Authority

[sawyl]

Return to Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy with Authority. Set in the Southern Reach itself, the moribund government agency charged with analysing and containing the mysterious Area X, it follows operative John Rodriguez, alias Control, as he is parachuted in to fill the vacant position of director.

Despite a determination to impose his own stamp on proceedings, Control is almost immediately out of his depth. His deputy, Grace, clearly expects the previous director to return and dedicates herself to undermining Control at every turn. Control doesn't get much support from his superiors in Central, composed of a disembodied handler called the Voice and his mother, a star operative who has spent a great deal of her own capital covering for Control's mistakes and who has made it very clear that the Southern Reach represents Control's last chance within the agency.

When Control is informed that three of the members of the twelfth mission into Area X — the surveyor, the anthropologist and the biologist — have returned, he becomes fascinated with the the deeply taciturn biologist, whom he believes holds the answers to the mystery at the heart of Area X. Fighting against Grace's desire to turn all the subjects over to Central, Control tries to understand what makes the biologist special and what he ought to make of her firm assertion that she isn't the biologist but Ghost Bird — the biologist's late husband's nickname for his wife.

Authority adds a great deal to the twelfth mission, narrated by the biologist in Annihilation, explaining the ambiguous role of the psychologist and bringing out the differences between the biologist and Ghost Bird, the version of the biologist returned back to the real world by Area X.

John Rodriguez is a fascinating and unreliable narrator, whose account of his time at the Southern Reach is slippery in the extreme. Paranoid that both that Grace and the Voice are attempting to manipulate him, Control sees interference in the slightly things: a dead mosquito in his car, an old cell phone in his backpack, people panhandling outside a coffee shop. But it's clear that Control doesn't have the best perspective on events or on his own past, as is made painfully obvious when Grace, over lunch with Southern Reach's senior staff, recounts the disastrous field mission that put paid to Control's career as a field operative.

The book ends on an astonishing note, with the worst of the former director's fears coming to fruition. Control, forced to fall back on his tradecraft, flees, searching for Ghost Bird, whom he still believes may hold the answers he seeks. In his possession is a manuscript written by Whitby, one of the scientists at the Reach, which attempts to explain the mysteries of Area X in terms of its terroir.