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3.56 AVERAGE
3.56 AVERAGE
i didn’t like this one as much as the first just because it was less naturey and creepy but it was completely necessary for the plot of the series and the ending got me back
adventurous
challenging
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
It’s not until the last few pages that you get a sense of where this book is going, and by then, the story has become a cliffhanger, urging you to continue even though you’ve slogged through mud to get there. The author wants you to keep reading the next book, but this book doesn’t give you any hope that the next one will be better. The protagonist thinks he’s a spy from a John Le Carre spy novel, but he’s more like Quoyle from The Shipping News - a fumbling milquetoast with no control over anything. Authority is a sequel to Annihilation, but only one character occupies both novels, and even then she’s subordinate for most of the story. The mysteries introduced in the first book aren’t answered here, which makes me cautious in reading the third book, let alone the fourth one, which came out recently. Vandermeer philosophizes in his writing, but he isn’t saying anything consequential that propels the story.
But I’m probably going to read the next book anyway. Maybe in a few years when I’ve forgotten my disappointment over this one.
But I’m probably going to read the next book anyway. Maybe in a few years when I’ve forgotten my disappointment over this one.
adventurous
challenging
dark
funny
reflective
tense
Authority
Southern Reach Trilogy, Vol. 2
Jeff VanderMeer
Southern Reach Trilogy, Vol. 2
Jeff VanderMeer
VanderMeer’s clever and mostly effective follow-up to Annihilation avoids the common second-in-a-series problem: “more of the same, but not as good.” He does this by subverting the reader’s expectations. Instead of returning to the incredibly strange, biologically warped (aliens? multiverse?) environment of Area X, Authority moves to the most mundane of landscapes: government bureaucracy and American suburbs. While familiar, the landscapes are familiar, but in VanerMeer’s world strange and upsetting in their own right.
Picking up with the returnees from the twelfth expedition, Authority ostensibly begins where Annihilation leaves off. But the setting is different—offices of Southern Reach and suburbs—and with it comes a new cast of characters. Imagine if the central task of Severance were solving the mystery of Area X instead of finishing Cold Harbor; you might then get a sense of the remote strangeness, dark humor, and nightmare-within-the-ordinary that defines Authority.
Bureaucracy as Hellscape
For a novel so different in setting and tone, VanderMeer pulls off something remarkable. He transports the themes and characters of Annihilation into a bureaucratic hellscape—every bit as toxic as Area X, even if entirely mostly natural. His prose brings a grotesque edge to the mundane, describing offices and suburbs in visceral terms reminiscent of Area X:
- The office has the “smell of the sour metallic tank of a low quality cleaning agent almost like rotten honey” (p. 20).
- Ideas “colonized the former director’s mind and … infiltrated the assistant.”
- The Southern Reach offices were “a kind of mausoleum entombing curiosity and due diligence” (p. 51).
- “The plant had the look of a creature trying to escape with a couple of limbs finally freed reflexively curled over the edge of the drawer” (p. 85).
These grotesque descriptions remind us that strangeness is not confined to Area X—it already exists in our world. As one line puts it: “The director had been on an expedition sent into Southern Reach and just like the expeditions into Area X not told the truth” (p. 231). Both the office and Area X are expeditions into the unknown.
Themes Imported and Transformed
VanderMeer also imports many of Annihilation’s themes into this new setting. The border between Area X and our world is shown to be an illusion—just as borders themselves often are.
In Area X, rituals, training procedures, and scientific protocols gave the illusion of control. (In truth, the only “control” was hypnosis—and that didn’t work very well.) Here, bureaucracy plays the same role: a set of empty rituals masking ignorance and cover-ups.
As one charter puts it:
“The gist had been that institutions, even individual departments and governments were the concrete, embodiment, obnoxious ideas or opinions, but also of attitudes and emotions… The Southern Reach had been set up to investigate and contain Area X and yet despite all the signs and symbols of that mission all the talk of files in briefs and analysis. Some other emotion or attitude also existed within the agency” (p. 145).
The Kafkaesque quality is unmistakable. At times Authority reads less like a sequel to Annihilation than to The Trial.
The Character of Control
The protagonist, Control, is set up as the inverse of the biologist and geologist from book one. At first, VanderMeer primes us to see him as a competent archetype: male, CIA background, seemingly a chess master navigating others with the wisdom of his spycraft family. But this too is an illusion. Control is constantly manipulated—by the assistant director, the biologist (whose name we still don’t know), even his mother. He repeatedly loses control, and by the end, he collapses in the face of Area X.
The entire novel is about subversion—of character, of setting, of expectation.
Postcolonial Resonances
In her excellent introduction, N.K. Jemisin frames Authority as a kind of postcolonial novel: colonization seen from the perspective of the colonized—except here, those traditionally colonized hold the power. Grace, the assistant director, becomes the true authority, while Area X—the land itself—acts as colonizer, not colonized.
WHAT BOARDER
Even the very concept of borders is mocked. One memorable sequence involves a scientist sending thousands of rabbits across the boundary, their liminal state both absurd and horrifying. As Control reflects:
“[T]he border in particular stuck with him as a job. The absurdity of a coexisting in the same world as the town he was running through the music he was listening to….. The border was invisible” (p. 75).
Later, he concludes:
The absurdity of the board concept goes throughout. What is the difference between the original explorers and returnees, being alive or dead (see the mysterious self phone. “That placing trust in a word like border had been a mistake, a trap. A slow rambling of terms unrecognized until too late” (p. 295).
Terroir and the Self
The fluidity of borders extends to identity itself. The biologist enjoys the remoteness of Area X because of “how you could lose yourself here in 100 ways. How you could even become someone very different from who you thought you were” (p. 325). By the novel’s end, she claims she is no longer the biologist. Likewise, the Director (the psychologist of book one) returns but in “a corrupted, fragmented state.”
Instead of stability, VanderMeer offers the idea of terroir, explained by Whitby as:
“the specific characteristics of a place, the geography, geology, and climate in concert with one’s own genetic propensities can create a startling deep, original vintage carriers… if something far beyond the experience of human beings had decided to embark upon a purpose that did not intend to allow humans to recognize or understand then terroir would simply be a kind of autopsy… You could map the entire process, say a beach head or an invasion only after it had happened and still not know who or why” (pp. 128–130).
Here, identity, reality, and place are inseparable. The only seemingly stable element is Whitby’s manual on terroir, which Control clings to like a life raft.
Final Thoughts
Several of my friends who loved Annihilation felt lukewarm about Authority. And it’s easy to see why. Gone are the mind-bending revelations of an alien environment and the flood of “what the F” moments. In their place is, essentially, an office satire.
Yet I found Authority compelling on its own terms. The translation of Annihilation’s themes into mundane settings worked for me, allowing the trilogy’s ideas to be reconsidered in a new light. That said, the novel is overlong. The final quarter adds little growth in either ideas or characters, and I finished it mainly to see what happened. And I never had the emotional bond to Control or this version of the biologist as the Biologist in Annihilation.
Still, despite its flaws, Authority is a strong and thought-provoking continuation of the trilogy. To say it’s not as good as one best speculate books recent times is not much of knock. I recommend Authority—and I look forward to finishing the final book.