Annihilation
by Jeff VanderMeer
First reviewed December 2014
This book made it into a miniseries that I heard was good, and remains pretty popular.
The review details my first flight to SF—where I now live—with my then-girlfriend—now wife. Interesting travelogue for my own personal recollection, which is honestly the best part of reading these old reviews (for me).
I made the mistake of scheduling a mid-December layover on my flight from New York to San Francisco. Did I not recall, while booking during a balmy October afternoon, that Chicago’s O’Hare airport is often a frozen purgatory for holiday travelers? Or that a direct bicoastal flight of about five hours becomes two trips, the Chicago-to-SF leg hovering around four-and-a-half hours—not counting layover—after a three-hour East-Coast-to-Midwest “hopper”?
I slept through most of my first flight, but during the pre-tarmac portion of the trip I continued to read Annihilation, a near-perfect airplane book. Its structure is that of a journal so the narrative is both unreliable and quite limited—the majority of the world is not discussed, but you know it is out there, and it is weird. The narrator has no reason to assume the reader of her journal wouldn’t know what life outside of Area X is like, nor what it is like to live without the government regulations from the Southern Reach. So she never directly discusses the things that would be common knowledge. It is that limited scope and narrative cohesion that pushes the mystery and kept me turning the pages.
The unseen is the strength of the best horror stories—the imaginary monster is always scarier than the hard line of corporeal reality. Not that I categorize Annihilation as horror; more like uncomfortable. Unsettling:
At first, I only saw it as a tower. I don’t know why the word <i>tower</i> came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could as easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it inland. I saw this in vast and intricate detail as we all stood there, and, looking back, I mark it as the first irrational thought I had once we had reached our destination.
Irrational. Perfect.
The cover art is distinctive and lovely; the only downside is that it sparked comment from my seat-neighbor on the plane—a welcome distraction if it had been the second leg of my journey, but at 7am when all I wanted was solitude and the strong narrative voice of my written companion, I opted out of engagement:
On the whole, by dusk this strategy of busying ourselves in our tasks had worked to calm our nerves. The tension lifted somewhat, and we even joked a little bit at dinner. “I wish I knew what you were thinking,” the anthropologist confessed to me, and I replied, “No, you don’t,” which was met with a laughter that surprised me. I didn’t want their voices in my head, their ideas of me, nor their own stories or problems. Why would they want mine?
Even though my plane-mate’s stories and insights were probably very interesting; he intimated that he had a connection to the (an?) editor and floated the insider tidbit that the publisher had taken a risk on the series. Presumably—though I (perhaps rudely) did not offer a polite follow-up question to verify—the risk was because all three books in the series were published in the same year, leaving no time to gauge public interest after the debut novel and thus removing the chance for the publisher to avoid throwing good money after bad. Because I simply wanted to read and sleep, that mystery remains unsolved. But in the most classic of ironies, I longed for his chattiness on the second leg, that dreary flight from Chicago to San Francisco. Everything felt so tedious after the interminable hours delayed at O’Hare that I coughed up eight dollars to watch Guardians of the Galaxy simply to distract myself as I rued the reticence of my second-leg seatmates.
Why not read my book? Well, I finished Annihilation in O’Hare while waiting for the weather to be clear enough to take off. Not, as one might expect, the winter blast in Chicago, but the foggy skies of San Francisco. Annihilation is both a page-turner and a quick read. I wouldn’t have rented a movie had I pages remaining; Annihilation owes me eight dollars.
Plotwise, not a whole lot actually happens. Its strength lies in the cohesiveness of its narrator and her interpretations of the world as it shatters around her. She remains the same, for the most part, and learning about her is a treat:
At first, I must have seemed mysterious to him, my guardedness, my need to be alone, even after he thought he’d gotten inside my defenses. Either I was a puzzle to be solved or he just thought that once he got to know me better, he could still break through to some other place, some core where another person lived inside of me. During one of our fights, he admitted as much—tried to make his “volunteering” for the expedition a sign of how much I had pushed him away, before taking it back later, ashamed. I told him point-blank, so there would be no mistake: This person he wanted to know better did not exist; I was who I seemed to be from the outside. That would never change.
That she’s rational to the point of robotic makes her the perfect narrative lens and accounts for some of her actions; as readers, of course we want the narrator to take the dangerous, almost ludicrous risks. “No coincidence, no story.”
Annihilation is a great preamble to an interesting world; questions of how two more books in the series can exist—right now—and in what form the story might be allowed to continue are infectious: “That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”