Acceptance
First reviewed January 2015
I remember very little from this book. I tend not to follow through on series anymore, even if I loved the first book—there is just too much out there. I would have cashed out after Annihilation if I read these more recently.
Why did I start Acceptance? I struggled through Authority after blazing through Annihilation; I made my peace with not enjoying Authority< well before it ended and was determined not to bother with this, the third book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. At least not right away. Maybe I’d give the plot some time to percolate. Or never come back to it at all. But the comfort of the familiar cannot be discounted, even when one considers the familiar rather tedious. So I launched, pell-mell, into Acceptance within a day of closing Authority. Can I blame the publishers for having all three books published within the same year? Probably not. Did the availability—the difference between joyously snoozing past your alarm on a workday and popping up full-awake at 7am on a lazy Sunday morning—contribute to my burnout, or might I never have returned at all if time had forced distance?
An impossible inquiry, though “forced” is an apt descriptor for the way Acceptance progressed. The kernel that was the Southern Reach Trilogy can be interpreted thusly: what happens if we physically cannot communicate with a species? Maybe it was too subtle in the first two books, but that point was laid out like brick to the face here. And it comes up often:
A little embarrassed, he said, “That fish down there sure is frightened of you.”
“Huh? It just doesn’t know me. If it knew me, that fish would shake my hand.”
“I don’t think there’s anything you could say to convince it of that. And there are all kinds of ways you could hurt without meaning to.”
In case you didn’t get it, we are the fish to Area X’s marauding little girl. There is stuff from space and it’s just going on about its business, but we’re not capable of comprehending it—fish that can’t understand a child’s rough touch. We’re fragile. All the mysteries in the story: the weird writings and their portentous religiosity; the inexplicable time-skipping events; these are all red herrings.
Fret not if it did not sink in, for there are always more chances:
Another way people were bound by their own view of consciousness. What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of sympathy? As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the transformation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee.
This, too:
In those transitional moments, between day and night, when anything seemed possible, or I tricked myself into believing that this was true, I began to talk to the owl. Even though I dislike anthropomorphizing animals, it did not seem important to withhold this communication because the evidence of his eccentric behavior was self-evident. Either he understood or did not, but even if not, sound is more important to owls than to human beings. So I spoke to him in case he was other than what he seemed, and as a common courtesy, and as a way to help with the welling up of the brightness.
Feeling the impetus behind the fiction breaks the illusion of a cohesive world; it pushes through to the constituent elements to show the raw timber behind the set pieces. I can’t quite put a finger on what—if anything—I have pulled away from Acceptance, and whether not that is my failing or its. But perhaps its memory will strike me at some point in the future, and I will remember fondly the month or two I spent with Area X.
Or perhaps not.