Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Publisher: Fourth Estate
This 2014 novel, the first in the Southern Reach trilogy, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel that year, and a movie adaptation is scheduled for release this year by Paramount Pictures. While this slimmish (195-page) work is diverting enough, I find it hard to see what all the fuss is about. Between this, and the ongoing hysterical online war or words being fought over the subjects of my last two reviews--Netflix's Bright and Star Wars: The Last Jedi--I'm beginning to feel alienated from the rest of scifi fandom, as though you're all doppelgangers or possessed by alien parasites.
"Annihilation" one of those novels where nobody goes anywhere or achieves anything, save to be confronted with exponentially escalating weirdness for which there is neither explanation nor resolution. I hesitate to call it Kafka-esque--here it reminded me more of Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris," so perhaps it's more Lemmy than anything else. Yes, definitely a Lemmy book.
The plot is mostly beside the point, but just for the record, four women are sent to investigate a coastal area plagued by mind-bending phenomena, the 12th such expedition. The previous 11, including the one the narrator's husband was part of, almost all ended in madness, murder and/or suicide. Sure enough, when the four arrive a deepening sense of unreality sets in, as they try but mostly fail to investigate the fate of the other expeditions and the origin of the area's mysteries.
Just as in Solaris, the narrator and main character (here simply known as 'the biologist'--none of the characters are referred to by name) is thrust into a bizzaro alien world where something or -one bends the normal rules of nature to sanity-defying degrees for some inscrutable purpose. In "Solaris," it was the planet of the title; in "Annihilation," it's a place known only as "Area X". In "Solaris," the narrator's deceased wife reappears, seemingly re-created by the alien intelligence; in "Annihilation," it's the narrator's husband. The narrator in "Solaris" is wracked by guilt over his relationship with his wife; in "Annihilation" the narrator is maybe too sociopathic for as relatable an emotion as guilt, but there's an undercurrent of regret.
The writing too reminded me of Lem, not to mention both Kafka and Camus, in that the bulk of the story takes place in the mind of the narrator, and focuses on their reaction, or more often blank failure to react, to their surreal surroundings. It's to Mr VanderMeer's credit that the book is never a slog despite this. It's a light read for such a weighty theme.
That said, I didn't find anything particularly new or exceptional in the interior monologues, oblique weirdness or existential angst presented here. To be fair, the navel-gazing in "Annihilation" seems more about the individual's place in nature rather than in the cosmos (as in Solaris) or in society (as in Kafka or Camus), but how thought-provoking you find those themes probably depends on to what degree you empathise with the anomic narrator, and I didn't very much, and without that connection the whole book becomes a series of pointless mysteries with no payoff.
I do find it interesting that despite the opacity and resistance to any clear interpretation, enough people connected with this book enough for it to win the Nebula. What did they see? Was it the fact that all four characters are women? The undercurrent of environmentalism? The lack of any heavy-handed or didactic messages? You see, the book's very popularity has me feeling like a character in it.
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