David Merrill's Reviews > Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy

When I first joined Goodreads, I updated status as I went. I soon found this got in the way of my reading and decided to only do minimalist reviews of books. Then I found even entering the book when I started got in the way of reading, so I started entering books upon completion. This eliminated entry of books I didn't finish, which was happening more often with group reads and book discussion groups, as I was sometimes uninterested in a book, not in the mood or just didn't like it. I tried using the update function, but soon found I was so limited to length, I didn't even get to the book itself, so I decided to jump right to the review, which I'll just keep adding to. Goodreads obviously wasn't built for readers like me.

Another thing I find different in my experience here, is I hate reviews that give a synopsis. I find them boring and they just wreck the reading experience for me. So, I tend to discuss the book and try to give as few plot elements as possible. Most of the time, if I think of something to write that will require me to give something away, I'll try to present it in a different way, so I don't have to, or I just leave it out. If I do put spoilers in, I'll give warning in the text, so anyone reading it can just skip it, rather than use the hiding function, which I also don't like much.

So what is it about Area X that has me wanting to review as I go? I guess it has to do with my having such strong impressions even in the first few pages of reading it. So often with newer authors from the past ten years, I find their books are, I can only say, sloppy, from novel structure, even down to proofreading. If plot and characerization are there, I can generally get through that, but so often those are minimal, the book is poorly plotted and I end up throwing the book down and reaching for something else.

Not so, with Area X. Almost immediately, I feel I'm in good hands. Attention is given to the atmosphere of the novel. I can immediately see structure has been given attention too. All three books seem inextricably linked, from the illiteration of the novels' three titles, even down to the design of the book with page numbers on every other page and just a stylized X on the front cover. All seem to serve the story.

My first impression is this book reminds me a lot of Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I have no idea if that impression will hold, but Area X reminds me of the Zone being explored in Roadside Picnic and the 12th mission to explore Area X like the mission in it. Characters are only identified by their professions, as they've been instructed not to use their names for the expedition. This serves to annihilate identity, which is fed by the book design features I mentioned above. This serves to disorient the reader in the same way the characters are disoriented by Area X. I hope this book lives up to the promise I find in these first few pages. I'd heard a lot of good things about this book and wanted to read it for a while, so I was glad when my reading group chose it for this month.

By the end of the first chapter, our narrator, a biologist, possibly female, due to an encounter, we find to be unreliable. Within a page or two another monkey wrench is thrown into the mix, calling into question everything about the expedition and the people who initiated it. What are their motives? Vandermeer brilliantly sets us up with a lot of questions right off the bat. This narrative is also reminding me of early fantastic tales told in the first person, like those of William Hope Hodgson.

I think one of the reasons I find myself writing as I go with this book is the reading of it becomes a sort of expedition of my own. The discovery of its substance, its structure and its plot mirrors the discoveries made by the biologist. As I complete chapter two and move into chapter three I find our biologist starting to name things they are finding. She feels the naming of them is important, which is an interesting counterpoint to the obliteration of the names of the people in the expedition. There is the argument of whether to call the thing they first explore a tunnel or a tower. Naming is important in magic, so it makes me wonder if that will come into play in Area X. And then there's that old science fictional trope, technology far enough advanced will appear as magic. Perhaps it is that sort of magic we'll find within.

I've just finished chapter four, so I'm nearly finished with book 1 of the Southern Reach Trilogy, Annihilation, with only one chapter left. I'm struck by how little dialog there is in this book. This is unusual for a modern novel. My initial impressions of it being somewhat like a Wlliam Hope Hodgson novel were well founded. It also reminds me of the work of Lucius Shepard, but with a more relaxed vocabulary. I'm also struck by the length of the chapters. I took a novel writing class recently wherein the instructor continually pushed the idea that publishers want short chapters these days. My experience of genre novels is that longer chapters don't seem to impede their sale. In particular, I think Science Fiction tends to benefit by longer chapters when description of alien worlds, their societies and the alien beings living in them is necessary. The same might be true for Fantasy and Horror novels, depending on their nature. Each time he pushed the idea, I questioned it in my mind, though my own tendency is toward shorter chapters anyway. I still have the ghost of Roadside Picnic surfacing in my mind as I read as well.

