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lesserjoke 's review for:
Visser
by K.A. Applegate
The Chronicles have been a consistently strong corner of the Animorphs franchise -- perhaps surprisingly so, given how little they feature of our familiar teenage animal-morphing freedom fighters. In this third volume, for example, the spotlight lands on Visser One, the Yeerk commander who outranks Visser Three but has fallen on hard times after he accused her* of treason. The last time the heroes saw this foe in book #30 of the main series, she had seemingly died, right after learning that the son of her human host, Marco, was one of the so-called Andalite bandits. Yet they never found a body, and #35 ends with the cliffhanger of her calling the boy at home.
Here, we find that the visser is on trial for her life, facing charges of incompetence and conspiring with her people's enemies. Visser Three is there as her inquisitor, although she detects that their superiors on the Council of Thirteen are displeased with him as well and she's determined to cast the blame his way as she presents her carefully-chosen testimony (which we hear along with her thoughts and interior dialogue with Eva). The Andalite Controller has ploys of his own, however, from surprise witnesses to a staged wild animal attack for him and his guards to defeat, claiming that it's the resistance group in morph. (And let me say, it's a jolt for the reader to figure out what's happening in real time, as the beasts and hapless Hork-Bajir Controllers are killed before our eyes.) When the defendant sneaks a cell phone and dials Marco, it's to provide him and his friends with a weakness in the Yeerk pool security and encourage them to launch a strike that day, thereby discrediting her rival's pathetic charade.
As that maneuver demonstrates, Edriss 562 remains a devious individual even at her lowest, willingly betraying and sacrificing bystanders of her species in order to save her own skin. I'd even go so far as to call her an antiheroine in this novel, a narrating presence whose perspective is both sympathetic and repulsive as she details her initial infiltration of the earth. Together with a partner, defying orders to ignore the distant planet for now, she came here in the early 90s and became the first known Yeerk to capture a human host**. She's likewise the one who founded the front organization The Sharing, and settled on a plan of slow conquest by subterfuge, rather than the all-out war that Visser Three would prefer.
She's also deeply conflicted, and like many secret agents behind enemy lines, finds herself drawn to the unwitting population in which she's immersed. Despite her commitment to the mission, she knows she's assimilated into the local culture in a way her people would never tolerate or understand, particularly regarding the bombshell revelation that she used one of her longtime hosts to get pregnant and deliver a pair of twins***. She seems to genuinely care about those children, later given up for adoption, and her true impetus for avoiding the strategy of bloody combat that the Yeerks deployed against the Hork-Bajir is to keep the pair of them safe… until the occupation has spread enough that they can be captured as Controllers themselves.
It's pretty sick, but author K. A. Applegate does a great job of leading us to root for this creature regardless, especially via contrasts with the boorish cruelty of Visser Three. She wants to live, to prove herself against her misguided detractors, and to preserve our world from outright slaughter. She calls in the good guys, who do in fact show up and ruin the prosecutor's day. Clearly guilty, and suffering from torture and Kandrona starvation, she nevertheless manages to convince the judges to stay her execution. It's hard not to like her as a protagonist for all that, at least a little.
Eva comes through well too, as a perpetual voice of judgment -- sometimes positive, usually negative -- within the alien's mind and briefly as a free woman who can speak to her son under her own volition again. After the Animorphs rescue her, she makes the heartbreaking decision to remain behind and let herself be re-taken, reasoning that the visser's opposition to military intervention on earth is important to maintain, and that it would be too suspicious for her host to escape with the kids. At the same time, Edriss can't turn in the team to the forces on her side, leveraging her realization that they must be mostly all humans Marco's age, because then the Yeerks would learn how she suggested and abetted their attack on the pool. So they depart in a tense equilibrium, with the general soon sentenced to travel off-world to another developing battleground site anyway.
Overall, it's a fun title. The temporary shift in focus allows for an interesting character study of a complicated personality, and the plot scratches a logistical itch to explain a lot of background history, the sort of confident flashback move that a series can only really do once it's established a firm sense of itself in the present. It's furthermore a glorious love letter to humanity: why a race like ours would matter so much to the burgeoning Yeerk Empire, and why the fighting spirit exemplified by folks like Eva and her son keeps us from being an easy pushover by a technologically-advanced civilization such as theirs. The increasingly-traumatized teens aren't in it for very many pages, but this narrative of their opponent is a terrific addition to the wider saga.
*Yeerks don't have a gender, but we mainly see this one infesting women and she thinks of herself as a mother, so I'm following the convention of the books in that pronoun use.
**Visser Three apparently never told anyone that Chapman and Loren were temporarily infested in The Andalite Chronicles about a decade earlier, assuming he retained those memories.
