[If you’re new to the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, you may want to check out Katy’s review of Book 1, Annihilation, and Book 2, Authority, before you start here. ]
The thing about a series of books you love is that, eventually, you have to accept that it will end.
Endings reign in Acceptance, the third and final novel of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. It is the last foray into Area X, the pristine alien wilderness where names have an immense power, while death has less power than you’d think. Extinction is everywhere in its pages, and nowhere.
The Southern Reach series is a sci-fi Southern Gothic environmental parable/post-apocalyptic diary/government conspiracy/creation myth, all of which centers on badass women, questionable espionage and mind-bending monsters. It is weird fiction at its finest, and I have fallen in love with it over the last half a year or so. As such, I waded into Acceptance with very high expectations.
It did not disappoint. Acceptance shakes things up as much as it wraps things up, a fitting finale to a bold and enigmatic series.
There is more to learn about the world of Area X here, and much more than I had expected to find. There are new secrets revealed about the world beyond the border, many of them keys to puzzles I’d never thought to solve.
So it goes, though, as with life and with unknowable otherworldly coastlines, and this slightly off-centering state of balance feels right given the disorienting context.
Offsetting expectations even more thoroughly, Acceptance takes on a different format again to Annihilation and Authority, using a refreshing blend of tenses and points of view that keeps the motor humming on what can sometimes feel like a long journey. The pacing is varied and usually superb, pulled along by beautiful language and rhythms that tie together storylines and narratives across time and space. There are some breathtakingly gorgeous phrases – ‘the sun was a whispering corona at his back’ made me stop, close my eyes, and try to feel it; ‘a tangy glottal something in your mouth, dripping out’ made my mouth fill with the taste of copper.
The novel takes its dues from the deeply disturbing images from the last chapters of Authority and tunnels deeper into body horror, too, as well as keeping the desolate and surreal psychological horror of the first two books ticking over. With the Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer has shown a sharp eye for the details that matter emotionally and he uses this knowledge as an ice-pick, digging at the hope and warmth you feel for these characters, leaving scars in you that will seem everlasting.
There is an invitation to learn much more about the characters from the first two novels, and I believe the real underpinning of greatness in Acceptance is that, when the situation is at its most bizarre, the characters always feel so real. VanderMeer has such a talent in creating relatable characters; it is easy to fall into the individual worlds of the beautiful, complex, diverse and lifelike cast of this novel.
VanderMeer crafts characters with flaws and strengths that are easy to understand and empathise with, even if you find yourself disliking what they have to say. These characters may sometimes be represented as places, and animals, and monsters, but they are always people. VanderMeer makes you know and love each character, even when you hate them. And then he does horrible things to them.
It’s sad, and hopeless, and bleak, but peculiarly optimistic, something like the last stages of grief. I feel weather-beaten by this maddeningly close look at mortality and desperate futility, and I also feel very pleased – grateful, even – to have experienced it. Somewhere in this epoch of feeling godawful about miserable imaginary people I feel this glorious sense of triumph, of beauty. I kind of feel like somebody’s blown my chest open with a shotgun but the resulting mess makes such a sublime Rorschach blot that I don’t even care. It is a glorious discomfort, both a beginning and an end, and an experience that I would recommend to anyone.
