A tower that is not a tower.
An angry moaning coming from the reeds.
Black trees, black water, grey moss, and shimmering lights that should not be there. A husband, hollowed out. A dolphin with a human eye.
Welcome to Area X, a once-inhabited bionetwork that is now irrevocably transfigured into a pristine and deeply uncanny wilderness. It is a flourishing and foreign ecology, a new world of mould and honey, sweet rot and dark growth. There are borders purportedly keeping the weirdness penned in, and no contamination is allowed to escape into the normal world beyond – or so the Southern Reach, the shady government agency charged with its study, want us to believe.
It is a forsaken and mesmerising place, reminiscent of Chernobyl as it stands now, nature lush and running rampant through the skeletons of lichen-covered and dissolving houses. Area X is a world of great beauty and great desolation, and both of those things have a habit of taking root in those who are willing to accept them. It is a biologist’s dream.
The biologist in question – and she is only known as ‘the biologist’ – is one of a team of women, all scientists, all nameless, charged with dissecting the mysteries of Area X behind its ill-defined and invisible borders. The biologist seems more willing than most to become a part of her new surroundings.
The story is told through her journal as she documents her stay in Area X, and in it she reveals her attraction to the beautiful and the wild, her pull towards the curious, her need to escape into and be part of unknown territory. If anyone understands the otherness and assimilation of Area X, it’s the biologist. Of all her teammates – a psychologist, an anthropologist and a surveyor – she is most at home with the strange, even as the strange makes its home in her. So used to isolating herself, she battles a need to be objective with an almost compulsive yearning to adapt, to belong to natural patterns of action.
The book seems to revolve on what the biologist does and does not tell us about her journey, and what she does or does not know. The use of foreshadowing in the narrative is excellent and untrustworthy – VanderMeer manages to capture the subtle, brutal and blunt by turns. All of this makes the biologist a likeable and compellingly unreliable narrator.
The way I came to see the biologist echoes how the biologist sees every other character – ultimately likeable, but untrustworthy. Despite all my better judgements, I loved all of the characters in the novel, even when I did not trust them. Perhaps especially when I did not trust them. The characters don’t even trust themselves. In this book everyone, and everything, is a liar.
From the completely unnerving opening line (‘The tower, which should not have been there…’) I found myself hooked. Everything is vividly, almost deliriously described. You can smell the decay and the sweetness; you can almost taste the nectar-y spores of fungi, the brine of the perfectly still black sea; you can feel the damp, the quiet and the light as if the pages of the book glowed with phosphorescence.
The focus on the foreign within oneself makes this a work of perfect weird fiction that will populate you and refuse to let go. So much has stayed with me after reading Annihilation – a lighthouse keeper’s face, a dead fox, a toy rabbit on the stairs – that I’m sure I, too, will be changed forever.
There were a few things that took me out of an otherwise engrossing and engaging story. Hypnosis, for example, is not nearly as effective as it is depicted in the novel – as someone who works in psychology it can be really frustrating to see hypnosis used as an complete-mind-control plot device. Knowing this was enough to pull me out of the story at several key moments.
Some of the dialogue, too, feels rather wooden, too affected and technical to be real:
[pull_quote_center]“The architectural model is hard to identify. The materials are ambiguous, indicating local origin but not necessarily local construction,” said the anthropologist.[/pull_quote_center]
I tuned out about three times when I first tried to read that.
There’s more than enough strength in the story and the characters, however, to metamorphose these complaints into tiny niggles. There is so much to the psychology of the book that the psychobabble about hypnosis does not really matter. If some of the dialogue seems stilted, other exchanges resonate and ring out in their authenticity.
To me the real hook of the novel is that, at its heart, Annihilation is a look into the roles we play and how we adapt to suit our environments. The biologist adapts by asking questions, even if she finds herself not wanting to know the answers. She fills the book with questions– it’s inundated and colonised by them. The plot, the biologist, Area X, Southern Reach; all are haunted by questions, and by a terrible and changeable past.
With Annihilation kicking off of a trilogy, I am left with so many questions. I’m not sure I want to know the answers. By that I mean, of course, that I am dying to know. The next two books in the trilogy, Authority and Acceptance, may provide some resolution.
In this first novel, however, we must start along with the biologist – we join her as she begins at the top of the tower and we descend, intensely curious but afraid to know, working our way to the bottom.
Read and be transformed.
