Hey folks
It's my birthday today (getting old) and I'd like to share with you my thoughts on Jeff VanderMeer's existential horror novel called Annihilation and its sequels (Authority and Acceptance). Annihilation is one of my favourite books of all time and truth be told I haven't been able to find anything in the science fiction/cosmic horror/existential horror gene that tops it.
Have you read the books? You should! (However, you should skip the second book in the series - if you commit to the whole Southern Reach trilogy - and read only the last twenty pages or so. It's really not necessary to read the rest because there's a) no plot and b) it's boring as heck to follow a main character who goes to hid job in a boring office and does boring stuff there.)
Annihilation (the first book in the trilogy) is one of the best books I've ever read. It's quite honestly also (one of) the most impactful book(s) in my library.
I want to tell you why.
The most striking theme in Annihilation was to me the existential dread/horror the protagonist faces as she ventures into Area X. It has so much in common with what I'm constantly going through in real life (confusion about life/depression/trying to find ways to improve myself/trying to find meaning in life itself) that it resonated with me very deeply. There is always a sense of not knowing what's going on and what's going to happen. The tension is constant and the stakes are higher than life or death. They are existential. The biologist (the main character of the first book) finds new and stranger things every time she takes a step forward in Area X just as anyone else faces problem after problem in their day to day lives.
There are several scenes in the book where events happen and are not explained. This would be annoying in most books but in Annihilation it fits perfectly.
The ending too is very open and inconclusive. There is no 'good guy defeats bad guy' or even 'protagonist overcomes antagonist' climax. The climax is written the same as the rest of the book - very quietly but with lots of tension in it. The ending remains open-ended.
Another reason why this book is great is its main character - the biologist. The biologist does not change whatsoever during the course of the book (although she learn a lot of new and weird things). A lot of the times this is likely to be the sign of a bad book. But not so with Annihilation. The whole journey of the protagonist is so beautifully written and her character explained/developed that it impressed upon me such an awareness of how it's not always necessary to win/to defeat your own demons/etc. etc.. The point made was that everyone lives with some sort of disadvantage or baggage in life - which is true - and the point that follows this initial tidbit is that it does not matter at all. In a sense it says 'the past does not matter' just like the psychologist Alfred Adler did.
What does matter (and here Annihilation makes the greatest case for itself) is that we must simply go on despite our baggage/fears/anxieties/past. We must go on while trying to become better versions of ourselves. We must stay in motion and never surrender even when we feel hopeless or feel as if our life is meaningless or has come to a crushing end. This is portrayed by the book's ending very well. The biologist does not achieve what she set out to do immediately. What she expected did not come to pass. And still she decides to go on. There is no going back for her - or us - into the past. To return to the real world beyond Area X would be an admission of defeat but despite there being almost no hope of still achieving her goal the biologist soldiers on. It doesn't so much say 'go on despite adversity' as 'go on because there is nothing else left and you cannot return to the past'. It gives you a sense that there is only one way - forward.
At this end point of the story the biologist's motivations have changed (her initial goal did not come to pass) but her journey forward has not really. The biologist continues to move forward not to achieve her prior goal but because 'What else is there to do?'. I personally found that very beautiful and it immediately turned Annihilation into one of my favourite books. (Likely even the most favourite). I haven't been able to find anything that compares since.
Authority
Obviously after reading and loving Annihilation from sentence one I decided to stick with the trilogy. I read Authority next... and was severely disappointed. There is literally nothing that redeems this mock-up of a novel. In about the same 250 pages as Annihilation nothing whatsoever happens except some dude I don't care about (called Control, of all things) goes to work doing a job I don't care about (spoiler alert, he's a desk clerk in an office). And that's the book. The last twenty or so pages alone are relevant to the plot set up by Annihilation and continued in Acceptance, but the rest is plot-less plodding along of the most boring kind.
I recommend you skip most of the book and only read the last 20-30 pages to get the one small piece of information you'll need (but not even truly need) to get into the beginning of Acceptance smoothly.
Acceptance
In Acceptance the existential horror switches to cosmic horror. It's reasonably well done and I liked a lot about it (but not everything). Acceptance starts where Authority's last few pages left off. It's written from multiple points of view out of which only two are really great. The best one is of course Saul's. This was one of my first experiences with an author who writes a homosexual character and does not make the book all (angsty and boring) about it. No. Saul's story is really well done. I truly felt for the character and later on his lover as well. There is no 'oh he's so special because he's g-a-y'. He simply was attracted to men and had a boyfriend(-ish?) and that's it. This stood in stark contrast to a lot of other queer novels whose only point seems to be to make a big deal out of their characters being non-heterosexual. Acceptance did not and so of course this off-handed way of telling us he's gay was at the time a huge plus point from my point of view and also gave Jeff VanderMeer a lot of credibility in my eyes.
If he included Saul's homosexuality just to have the obligatory homosexual or whether Saul came to him this way I don't know (and probably never will) but it read very smoothly on the pages. It was just as a valid and real a relationship portrayal as any romantic side-plot I'd read before. And therefore that's a thing to applaud VanderMeer for. He did not draw attention to it.
The rest of the plot revolving Saul was the same level of perfect. A focus was put on Saul's experiences with Area X and its formation. I liked that a lot. It did not clarify anything in Annihilation (although it did give some hints of how Area X was made) and it really only served to pose more questions. At the end of the trilogy there is still a great sense of mystery and strangeness around and Area X has neither been conquered (again not hero beating a villain) nor destroyed. It is simply there and it is spreading from its point of origin.
What happens next (if anything at all) is up to the reader's imagination.
I won't like. I'm dying to read more about Area X and what happened to it/our world when it spread. But I am equally happy with the conclusion as it is. Not everything is knowable. The world is not as transparent as most books would have us believe. And that's just beautiful when it's written down in a book.
All that's left to do is watch the movie. (I know I'm late!)
Have a good night/day! WriteBot.
Happy belated birthday!!
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