Review: Jeff VanderMeer's "Annihilation", Plus Bonus Free Manchild!!

[x_los]

 I was a bit afraid that Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation might be too loopy and intense to listen to while doing data entry, but it was all right. It’s interesting to finally read a book I already know so much about the basic themes of via osmosis and academic papers. The actual reading experience felt simultaneously somewhat scooped out—this is a concept piece, and I already know the concept—and more subtly strange than I’d expected. That makes sense, though: the types of descriptions I was dealing with all have their purposes and limitations, and are of necessity abstractions to given ends.

 

It was likewise interesting to read this after consuming so much proto-Lovecraftian horror earlier in the year. VanderMeer’s place in that tradition was unusually apparent to me. I also started to consider his strategies for handling the ineffable, and how his choice to describe the fuck out of the indescribable makes me question some truisms regarding the inadvisability or impossibility of ‘showing the monster’. This thought’s muddy: it’s still niggling at me. The book is somewhat effective as horror, in a nebulous way—I found it difficult to get to sleep last night, though my anxiety was shapeless. It’s also a bit ‘colonising’. I catch myself thinking and writing about the book in an echo of the terms it sets out, in the linguistic pace it establishes, with the absorptive quality the main character describes as characteristic of both herself and Area X. 

In terms of Area X’s relationship to the environment, I was curious right off the bat about how a contaminated cypress marsh, let alone a chunk of the ocean, could avoid interacting with and contaminating local waterways. How does the ‘barrier’ work in that respect? A little odd that we didn’t touch on the question. 

(I did also keep thinking about Real World: Area X. What happens when people STOP being polite and START sloughing off the skin of their faces??)

In response to a joke I made (“Man Annihilation is just like— Me doing data entry: Man this tower is no bueno guys. Don’t think you should hang out in here so much. Just 30% through the book, but that’s my opinion u kno? Was this floor smear an anthropologist last night hard to say”), a friend made a comment mid-read that I was going to be frustrated with the characters’ poor decisions, which indicated to me that this strong genre-reader might be approaching the text as survival horror featuring a Final Girl. I found that jarring in a productive way, a la “Macbeth Murder Mystery”. It makes you think about how it’s unusual for some types of horror, but not at all unusual for others, for the story to be about submitting/converting to the threat. In some subgenres of SFF (transmigration stories, hugely, and in another respect the portal fantasy), there’s an ideal move-set: a sequence of reactions that brings you through crisis unharmed, unchanged, and may even deposit you back in your world of origin (depending on the nationality of the writer: the West dumps you back in suburbia, the East keeps you in Narnia). And even in cosmic horror, we’re usually dealing with artifact fiction about people lost to the unspeakable rather than seeing them as POV characters. I guess, though, that this is such a journal as Lovecraft might give a character—we’re positioned as not just readers, but members of a subsequent expedition, about to get caught up in the horror ourselves. 

As far as the biologist goes, and the intense stiltedness of the characters’ dialogue or even this story-world, I’m tempted towards a few discrete but possibly overlapping readings:

- this protagonist could be understood as markedly neuroatypical,

- the programming and military/technical context could be responsible for the groups’ unusual use of language, 

- the story-world or book could just operate this way: mannered, awkward, alienating.

The main character is especially awkward, but then so are all the other characters to an extent. To what degree is this just the book talking? My friend Ana suggests that the writer often uses this tone for other projects as well, sometimes without the clear harmony of intent and style this project seems characterised by. That might indicate this book’s particular choices are less specific and intentional (even if it doesn’t really change the effect of those choices for me as a first-time reader). They stress, however, that the biologist is notably more aligned with these effects than the characters of the series’ next two books. 

I don’t know that I’d necessarily say I enjoyed this book. It’s engaging, and the stuff Annihilation would have to do to be a book I straightforwardly Enjoyed, in terms of language and character, would scupper the intriguing stuff it’s already doing. ‘Did you like it?’ is often a weird-ass question to ask about books. Not every project is a cuddle, and I don’t always want a cuddle. While I don’t want to jump into the subsequent volumes right away, I might or might not read them. Annihilation is alienating, but not ‘alienating’ like Camus’ The Stranger, which I would push into a well if I could, in part because it’s not a hotbed of Mangst. As Ana put it in a discussion of the tone, “there are people and places, but those people are weird cunts and the places are also weird cunts.”

