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Southern Reach, book 4
by Jeff VanderMeer
Book Reviewed by:The surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series―and the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.
When the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.
And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast―before Area X was called Area X―had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?
Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.
001: THE BIOLOGISTS
Once, the story went, there had been biologists on the Forgotten Coast, in numbers so great that the ground shook in the aftermath of their passage. Eager men and women who without warning bestrode the terrain like conquerors, sent by the government and funded by money that came in the form of buried gold bars that could not decay or devalue like the money kept in banks. Which is why, the conspiracy theorists at the Village Bar claimed, the biologists had been so stooped and weighted down when they arrived. Their packs had been full not of supplies and food but of gold.
That the force or forces that had sent the biologists to the Forgotten Coast wanted the biologists to be ungoverned by barter, isolated, free of the sense of neighborly responsibility that had held the Forgotten Coast together for so long.
That the biologists had been complicit, aware of their role, which was important, Old Jim believed. They had to be complicit if the folks in the Village Bar were to ...
Writing a prequel rather than a sequel, VanderMeer regales us in Absolution with chronicles of Area X in three expedition logs from throughout its history. It would most likely baffle a new reader, though I would still recommend it to a seeker of the strange. For fans that read and loved the previous trilogy, it is a treat. Not for the faint of heart, reading Absolution sometimes feels like riding a roller coaster and crashing, breathless. The pacing is excellent—the rhythm of tension and menace, of clues and images. VanderMeer describes the environment and the inner monologues of his characters in hypnotic prose, words strung together like dreams, painting the picture so clearly it feels tangible. The characters are sparse but palpable; dropped into perilous situations, no one is singularly good or bad. All have shades of gray and flaws that make them whole.
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