Acceptance

The title of this book gives a clue as to the overall point. If it is frustrating and answerless it is because it is supposed to be. This is a little bit of an environmentalist fable and a little bit of a character study; the first because it demonstrates a hostile and conscious natural world that fights back against despoiling humans, and the second because of how it details how individuals react to a solutionless problem. Characters who attempt to fight Area X, or even to understand it at all (a defiance in its own right) will come up short. This doubly applies to the reader in a sense. The biologist who is at home in the natural world and becomes (quite literally) one with her surroundings is the only one who can take the realization show more that the end is neigh with peace.
That isn't to say speculation is impossible; Vandermeer drops little details and images throughout the book in order to get a rough idea of a self replicating terraforming agent gone wrong-- or maybe a microscopic alien invasion that duplicates the genetics of what it hits-- or is it a magic lighthouse lens that opens a portal to another dimension that is slowly overtaking this one? The point is these details, evocative and diverting as they are, only open up more questions.
By sheer coincidence I am also reading [b:Roadside Picnic|331256|Roadside Picnic|Arkady Strugatsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1173812259s/331256.jpg|1243896] which is also about an alien zone whose toxic hazards and all-around weirdness metastasizes into the environment around it. That Vandermeer was influenced by the Strugatskys is evident, we will see how well the two compare with each other. show less

Acceptance is an especially apt name for this final volume in the trilogy. Because in the end, it seems, that there are no final answers, no clear explanations, no real way to fight against Area X. No matter how it started, no matter what you do, Area X will win. As inexorable as death, evolution, entropy.

This book features four POVs, the new one being the lighthouse keeper. It is impossible not to like the lighthouse keeper, to not want to throttle the obnoxious Science and Seance people. His story is one of slow creeping horror, piling on infinitesimally until the dam breaks into a deluge of epic proportions - to my mind the most horrifying scene of the entire series.

There are definitely a lot of unanswered questions at the end of show more this volume, the kind of thing that can drive readers crazy. But to my mind, it's clear that none of those questions matter. There is only Area X, and there is only one thing to do -- accept it, and live on its terms. There are no other real options. show less

When people talk about the great science fiction novels of human environmental destruction, they often talk about John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up. I wonder if one day the Southern Reach Trilogy will be talked about the same way? It's much more elliptical in its approach, but the three books are drenched in landscape and environment, in the atmospheric conditions of the natural world. All the more to accentuate the unnatural ecology of Area X, the eerie strangeness it exerts om all the characters and all the readers, but Area X is not just an invasive environment, it is a cleansing one, a transformative one. The inability to grasp the secrets of Area X matches the inability to act as custodians for our own world, even that failure is as show more destructive as anything Area X can do. Only Ghost Bird can operate without secret strategies or hidden agendas or fixed objectives. Without those the others - Control, Grace, the Director - are lost, struggling to grasp something that cannot be comprehended. Obsessed with conquering something that cannot be conquered, spying on something that can spy back, taking samples of things that takes samples of its own, obsessing over something that that barely notices them at all, instead of living with it. In the world that reads the Southern Reach trilogy from the outside, we are Area X. show less

Jeff VanderMeer's final book in the Southern Reach Trilogy feels just as different from the first two books as the second book did from the first. As one would hope, "Acceptance" gives us some explanations behind the mysteries described in the first two books. But having read these explanations, I came away thinking they only look like explanations. I know a little more than I did before, but not nearly enough.

"Acceptance" was neither surprising nor scary nor completely satisfying. Unlike the first two books, "Acceptance" is heavy with multiple points-of-view. Characters from the previous books appear in both flashbacks and contemporary circumstances. We learn a number of different things about how Area X came to be, and the show more conspiracies it generated, and how secrets contained secrets like so many nesting Russian dolls. But there is much we don't learn as well.

The story of the TV show "LOST" comes to mind. By the end of the final season, we knew the puzzle pieces fit together, even if we couldn't quite visualize the cover on the puzzle box. The ending of "LOST" brought the story to a conclusion, however susceptible it may have been to different interpretations. (And admittedly, more than a few viewers were left frustrated.)

The ending of the Southern Reach Trilogy, however, seems to wander, as if the book itself were mirroring the minds of the people in the story, like the lighthouse keeper as he endures transformation. It makes me wonder if the author himself entered (and returned?) from Area X. In the end, the bits and pieces don't fit together. Rather than puzzle pieces in a box, they seem like a collection of artifacts in a cabinet of curiosities. show less

So that's it? That's all we get?