It’s weird to think they made a film of this, because while the concept is strong and the descriptions would make remarkable visuals, in some ways nothing happens in this book. What’s the plot? Woman walks down tower, meets snail. Lighthouse is a mess. Whelp. There’s a video-game feel to it all, where the plot is often—more conceptual and world-driven than narrative in a meaningful character sense? That said, I was really struck by the revelation regarding the lightkeeper, and the fact that the circle indicated the psychologist knew (at least before she died). 

It’s slightly weird that after reading her husband’s journal, the biologist doesn’t have much reaction to the idea that actually, the guy she slept with and saw through his death from cancer wasn’t her husband at all, or even a person. Even at the end, she’s still talking about the doppelgänger as though it was meaningfully her husband. In all probability, the clone was made by some force here and then beamed over the border by the tower. That’s not even a guy, bruv—you fucked a plant. 

‘When he later came back, and I saw what normal could be—‘ He didn’t though? So you didn’t? 

***

Side note: at the big conference in Austria where I first heard a lot of papers about this book, one scholar mentioned, in response to questions, that he didn't really think the last two books in the Annihilation series added a lot to the first. Some Shit Stirrer guy who's a big deal in the field @'d VanderMeer about this, and started some wanky fight. I'd been asked to write a very breezy, personal conference report, and I mentioned that I thought this interaction—exposing the scholar and baiting the writer into an argument—was inappropriate.

To me, it was a startling tattle-tale impulse. Especially in response to informal questions, people should be able to talk about contemporary books without being ratted out immediately to their creators for having an opinion. Some random writer doesn't need to know that some scholar doesn't find his recent books to the scholar’s personal taste. I also said that I thought the way the environmental track handled climate change as a threat absolutely different in scale and nature to both all previous human environmental alterations and all colonial ‘apocalypses' was inaccurate and inappropriate. Then I was told this conference report, which they’d sought me out to produce in the first place, couldn't be published because I'd been unprofessionally breezy and spikey. Even though I’d been asked to be informal, and even though I thought my criticisms entirely legitimate. I'll never work with that journal again, honestly.  

I think the unprofessionalism here arrose from the conference's active social media being taken over by ‘controversy’, and our having to slog around this as the guy who provoked it giggled. He was so ‘O U MAD THO??’ at VanderMeer. I'm not fucking surprised that someone who's just fresh off writing two books that took years, which you've just said you think are pointless, is not Gracious in response to having your opinion rubbed in his face? Is his upset reaction not exactly what you were trying to provoke, in saying this to him? As a scholar, it's deeply weird and inhibiting to know your criticism might be directed at the writer. It’s also often unsafe, in the era of weaponised social media pile-ons (especially so for marginal scholars).  

The famous scholar who chose to start and then aggravate all this is evidently the type of guy who thinks he's an enfant terrible provocateur, despite being 45 and balding. Honestly, some people are simply balding in their souls. It would not at all surprise me to learn that all his life, this man has spiritually been egg-hairless.

Also, I was super fucking right about the framework of the environmental/petrocultures shit being painfully white. People started to say similar shit in more places where I could see it directly afterwards (though I’ve no doubt scholars of colour had been discussing it in spaces I’ve less access to for a while). I did feel very, ‘WELL LOOK WHO IT IS! MY CRITICISM, RECEIVING SOME RESPECT AFTER ALL WHEN I WAS PATRONISED FOR SAYING IT—‘

me: Do you think this analysis of humans' historic engagement with the environment could benefit from literally any anthropological or historical perspective?
dudes: No, surely not! It’s not weird that there are 20 people in this room and only 2 including you are women and only 1 guy isn’t white, that’s a very sound basis to form opinions about global affairs on—