Review: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer at The Guardian

Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, in which a stretch of Florida coastland is transformed into a weird, otherworldly space, leading to repeated attempts to comprehend and control it, is a fascinating instance of mid-career breakout, in which a writer who had seemed like a well-kept secret suddenly became a household name and public intellectual. In the decade since, VanderMeer has gone from strength to strength, and so his decision to return to Area X with a new novel is an additional, unexpected twist in the tale. I review Absolution at the Guardian.

Much of what made the original Southern Reach books powerful and disturbing can be found in this new volume. Once again, VanderMeer produces a near-seamless shading between the weirdness and danger of Area X, and the natural environment that preceded it. Old Jim is rattled by a stand of trees left dead by the inland incursion of seawater, seeing in it a hint of the unearthly, while a superintelligent alligator who is the Rogue's companion disappears into the swampland. For the bureaucrats at Central, obsessed with "foreign interference" – a term whose vagueness obscures many possible meanings – this liminal quality is untenable. They send wave upon wave of operatives – as Absolution reveals, the ones we knew of were preceded by others – to unravel it. Invariably, once these operatives learn to understand Area X, they realise that they have become too altered by it to explain it to others, or even to return from it.

There is, however, a shift in Absolution's focus, one that perhaps reflects the intervening decade of real-world events. The original Southern Reach books often featured grey bureaucrats attempting to quantify the indescribable. Absolution turns its attention to these bureaucrats, in the process revealing that they are not so grey. Central may in fact be a greater danger than Area X, if only because its leaders remain convinced that they can weaponise it. Having learned the extent of his superiors' manipulation of their own agents, and their involvement in the lead-up to Area X's creation, Old Jim begins to think of Central as a "shadow, eaten up from the inside". Lowry, whose official mission is to find the "off switch" that will return Area X to normality, embodies Central's contradictions, veering erratically between a xenophobic desire to destroy Area X, and an almost romantic longing to be made one with it.

Something that I didn't quite have space to discuss in this review is that Absolution feels less like a coda than the beginning of a new strand in the Area X story. For every question it answers (though these answers are always partial and confusing) there are new strands of story, new characters whose fate is left uncertain, to be pondered. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up returning to Area X yet again before long.