Absolution

In Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer’s prequel to the Southern Reach series, a team of biologists, covert agents, and just plain lost souls find themselves stranded in Area X, a swampy region where they are taken over by the weird, the hallucinogenic, and the cannibalistic horrific. Call it Kafka in the Swamp. Call it Twin Peaks meets Night of the Living Dead. It will run your creeposoid meter off the scale. What elevates Absolution above B-movie status is language. Again and again, characters try and fail to explain to themselves and others what is happening to them. In the end, Lowery, one of the two main characters, is reduced to f-bombs and nonsense words. Here is his description of some naked, not-people: “No, it was slinky-dinky show more pinky-winky shit, loopy and looping, and the flexibility of them at the joints and how they swung around and stared upside down felt like something out of a tube of toothpaste.” show less

underwhelmed, unfortunately. wanted to like this, and there was just enough of the spycraft i loved in authority (my favourite of the series) to keep me reading until the end, but i found this tonally dissonant and i didn't really enjoy the prequel angle of proving more questions alongside minimal answers. like damn idk sometimes i just want the satisfaction of a mystery solved. i think, it rules that area X is more articulated here and yet still obscure and arcane, mystery within mystery, but i wanted more from the human narratives, more about old jim and "cass" and lowry, i didn't feel any meaningful catharsis on the front where imo it is most needed in fiction. on some level i think it's just that my tastes have changed substantially show more in the past decade or whatever since i read the original trilogy, but i also think on a structural level this just never really coheres. there's a bunch of very contemporary slang but it's impossible to tell when this is really set, the 90s maybe, they don't have digital cameras. timeless in the annoying way. also it's stupid and this is probably just a me thing but in the 25-odd years that i have studied classical music and even specifically art song for a period, i have never once seen winterreise translated into english... took me all the way out of it LOL. too many wonderland references/10. white rabbits? seriously??

also i will say it here in case i can save someone else a nasty surprise, there is graphic cannibalism in this book and i am simply too squeamish for that! had to go into skim mode for a little bit and just let my brain glaze over. show less

I hardly know what to say about this. Back when I was on Facebook, I followed the author and he was not exaggerating at all about the number of times "fuck" appears in this novel.

It's warranted, you bet.

This will not answer all your questions about Area X: it will suggest directions towards partial answers to some of your questions, and raise entirely new questions. If ambiguity maddens you, and you want everything explained, don't even attempt this book. For all you others, you weirdos like me, you will find things here you'll find nowhere else. No longer will you have to wonder what it would be like to be attacked by a line of "goo people" and to shoot at them only to have your rifle turn into a fish and start to eat you. It's ALL show more here. Or is it? show less

An Analogy -- Absolution : Acceptance :: Authority : Annihilation.

Jeff VanderMeer's latest novel Absolution is a further development of his Southern Reach books about an irruption of exotic organisms and behavior in a coastal wilderness and the government agency investigating the enigma. It has been seven years since I read the Southern Reach "trilogy," so I probably missed some callouts and characters who had been present in the earlier volumes. Not Whitby, though. He did not escape me. Neither did Gloria, nor Henry.

The second and longest of the book's three parts has a protagonist "Old Jim" not much older than me, and it grounds his character in his relationship with his daughter. This circumstance gave me a eerie sense of mise en show more abyme, and not only because he was the reader to whose eyes the content of the book's first part was presented in the form of records from Central. It was also because my daughter is a fan of the Southern Reach books, and I acquired the copy I read with the intention (still in force) of giving it to her.

The third part takes a real turn, in having a limited third-person viewpoint identified with a profanity-spouting chad, and incorporating big blocks of his stream of consciousness into the text. Temperamentally, he seemed to be almost a polar opposite of the Biologist from Annihilation. I felt like some events in this section had been influenced by the tone and perspective of the Alex Garland film.

If I am reading it correctly, Absolution closes a tangled circuit by concluding its account just slightly before the beginning of the events recounted in Annihilation. But anyone hoping for a more conclusive resolution than the one afforded in Acceptance is likely to be disappointed. The Southern Reach is a fractal coastline: the more closely you inspect it, the longer and more tortuous you will observe it to be. show less

A serious bummer for me - this prequel takes the focus and concerns of the volume I liked least in the Southern Reach Trilogy - Authority - and spends all its time with them. Note to authors of speculative fiction (and other genres): If characterization isn't your strong suit, why on earth try to double down on it? The dehumanization and marginalization of the human world was the great theme of the SRT - while the a-human world of Area X was so vividly being brought to life. So it made perfect sense that the human characters were mostly ciphers. And the horrific elements here seem much more isolated and gratuitous because they don't emerge out of that marvelously unique and evolving ecosystem, but are just grafted on (because, show more eco-horror, so...) This volume is getting raves, but to me it's a "reach" that exceeded its author's grasp. I'm sorry it'll be the last word on Area X.

Also, sorry again, but in what universe can any government agency afford to send 25 biologists on a mission to release four alligators? (Even if it's a false flag operation with another purpose entirely.) I'd like my fantastical premises to be at least somewhat coherent, thank you. show less

Despite considering VanderMeer's original "Area X" trilogy, particularly "Annihilation" to be one of the great achievements of speculative fiction in the first quarter of this century, I was leery when a fourth book dealing with this setting was announced, since I didn't really consider it necessary. Still, it was inevitable that I was going to read it, and if you've read the original three books you should probably try this one. Basically, the problem is diminishing returns. "Dead Town," the opening segment, I'd be happy to consider nominating as a free-standing novella for any of the relevant awards. As for the rest, I'm not sure they add a great deal to the "Southern Reach" mythos, particularly "The First and the Last." File under: show more Your mileage may differ. show less

Honestly there's no way to describe this book other than "what the fuck?" Truly the most baffling book I've ever read, in the best way. I love this series, and finished this, the fourth entry, with far more questions than answers, and I don't think I'd like it any other way.