Annihilation

[sawyl]

On the advice of Dr S, I've been reading Jeff VanderMeer's delightfully wonderful Southern Reach Trilogy. Annihilation unfolds from the perspective of an unnamed biologist who has been sent into Area X, a zone of the southern US cut off from the rest of the world by a strange barrier.

The biologist's mission is the twelfth to be sent into the area by the Southern Reach Authority, the government agency responsible for investigating and containing the area. The mission, for experimental reasons which remain unclear, is made up of women: the biologist, the anthropologist, the surveyor, and the psychologist. The psychologist, armed with a series of phrases which can be used to trigger hypnotic states in the others, is in charge. None of the women have names; names were deemed unnecessary — maybe even hazardous — and were removed early in the group's training. They were supposed to have a linguist with them, but she dropped out when confronted with the prospect of crossing the boarder into Area X.

Reaching the base camp established by previous missions, the team discover an error in their map of the Area: a topographical anomaly which everyone bar the biologist insists is a tunnel; the biologist, our unreliable narrator, insists against all the evidence that it is a tower. Descending into the anomaly, the biologist finds a set of cryptic words written on the wall using a living fungus:

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead...

The rest of the book focuses on the group's reaction to their experiences in the tower, especially as the biologist begin to realise that her encounter with the words is starting to change her. She investigates other aspects of the Area — strange flora and fauna, the lighthouse on the coast where one of the previous missions has come to particularly bloody end — but she keeps on finding herself drawn back to the mystery of the tower.

The mission has a dream-like quality, while Area has a logic all of its own that comes to infect the thinking of each mission sent to explore it. Some of the missions have returned. Some haven't. Some have returned horribly changed. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

The book excels at an unpleasant, obsessive sense of horror, with the main characters fixated on something which they know is dangerous but which they can't quite seem to leave alone. In a lot of ways the biologist's obsession reminded me of the tower in Alastair Reynolds' superb gothic novella Diamond Dogs and its cast of characters willing to sacrifice almost anything to get to the secret at the heart of their mysterious spire.

As a standalone novel, Annihilation doesn't resolve anything; but it is not supposed to. Instead it's a beautifully written and delightfully unsettling scene-setter for events of the next novel in the trilogy...