I just noticed Jeff Vandermeer is a Goodreads writer and he answered a whole lot of reader questions about the Southern Reach Trilogy. I discovered Roadside Picnic was not an influence on the book as he's only read the first chapter in a bookstore. Tarkovsky's film adaptation, Stalker, was also not an influence because he hasn't seen it. I'm not sure if I find that disappointing or not, maybe just interesting. The Lucius Shepard feel probably stems from his own world travel and a minor in South American history in college. I guess, you always wonder whether your own impressions, what you bring to a novel from your own life and past reading has any basis in reality about the new work you're reading. Apparently not. This isn't the first time I've experienced something like this. I had to interview the band, Catherine Wheel about their album, Adam and Eve. While listening to it, I heard sounds that reminded me strongly of other bands, most notably the guitar work of The Edge from U-2. It was a unique opportunity to pick the artist's brain and see whether my impressions were valid or not. Fortunately my editor was as interested in the artist process as I was and I got to ask all my questions. Rob Dickinson claimed they were all off base. But the man was pretty much a dick throughout the interview, even going so far as to trash my questions and try to tell me I should be asking questions more like where they were going next on their tour. Since I was writing for a webzine, any of our readers could find that out and even buy tickets on line if they wanted to. But I digress. The long and the short of it is we all bring a host of experiences, previous reading and viewing material to each new work we encounter and like to assume perhaps the same influence fed that new work. Occasionally it may turn out to be true, but those things we like to think influenced the author are really just our own influences as we approach that new work. Those influences probably more color our own experience of that new work. I suppose that's where the feeling of disappointment may come in. As an adult male, who has read many books, seen many movies and listened to a lot of music in my life, I can never really approach anything with fresh eyes. Maybe that's why we tend to go back to music, books and film from our youth when we could. All of the things we read, saw and listened to would have a much greater impact without all those layers of influence getting in the way of our experience.

So, what I've just uncovered is that my "review" of the Southern Reach Trilogy isn't really a review of the Southern Reach Trilogy at all. It's more a review of my personal experience of reading the book. I guess now that I know this, my review will likely get more rangy. I can take you pretty much anywhere I want now. Like the fact I'm typing this on my iPad 3 in my kitchen after cobbling together dinner after having taken a nap to The Creature Of The Black Lagoon following my completion of chapter 4. Earlier, I'd have seen this as a digression, but now I'm wondering how having experienced half of the Creature while half asleep will influence my reading of chapter 5 later.

If there are any spoilers, they are here in the next paragraph:

So, I've finally finished book 1, Annihilation. I really liked this book. It took the observation of a fantastic world like we might find in William Hope Hodgson's work, as I mentioned, and meshed it with what Science a Fiction is supposed to be by sending a group of female scientists to be the observers. What it also does is compromise those observers, so we don't have a reliable narrator here. What's wonderful is Vandermeer is also exploring the scientific method and the problems inherent in it. For example, when the observer alters the behavior of the observed. The experimenter sometimes essentially becomes part of the experiment. In the case of our biologist, she becomes part of the observed. Nothing we read here can truly be trusted. We can guess the other members of the expedition experienced things in a very different way and probably interpreted them differently too. I suppose, since the biologist survived (or did she?) her interpretation was probably the most accurate. Or perhaps we can only say hers was the most beneficial to survival. We don't really know if it needed to be accurate for that. What we do know is some later expedition found this narrative. I wonder if book 2 will get into that. I liked the meshing of the old fantastic with Science Fiction. The ending was truly disturbing and wonderful. I'm looking forward to book 2, Authority.

