Review: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer

As someone who was a huge fan of Jeff VanderMeer’s writing going back to the early aughts, I’ve always felt a bit bemused by his mid-career breakout with the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance). His earlier work was firmly in the fantastic mode, so both the shift to science fiction, with a trilogy of books in which a stretch of Florida coastland is transformed into a zone of uncanniness that alters anyone who ventures into it, and VanderMeer’s subsequent embrace as a public intellectual, took me by surprise. VanderMeer’s career has continued to flourish in the subsequent decade, so another surprise—to more people, I suspect, than just myself—is his decision to return to the setting of Area X with a new novel. The folks at the Guardian let me review it.

Absolution, the unlooked-for follow-up to the trilogy, seems at first glance like a series of outtakes from it, featuring familiar names and previously unknown backstory. Twenty years before the event that triggers Area X’s emergence, a scientific expedition – secretly bankrolled by Central – encounters harbingers of weirdness, such as the appearance of thousands of cannibalistic rabbits, and a mysterious figure dubbed the Rogue. And then 18 months before the event, a disgraced Central agent known as Old Jim is dispatched to the region to investigate the expedition’s failure and find the Rogue. A year after the event, that first expedition into the site – whose failure looms over the scientists in Annihilation – is related to us in the drug-addled, profanity-laden voice of one Lowry, whom readers of the earlier book will recognise as the expedition’s sole survivor.

Much of what made the original Southern Reach books powerful and disturbing can be found in this new volume. Once again, VanderMeer produces a near-seamless shading between the weirdness and danger of Area X, and the natural environment that preceded it. Old Jim is rattled by a stand of trees left dead by the inland incursion of seawater, seeing in it a hint of the unearthly, while a superintelligent alligator who is the Rogue’s companion disappears into the swampland. For the bureaucrats at Central, obsessed with “foreign interference” – a term whose vagueness obscures many possible meanings – this liminal quality is untenable. They send wave upon wave of operatives – as Absolution reveals, the ones we knew of were preceded by others – to unravel it. Invariably, once these operatives learn to understand Area X, they realise that they have become too altered by it to explain it to others, or even to return from it.

There is, however, a shift in Absolution’s focus, one that perhaps reflects the intervening decade of real-world events. The original Southern Reach books often featured grey bureaucrats attempting to quantify the indescribable. Absolution turns its attention to these bureaucrats, in the process revealing that they are not so grey. Central may in fact be a greater danger than Area X, if only because its leaders remain convinced that they can weaponise it. Having learned the extent of his superiors’ manipulation of their own agents, and their involvement in the lead-up to Area X’s creation, Old Jim begins to think of Central as a “shadow, eaten up from the inside”. Lowry, whose official mission is to find the “off switch” that will return Area X to normality, embodies Central’s contradictions, veering erratically between a xenophobic desire to destroy Area X, and an almost romantic longing to be made one with it.

A few things that the Guardian‘s word limit didn’t let me explore: first, reading the entire Southern Reach sequence at a stretch makes it all the more fascinating that this series has had such mainstream penetration. These are books that, despite their technothriller premise, repeatedly refuse the urge to solve their setting and situation. What’s more, they refuse conventional plot structure, skipping from one disaffected, emotionally numb protagonist to another and rarely offering them anything resembling catharsis unless it’s at the point of being completely remade. Anyone coming to Absolution expecting it to resolve Area X’s mysteries will be disappointed, since the book largely ends up delivering more of the same, including the same sense of confusion and mystery. It is both puzzling and delightful to me that so many readers, including those who are not traditional science fiction readers, have embraced that.

Second, though it’s hard to draw direct lines of influence—as I note in the review, the Southern Reach novels belong the wide tradition of Zone SF, which stretches back at least to the Strugatsky Brothers and Andrei Tarkovsky—I think the popularity of these novels has really told in mainstream pop culture. Alex Garland, of course, (loosely) adapted Annihilation into a movie in 2018, but even creators who aren’t obviously working in the same mode seem to have taken a great deal from VanderMeer. There’s a lot of Area X in how Craig Mazin imagines the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, and the zone of exclusion that forms around the exploded reactor, in his 2019 miniseries. And last year’s marvel of an animated series, Scavengers Reign, posits a similarly malleable natural environment, in which flora and fauna melt into each other, subsuming human visitors into their systems.

Finally, I would be surprised if Absolution is the last Southern Reach novel. There are a lot of loose ends left at the end of this book. Characters whose fate we don’t learn; groups and institutions that are marked as important without really coming to the fore. I have no concrete information, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually hear news of another novel in this setting.