***A clear act of rape upon her host, even though the text, aimed at younger readers, doesn't call it out as such. We're shown horror throughout the series at the lack of control a "Controller" has over their body, but I think this is thankfully the only instance of a Yeerk canonically forcing a human into sex.
[Content warning for gore, substance abuse, gun violence, child endangerment, and drowning.]
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Here, we find that the visser is on trial for her life, facing charges of incompetence and conspiring with her people's enemies. Visser Three is there as her inquisitor, although she detects that their superiors on the Council of Thirteen are displeased with him as well and she's determined to cast the blame his way as she presents her carefully-chosen testimony (which we hear along with her thoughts and interior dialogue with Eva). The Andalite Controller has ploys of his own, however, from surprise witnesses to a staged wild animal attack for him and his guards to defeat, claiming that it's the resistance group in morph. (And let me say, it's a jolt for the reader to figure out what's happening in real time, as the beasts and hapless Hork-Bajir Controllers are killed before our eyes.) When the defendant sneaks a cell phone and dials Marco, it's to provide him and his friends with a weakness in the Yeerk pool security and encourage them to launch a strike that day, thereby discrediting her rival's pathetic charade.
As that maneuver demonstrates, Edriss 562 remains a devious individual even at her lowest, willingly betraying and sacrificing bystanders of her species in order to save her own skin. I'd even go so far as to call her an antiheroine in this novel, a narrating presence whose perspective is both sympathetic and repulsive as she details her initial infiltration of the earth. Together with a partner, defying orders to ignore the distant planet for now, she came here in the early 90s and became the first known Yeerk to capture a human host**. She's likewise the one who founded the front organization The Sharing, and settled on a plan of slow conquest by subterfuge, rather than the all-out war that Visser Three would prefer.
She's also deeply conflicted, and like many secret agents behind enemy lines, finds herself drawn to the unwitting population in which she's immersed. Despite her commitment to the mission, she knows she's assimilated into the local culture in a way her people would never tolerate or understand, particularly regarding the bombshell revelation that she used one of her longtime hosts to get pregnant and deliver a pair of twins***. She seems to genuinely care about those children, later given up for adoption, and her true impetus for avoiding the strategy of bloody combat that the Yeerks deployed against the Hork-Bajir is to keep the pair of them safe… until the occupation has spread enough that they can be captured as Controllers themselves.
It's pretty sick, but author K. A. Applegate does a great job of leading us to root for this creature regardless, especially via contrasts with the boorish cruelty of Visser Three. She wants to live, to prove herself against her misguided detractors, and to preserve our world from outright slaughter. She calls in the good guys, who do in fact show up and ruin the prosecutor's day. Clearly guilty, and suffering from torture and Kandrona starvation, she nevertheless manages to convince the judges to stay her execution. It's hard not to like her as a protagonist for all that, at least a little.
Eva comes through well too, as a perpetual voice of judgment -- sometimes positive, usually negative -- within the alien's mind and briefly as a free woman who can speak to her son under her own volition again. After the Animorphs rescue her, she makes the heartbreaking decision to remain behind and let herself be re-taken, reasoning that the visser's opposition to military intervention on earth is important to maintain, and that it would be too suspicious for her host to escape with the kids. At the same time, Edriss can't turn in the team to the forces on her side, leveraging her realization that they must be mostly all humans Marco's age, because then the Yeerks would learn how she suggested and abetted their attack on the pool. So they depart in a tense equilibrium, with the general soon sentenced to travel off-world to another developing battleground site anyway.
Overall, it's a fun title. The temporary shift in focus allows for an interesting character study of a complicated personality, and the plot scratches a logistical itch to explain a lot of background history, the sort of confident flashback move that a series can only really do once it's established a firm sense of itself in the present. It's furthermore a glorious love letter to humanity: why a race like ours would matter so much to the burgeoning Yeerk Empire, and why the fighting spirit exemplified by folks like Eva and her son keeps us from being an easy pushover by a technologically-advanced civilization such as theirs. The increasingly-traumatized teens aren't in it for very many pages, but this narrative of their opponent is a terrific addition to the wider saga.
*Yeerks don't have a gender, but we mainly see this one infesting women and she thinks of herself as a mother, so I'm following the convention of the books in that pronoun use.
**Visser Three apparently never told anyone that Chapman and Loren were temporarily infested in The Andalite Chronicles about a decade earlier, assuming he retained those memories.
***A clear act of rape upon her host, even though the text, aimed at younger readers, doesn't call it out as such. We're shown horror throughout the series at the lack of control a "Controller" has over their body, but I think this is thankfully the only instance of a Yeerk canonically forcing a human into sex.
[Content warning for gore, substance abuse, gun violence, child endangerment, and drowning.]
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog