Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
Part one of a trilogy. First book I’ve read by Jeff Vandermeer. Creepy and impressively original.
The imagery, the characters, the setting, and the story make this Sci-Fi novel completely different than any you’ve read before. Vandermeer creates four distinct characters: The Anthropologist, Surveyor, Psychologist, and Biologist (narrator), who inhabit a lost world that haunts the imagination and makes readers eager to dive straight into Area X—a cut off part of the world that ‘nature’ has reclaimed.
The book starts off with the team not knowing exactly when it has crossed into Area X. The only thing their memory reveals is a white haze that seems somewhat like a passageway. The Biologist carries you through the story with her recollections in a journal. She went to Area X as the biologist, which is her career in the real world, but also because her husband went in an expedition before her. He came back to her after his expedition in his own mental fog; merely a shell of the man she knew before he left. The man that came back would regularly look despondently past her as if he was lost and trying to remember something. He didn’t know how he got back to to their home and he didn’t know if his trip was a success. He soon was carted off by the government agency that sends people into Area X, and died of cancer soon after they took him for experiments and debriefing.
The Biologist is fiercely independent, driven, and objective through the entire novel, but you don’t know that she truly cares for her husband until later in the novel. He is the real reason she eventually joins the expedition into Area X. The only thing you know is that they were fighting before he went in, and that they both wanted change in their lives. They were completely different. He was boisterous and obnoxiously outgoing in her eyes, while she was insular and cold in social settings. They both had innate expressions of adventure but they varied in how the world viewed them. He felt at home in a crowd and loved the challenge of figuring out the social dynamics in a room, while she was happier figuring out the biological relations between a frog and an abandoned pool-turned-pond.
Vandermeer turns the traditional lost love story around because everyone has read a story about the prince going off to rescue his princess, but a story about the princess trying to find out what happened to her prince was refreshing. The reader only discovers this in the last chapter of the book: “‘Will you come after me if I don’t come back? If you can?’ You’re coming back, I told him… How I wish, beyond reason, that I had answered him, even to tell him no. And how I wish now—even though it was always impossible—that, in the end, I had gone to Area X for him.’”
After putting down the book the only thing I wanted to know was what happens to the biologist in the next installment (like each episode of Game of Thrones on HBO). Each character goes through an unraveling experience—most towards their own death. There had been many expeditions to Area X that came before this four-woman team. As the reader you are constantly being pulled, page after page, into the mysterious nature of Area X. Throughout the novel, you realize that the training they received could not prepare them for all that Area X had in store.
As you also may have experienced, this winter was long and hard. It’s just now breaking. Green grass will return even if I can’t remember what it looks like. I found this story moving because it reminded me that even when I’m lost in my own darkness, I know that I have someone that will come after me. Even when I’m lost in my own mind; if I’m just a shell of who I was, I still have a woman that will chase after me. This isn’t to say I prefer to be rescued, but only that this book helped me articulate that it’s OK to want to be sought after, even when you’re not yourself. We all go through seasons of darkness, where we hurt the ones around us. This book shed a little light that even the ones that we leave behind can hunt us down and bring us home, if we let them.
Go pick up the book. It’s a wild ride. You might not tie it to your own life but it doesn't matter. It’s a creepy fun book with imagery of the unknown like you haven’t read before.
