You must understand how I felt then, how the surveyor must have felt: We were scientists, trained to observe natural phenomena and the results of human activity. We had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny.Annihilation, the first entry in a fast-tracked trilogy (all three novels were released within months of each other in 2014), was written by novelist and publishing entrepreneur Jeff VanderMeer. I read it based on an end-of-year Best Thing I Read in 2015 column in my favourite newspaper, but now that I've finished it and gone back to try and see what had grabbed my attention in that review, I can't imagine why I thought I might enjoy it in the first place:
When science fiction is good, it's really, really good. It's not just entertainment, it's a head trip, encouraging the reader to picture alternate possibilities and abstract theories in ways that haunt the reader and forever changes the way he imagines humanity's place in the universe. Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer, isn't quite there, but it's just so gloriously weird that it's worth a read, nonetheless.In hindsight, columnist Jen Gerson got that right: Annihilation “isn't quite there” and I don't know if to me the weirdness was glorious enough to make it “worth a read”. All that to say: I'm not the ideal reader of this type of book, and as broad opinion on it is divided (The New Yorker gushes that the three books in this series are “experiments in psychedelic nature writing, in the tradition of Thoreau, and meditations on the nature of epistemic pessimism, in the tradition of Kafka”, while The New York Times states that Anniliation is “ponderously plotted, often abstract in style and not very scary”), I can't say who the ideal reader might be.
To the details: Four scientists enter Area X on the twelfth expedition into its mysterious depths after months of physical and psychological training that they nearly immediately realise hadn't really prepared them for what they would find. This expedition happens to be comprised of four women – an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist who is the designated team leader, and a biologist whose journal serves as the novel – and their mission is deliberately vague: explore and record your findings. The team knows that earlier expeditions had been known to commit mass suicide, or had turned on each other, and that the eleventh team (which included the biologist's husband) had returned as empty shells of their former selves and had all died of cancer within months of their return. Yet, they weren't told the details of what earlier missions had found (beyond some crudely drawn maps) and even the border into this area is so mysterious that the team members had to be hypnotised to cross over it. It takes most of the novel to even discover where they are supposed to be:
Area X, before the ill-defined Event that locked it behind the border thirty years ago and made it subject to so many inexplicable occurrences, had been part of a wilderness that lay beside a military base. People had still lived there, on what amounted to a wildlife refuge, but not many, and they tended to be the tight-lipped descendants of fisherfolk.So, even when some explanations are finally given, it's with words like “ill-defined” and “inexplicable”. I want to note here that I started reading sections out loud to my daughter who wanted to know what I was reading, and several times I dropped the book to remark, “Do you hear how stiff and stilted that writing is? Oddly formal and not at all like the journal it pretends to be?” And my daughter shrugged and replied, “But it's supposed to be written by a biologist, not a novelist. Maybe that's the point?” And is that the point? Am I supposed to forgive the biologist for repeatedly not being able to put the “uncanny” events she's witnessing into words? In what might be the climax, the biologist finally confronts the presence in the tower (or is it a tunnel? Or is it a throat?) that has been writing the vaguely biblical yet nonsensical words on the walls of the structure with organic beings (gloriously weird?), and unsurprisingly, the encounter is indescribable (skip this one paragraph if a nondescription sounds like a spoiler):
As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. My eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough.I think this is my biggest problem with Annihilation: When you're reading a sci-fi/fantasy novel, you expect rules. Even in this Area X that's presumably situated in Florida, there needs to be a set reality, not “I can't describe what's going on; you'd have to be here to believe it”, not “I wonder how much of this is a post-hypnotic suggestion”, not “my entire life has felt like a dream and maybe this is, finally, reality”; even if it's an alternate reality, I need to believe that the narrator believes it's real. So maybe that's the point and I'm too literal and everything wonderful about this novel went over my head. I did especially like one scene – discovering the midden of journals in the lighthouse – but I'm not left intrigued enough to seek the other two books in the trilogy. At under 200 pages, Annihilation wasn't a waste of time, exactly, but it does suggest that this “trilogy” might have made a more satisfying single volume; if I wasn't given the choice to walk away, I would likely have slogged through the whole thing. I don't feel quite annoyed enough to give only two stars, but my three should be considered a rounding up.