I wish I had known. I wouldn't have wasted my time.

With this frustrating final book in the trilogy, I alternated between anger (because VanderMeer continued to stuff the pages with useless, time-wasting back stories), and annoyance (because the story wasn't going anywhere for the most part), with frequent side-trips into unadulterated boredom. There were large swaths of narrative that my eyes slid over but my brain couldn't get the gumption up to care about.

I'm entirely sick of novels that are trumpeted as the next evolution in horror, or the logical offspring to this author or that author...novels where the author has some talent (and VanderMeer does, when he tries), and some imagination (as VanderMeer show more also does), but, through the course of the story, not only does NOT bring it home, but steadfastly refuses to, instead choosing to deepen the mystery instead of attempting to clear the cobwebs.

Let me be clear: When you finish this novel, you will have gained very few answers to all the questions set up in the first two novels. But you will be treated to pages and pages and pages and pages of backstory, of telling versus showing, of annoying second-person point of view, and not much else.

I'm actually a fairly willing reader. I understand that there's times when an author wants to scatter clues and let the reader figure some stuff out. I'm a fan of that. It makes the reader feel like they're part of the story. But when you drop a single, ambiguous clue about once every hundred pages? No.

If you want to be left scratching your head, knowing far more about the characters than is needed, and knowing far less about the mysteries of Area X than you wanted, go ahead, read the books. But if you want a satisfying conclusion to a story, seriously, go read something else. This is not the trilogy you're looking for. show less

Rating: 4* of five

It's a frustrating thing to wait for a book, a series, an idea to cohere. When it fails to happen, the result is usually a sense of letdown at the very least, and not infrequently outrage and betrayal. And here I am rating this incoherent (in the nice and accurate sense) final volume as the best of the lot.

Wonders will never cease.

The Big Reveal of this series doesn't need to be coherent (again used in the nice and accurate sense). It is big enough, titanic in fact, that any attempt to fit it into a pleasantly proportioned package would merely be absurd. This is a rare case of a resolution needing enough room to encompass the beginning all over again, since there is no conceivable way the results of Area X's existence show more for the reasons it exists will stop reverberating in each and every iteration of each and every possible future that flows from it.

Was that vague enough for you? See, there's nothing I can be specific about except at the certainty of spoilering every development in each book. That being the modern era's Worst Imaginable Sin, I'm avoiding the lynch mobs that roam freely over the internet. Let me give you a clue that won't be a clue unless you've read the series: The parable that seemed tantalizingly just beyond reach is here full-blown at last. What Area X represents in all its strangeness and its inscrutability can't be made any clearer than it is in the book, even though as you're turning the last few pages you're going to have a raft more questions than you started the book with. And that's a good thing.

Philosophically VanderMeer's point, well one of his points anyway, could not possibly be more timely than it is right now on the cusp of the Arctic's final descent into deglaciation. A piece of the planet is in reality changing before our (appalled) gaze into something that isn't quite set yet. The reasons aren't mysterious, in the case of the Arctic, but the consequences are equally bizarre, unpredictable, random. The planet isn't going to remain the same. The consequences for some, even many, individuals are going to be as condign as they are in the book. The authorities are as nugatory in the face of out planetary changes as they are in the book. The public is as...oblivious? unconcerned? flip?...as is the shadowy, gesturally indicated public of the book.

This series of books isn't a Rubik's cube of a story. It's a Seurat painting of lore. Enjoy that? This is a series for you. show less

i cannot BELIEVE i forgot to write a review but this is now the third book that has ever made me cry - congratulations acceptance! congratulations saul evans for giving me SO many emotions! in general though i think acceptance is for sure the best book of the trilogy - they're each really different, but where annihilation and authority do one thing and do it well, acceptance is ambitious, overarching, bringing together so many threads and doing it with extraordinary style. i wasn't bored a single moment. the language is lush; the part that sticks in my memory is control and ghost bird's crossing to the island, and of course the biologist's return, both some of the most exquisite writing i've ever read. i love every character. i show more especially love control and whitby and gloria and of course saul. i think gloria is the most convincing 9 year old in fiction i've ever read, though of course she's great as an adult too. i just. LOVE this book. with my whole heart. if you want to read some good writing and immerse yourself in something that'll mess you up just a little, this is the book. show less