Back again with the final (for now at least) installment of my ramblings about one of the most bizarrely captivating series I've ever read. Apologies in advance, this one will be a little long.
First and foremost, it's plain and simple that this series will not be for everybody. I think the average reader (by which I mean preferences for writing style/characters/plot/etc, not average skill) is most likely to think book 1 Annihilation is the best of the bunch, probably by a fair margin. I think that's probably also my opinion as well, book 1 was phenomenal for my tastes, but I want to expand upon my perspective as somebody who was entranced by the rest of the series as well.
Absolution is almost 100% a prequel. I say almost 100% because due to the perspective of Saul the lighthouse keeper that we got in book 3 Acceptance, about 1/3 of Absolution occurs after all of Saul's POV in that book.
VanderMeer's writing style is a little tough to digest. It's so incredibly descriptive, often hyperbolically so, to the point where it's not always easy to follow the sentence from start to finish. It feels a bit like a schizo-ADHD fever dream, where even the narrator finds themselves incredibly distracted and hyperfocuses on the minute details that otherwise don't feel particularly important.
For many readers, I can see this as being a MAJOR downside to the readability. For a while, I felt that way too. Then I started to think of it as its own sort of literary device, and while I wouldn't say that made it more clear to read, I would say that it made it far more immersive for me.
Old Jim's Section
I thought this section did a really interesting job of providing some key background and personality information towards three incredibly important secondary characters, Jack Severance, Henry Kage, and Whitby Allen.
If you've read the other three books in the series at this point, you know to expect layers upon layers of manipulation from Jack Severance. And perhaps it was naïve on my part to still feel a little blindsided by what came up, but nonetheless, the depths of his manipulation upon Old Jim left me positively reeling. I also think it gives significantly more insight to the character Control/John from books 2 and 3, being Jack's grandson.
Henry Kage's role in the book truthfully did not make a whole lot of sense to me. But I say that in a way that makes me very interested to reread the series again later down the line. Because learning a bit more about his actions and motivations which were detached from the goings-on of Saul Evans gave a lot of context that I think will explain his behaviors that we got to witness in earlier books.
The "character" (if it can even be called that) which this book introduced, the "Rogue" as Old Jim called it, appears to be foundational to the creation of Area X. And we learned that in addition to being a catalyst for the Dead Town disaster, the Rogue more or less inspired the child version of Whitby Allen to become the adult he turned out to be. Although now that I think about it, we didn't actually learn this until Lowry's section.
The Rogue appears to be a Central experiment gone wrong, or perhaps right, which Serum Bliss and the S&SB were intended to study the environmental effects of, knowingly or not. It still remains unclear exactly how much Central knows, and also how much Jack Severance is acting of his own accord as a side project.
I might be entirely wrong, but I think as of now, The Rogue was the root cause of Area X in some way.
Lowry's Section
Fuck. If you've read this fucking book, you fucking know exactly what I'm fucking talking the fuck about.
Okay that's enough, apparently there are over 1200 instances of the word "fuck" in its various forms throughout this section of the book alone, which amounts to somewhere close to 150ish pages or so.
While incredibly tedious to power through, this completely excessive choice by VanderMeer does serve a purpose. Lowry is a self-obsessed stimulant addict with a hero complex, and the usage of "fuck" throughout this section can easily be used as a barometer for Lowry's mood. When Area X's influence on him is at its highest, he uses it the least. When he's at his most significantly goal-oriented (relative to Central), he uses it the most.
It does a really good job actually of channeling the perspective of a stimulant fiend, and one of the unfortunate things about stimulant fiends is that they're incredibly annoying. Nonetheless, getting a first-hand account of the first expedition from one of its two* possible survivors was something I was glad to have received. I also found it interesting that there was no mention of the tower from book one, the team didn't appear to have encountered it at all.
*Karen Hargraves/Cass appears to have also escaped Area X back into the real world, if we're to believe the stimulant withdrawal hallucinatory perspective of the suit that Lowry had a conversation with at the end of the book. I want to run with the idea that she did in fact get out, because it gives me yet another piece of the puzzle to look out for throughout the series on a reread.
Final Thoughts
Like I said in the title, this book was like a car crash. It was incredibly chaotic, often hard to follow, and incredibly convoluted, yet somehow I couldn't help myself from being captivated by it nonetheless. If I were to compare it to any of the previous 3 books, oddly enough I would actually say that it probably felt the most like book 2 Authority, but with the atmospheric progression into madness of Saul's perspective from book 3. If I were to rank all four books from best to worst based on my first read of them all, it would look like this.
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Annihilation
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Acceptance
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Absolution
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Authority
I'm going to be thinking about this series for a long time. I'll definitely let it simmer for a while before revisiting it, but I greatly look forward to revisiting it when the time comes, to see what else I can learn on a second round through. VanderMeer himself says that he DOES include every "answer" a reader could possibly request from the series, hidden throughout the books at various points. And I like the idea of a gradually unfurling puzzle of sorts.
by PsyferRL