Area X. The old director disappeared on the expedition that included the biologist. The latter appears to have returned...but she asks that Control call her Ghost Bird and later insists she isn't really the biologist. He spends most of the story trying to understand what is going on with Area X and the Southern Reach from notes made by squirrely, sometimes hostile staff members - though the time he has to do it is shorter than he thinks. 'Acceptance' fills in the background details on several significant characters, including Saul, the keeper of the lighthouse at the heart of Area X, and Gloria (alias 'Cynthia') the missing Southern Reach director who knew him when she was a little girl. We also discover what became of the original biologist, and continue the story of Ghost Bird and Control.
The atmosphere of these books is amazing: creepy, yet full of wonder and beauty at the same time. For instance, in a spiral staircase going into the ground that the biologist insists on calling a 'tower', they encounter words written/grown in a kind of moss:
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few...
And so on, and so forth, endlessly. The words appear to have been written by a transformed version of the lighthouse keeper. Members of prior expeditions also seem to have been incorporated into Area X in altered states. Interestingly, the film version of 'Annihilation' captures this feeling almost perfectly, despite diverging radically in plot.
Overall conclusion: Before getting into any *spoilers* below...If you are keen to sample a Lovecraftian/cosmic horror/"new weird" tale without the over-the-top racism of the original Lovecraft stories, I highly recommend giving this series a look.
Further thoughts:
One of the interesting aspects of 'Annihilation' is that the main character reacts the way she does because she already has the tendency to empathize more with nature than with humanity1. As the director's notes (revealed in 'Authority') state, she: Becomes embedded to an extraordinary extent. Would know Area X better than I do from almost the first moment sets foot there.
Her husband had been a member of the previous expedition, and seemingly returned blank-faced and cancer-ridden. They had been having problems related to her emotional distance: "Ghost bird" was his nickname for her, referring to her elusiveness. But as she explores Area X, and finds his notebook, she feels herself growing closer to him and is convinced he is still there. Though she sees her own doppelganger leave, she decides to stay and look for him, in whatever form he might now exist. That is a hauntingly beautiful ending, and one I wish the film had used.
While 'Annihilation' is short on physical descriptions of the human characters, it is revealed in the second and third books that the cast of characters is really very diverse. The biologist is described as being part Asian, with straight black hair and green eyes. The assistant director, Grace, is a slim black woman who may be at least a little bit in love2 with the director. The director is attached to the place that is now Area X not only because it was home to her as a child, but at least in part because it was home to her native ancestors for thousands of years. The lighthouse keeper was a gay ex-preacher who moved out to the coast3 to try to live in a way that was more authentic to himself.
Is that diversity significant or important? Well, yes, I think so. Lovecraftian horror deals heavily in themes of 'the other'. Vandermeer seems to be giving both nods and middle fingers to Lovecraft throughout. For instance, before he came to the Southern Reach, Control worked in counter-terrorism. Specifically, countering right-wing domestic terrorism, AKA working against people who often act on the kind of extreme xenophobic attitudes Lovecraft himself held. When Control arrives in the area, he has strange dreams about drowning, and it is said:
He wanted to be close to the sea, but not on the coast...he'd had strange thoughts about the inhabitants of the coastal towns to either side of Area X being somehow mutated under the skin. Whole communities no longer what they once were....
But, in the end, he jumps after Ghost Bird into the sea and through a portal into Area X. Both the early anxiety about the sea, and then the acceptance no longer fitting the normal world and entering the sea have heavy 'Shadow over Innsmouth' vibes. Control also has a black and white cat named Chorizo who sometimes seems to react to the weirdness, which might or might not be a cheeky revision of the black cat in 'The rats in the walls' whose name is a racial slur. It is these people who, due to personality, gender, ethnicity, and/or sexuality, are 'othered' by our world who seem to cope the best with Area X, surviving and holding on to more of their sense of self for a longer period of time, perhaps because they've already had practice doing just that in the face of a hostile or uncaring world4.
There is much more ambiguity to this tale than in Lovecraft - that which is strange, and sometimes even initially horrifying, is not always bad. Human destruction of the environment, the extinction of species and the contamination of everywhere outside Area X, is mentioned over and over again; to other organisms, we would be the monsters. It is perhaps fitting that Area X absorbs humans and their creation and makes them part of a broader ecosystem once more. As the biologist comments, regarding a strange slug-hog creature with the face of the psychologist from a previous expedition:
This beast should have been a dolphin with an uncanny eye, a wild boar that acted as if it were new to its body...But it looked like a mistake, a misfire by an Area X that had assimilated so much so beautifully and so seamlessly...To disappear into the coastline, into the anonymous reaches of the beach and the wind or the marshes, did not really disturb me, perhaps never had. But this did - this blind relentless questing...I became resolved not to give in to the brightness, to give up my identity - not yet.
She finds an owl that she thinks may be the new form of her husband, and they stay together for thirty years5. When the owl dies, she writes up an account, and then lets 'the brightness' take over:
Ghost Bird saw it from the landing window. How the biologist coalesced out of the night, her body flickering and stitching its way into existence...the vast bulk seething down the hill...as trees fell to that gliding yet ponderous and muffled darkness, reduced to kindling by the muscle behind the emerald luminescence that glinted through the black...it had many, many eyes that were also like flowers or sea anemones...all across its body...In the multiplicity of that regard, Ghost Bird saw what they saw...She saw that the biologist now existed across locations and landscapes...Nothing monstrous existed here - only beauty, only the glory of good design...An animal, an organism that had never existed before or that might belong to an alien ecology. That could transition not just from land to water but from one remote place to another, with no need for a door in a border. Staring up at her with her own eyes. Seeing her.
There is something strangely appealing to this type of apocalypse, if indeed Area X is the beginning of the end for human civilization, because it is an ending that feels like a new beginning. It reminds me of a song I have imagined requesting for my own funeral, reflecting as it does the hope that, if one can no longer be oneself, one might rejoin something bigger than humanity.
Do not stand at my grave and weep:
I am a thousand winds that blow; I am the diamond glistening snow
I am the sunlight on the grain; I am the gentle autumn rain
When you awake in the morning's hush, I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight; I am the stars that shine at night
If hills could sing, I'd be their song; With roots and wings I do belong
If mountains spoke, I'm their refrain; I'd guide you through both wind and rain
(Chorus) Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there, I do not sleep
Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there, I did not die
1. One might perhaps guess that the biologist is somewhere on the autism spectrum. I'm not sure that is the intention, though it is a possibility. She seems to read people just fine - and Ghost Bird is VERY good at it - she just doesn't have much patience for human interaction.
2. This is never 100% confirmed, but Grace's level of devotion, her insistence that the director will come back, and her desire to preserve the director's office and other spaces as they were bear a much stronger resemblance to a grieving parent or lover than a co-worker. And one is likely meant to draw this connection, as there would otherwise be little point in repeated references to Grace having an (unnamed, undescribed) girlfriend.
3. Possibly in the '70s or early '80s, from context, though no clear timeframe is ever given for any part of the story.
4. At one point, the lighthouse keeper thinks: Bodies could be beacons, too...people opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn't see it, because they had no other choice. His boyfriend, Charlie, sarcastically notes: "That's bullshit. Don't ever become a poet." But of course that thought had been partly about Charlie, still emotionally skittish twenty years after having been rejected by his family; Saul wants to guard his light as much or more as the one in the tower. Even as he is overtaken by whatever is growing in him and in the land, his last thought is of Charlie, thankful that he is far out at sea and therefore probably safe.
5. Time passes faster inside Area X; it has only been a year or so in the outside world.