Now I'd like to get back to my journey to and through this book. This book is cursed. I intended buying the hard cover 1st edition for my collection because sometimes I have a sense about a book that it's going to really grab me and I'll buy the HC with that in mind. I found the least expensive one available on Amazon.com for about $18. The description said it had a couple of nicks on the DJ, but otherwise was in great condition. Since the next one up was in the $60 range, I jumped on this one. I prefer buying on Ebay, but I decided to take a chance. Usually I only buy books from sellers on Amazon if it's a bargain like this because I find the sellers on Amazon, by and large, don't really get book collectors and book collecting. Descriptions are minimal, if they're included at all, condition is inconsequential and generally wrong. And packaging is minimal. Unfortunately, all of these things happened with Area X. It came packed in a padded envelope (Arrgh!), which means a book that may have had just a couple of nicks on the DJ now had rounded corners and crunched spine ends. I wrote to the seller and she gave me a $12 refund, so it ended up costing about $9. That's fine for a reading copy of a book like this, which this book had become. Well, my journey has only made it more so a reading copy. Usually I'll put a DJ protector on a book like this. Unfortunately, I'm out of them. While I was picking it up once, my finger slid under the DJ and pulled. It now has a two inch tear near the rear spine. It's really cold and dry now, so I got a bloody nose last night. Unfortunately, there's now a small red smear along the page edge of about 30 pages. I can't tell you how many books I've read over the years that still appear unread. There have been a choice few that just seem to attract disaster. This is one of those. So, like the biologist, I have become part of the experiment. My observation has had a profound effect on the subject and the subject upon me.

So, I'm now nearly half way through book 2, Authority. We find Southern Reach waning and the Study of Area X appearing to be a failure, Control, a singular character sent in to assess what's going wrong with the expeditions into Area X. I'm finding this part of the journey isn't lending itself to a continuous review like the first book. Control, as a character, is uncomfortable. We find here, again, a narrator that seems less than ideal and less than reliable. He seems to be more a bull in a china shop, perhaps even a blind bull as he tries to delve into the people working at Southern Reach, those whop came back from the 12 expedition and the documentation left for him to study. I suspect he will be less than successful, but he may surprise me. It may be that he is the right persdon for the job in the end,.

Maybe, more interesting, maybe not. . . I found myself wandering around Goodreads and ended up reading through what I and others wrote while we read Dahalgren in 2012. I'm not sure how I got sucked into rereading all of those posts, but it reminded me I'd purchased a couple of books of literary criticism on Delany's work at the time. Unfortunately, at that time, I did not follow through and read them. Since then, I'd forgotten where I'd put them, but I was pretty sure I'd seen them recently while looking for another book I'd mislaid a fews months ago. (I own A LOT of books). And as insomnia crept in tonight, I more and more felt the need to find those Delany books. Fortunately, it didn't take long to lay my hands on them and in the course of looking for them, I found the other missing book. Well, one thing led to another and I started reading one of the articles in one of them (on Delany's Tales From Neveryon), actually a literary magazine, the Fall 1996 issue of The Review Of Contemporary Fiction. You may be wondering what, if anything this has to do with Area X or Jeff Vandermeer. Don't worry, I'm getting there. I find often, when I'm reading unrelated things, they find a way of connecting to each other in odd ways. After I read the Neveryon piece I was flipping pages and found there are book reviews in the back. Coincidentally (or not) there is a review of Vandermeer's first book, Dradin In Love: A Tale of Elsewhen and Otherwhere. It sounds like it's off the beaten track of Fantasy in away I would like. I have a tendency to like SF and Fantasy that doesn't fit well into those categories. Area X is filling that bill well for me so far, so I suspect I will like Vandermeer's other work. I will definitely have to try more.

I didn't write as much about book 2, which I just finished today. I just didn't like being inside Control's head, particularly when he was interrogating Ghost Bird, the botanist. Also, as he began to discover what was actually going on at Southern Reach and finding more and more disturbing parallels to Area X and how much subterfuge had been engaged in there. It hit a little to close to home to what I've been dealing with myself lately and only served to put me a little more off balance. While I'm really enjoying this book, I don't think it was probably a good idea for me to be reading it right now. Fortunately, only one book left, Acceptance. If it carries through with what the title suggests, maybe it will help to read it. I suspect not, though. I'm guessing Acceptance, when it comes to Area X and The Southern Reach is unlikely to be a comfortable process. Maybe it will offer some closure to what has gone before. At any rate, I can say, Jeff Vandermeer is an excellent writer and very much in control of his craft.