‘Absolution’ Takes Us Back to Area X

The story of an alien-possessed swamp that seeks to take over the world, Jeff VanderMeer’s  trilogy ‘The Southern Reach’ stands as one of the more unlikely publishing successes of our young century.

Rolled out in rapid-fire succession in 2014, the three books — ‘Annihilation,’ ‘Authority’ and ‘Acceptance’ — tapped into a growing realization that the planet we had been cooking for decades was, in turn, plotting to kill us. Normies and nerds alike ate it up, propelling VanderMeer to being New York Times bestseller author. With the earth getting hotter and even stranger, he revisits the coastal zone known as Area X in his latest novel, ‘Absolution.’

Technically a prequel (though VanderMeer in interviews suggests it’s also a sly sequel), ‘Absolution’ breaks little new ground, storywise. Instead, the book’s three interconnecting sections serve as commentary, sometimes illuminating and sometimes muddying, of the original books.

‘Absolution’ likely won’t enjoy the same crossover appeal as its predecessors. It’s too strange, too inward looking. But it more than earns its spot in the canon. The first three books told an environmental horror story showing how the world ends. While ‘Absolution’ packs in cosmic horror to spare, it ultimately acts as a meditation on how it feels to watch that world receding and the motivations of the flawed humans trying, absurdly and against all odds, to fend off oblivion.

In the original trilogy, the Southern Reach is the agency seeking to neutralize Area X, a freak landscape that mutates every vegetable, animal or mineral it touches. While contained by a sort of force field called the Border, Area X appears poised for a breakout. ‘Annihilation,’ the first and by far most popular novel of the trilogy (later made into a reasonably well-reviewed box office bomb by Alex Garland), follows the 12th expedition to enter Area X. Spoiler: the trilogy does not have a conventionally happy ending. 

The lead protagonists of ‘Absolution’ are side characters from the original books, and the first two sections take place before the Border falls around Area X. In ‘Dead Town’ we’re reintroduced to Old Jim. Previously seemingly nothing more than a dive bar character with a penchant for noodling on the piano, turns out Old Jim actually is a spook working for Central, the parent agency of the Reach. We find him plumbing old videos and moldy diaries to uncover the fate of some biologists following a botched experiment (involving alligators) in the swamp 20 years before the Border. Official accounts claim the party was wiped out in a hurricane; Old Jim suspects otherwise.

Old Jim returns in ‘The False Daughter’ and, man, is he in rough shape. His estranged daughter has cut him off for good (“Don’t follow me. Don’t try to find me. Don’t contact me. Sincerely, Cass.” reads the note left in his car). Old Jim then embarks on an alchol-fueled cross-country quest to find her that ends in a gutter, where he’s swooped up by a familiar spymaster. Once briefed and detoxed, Old Jim is shipped down to investigate weird activities surrounding the swamp, human and otherwise. His assistant: a woman who claims to be his daughter. Their relationship becomes the emotional center of the novel.

‘The First and the Last’ takes us deep in the mind of the only surviving member of the first expedition into Area X one year after its cut off by the border. The man who will go on to send more expeditions to their doom. The man everyone loves to hate. The one, the only: James Lowry. 

It’s not a pleasant journey. With a brain fried by drugs and the corrosive influence of Area X, Lowry’s trip is a travelogue of hallucinations, grotesque deaths, possible cannibalism, and a comical number of f-bombs and other obscene conjugations. The reviewer for The New York Times, somewhat remarkably, suggests the reader can skip most of these 132 pages. Wrong! Lowry’s journey gets at the heart of VanderMeer’s story; skipping any part of the ride means you miss a lot. Some of his jokes are even funny.

The biologist — the protagonist of the the Southern Reach trilogy — was a badass. Yes, sadness fills her backstory, but she moves forward no matter how weird reality gets and no matter how Area X has changed her. In ‘Absolution’ the leads are deeply broken men whose ability to assess their situation, or even reality itself, is compromised, if not delusional. Which, some might say, is the human condition as it confronts its possible extinction.

And it’s through these damaged protagonist that VanderMeer pulls off the neat trick of imbuing the original trilogy with something it was (deliberately) missing: a sense of tragedy. A sampling:

Old Jim wishing the biologists to survive: “Old Jim wanted, across the years, to implore the biologists to run ahead of the storm. To cease operations and observations. To join the stampede of animals.”

Old Jim, clinging to memories of his daughter as Area X floods his brain: “The real Cass, at ten, at the piano, protesting her incarceration on the bench at first, but then banging the keys with him. ‘Don’t stop,’ he was saying or she was saying. Or it’ll be over. Just don’t stop. Just keep going.”

Lowry, tripping balls in the closing section and realizing: “That the Area X [he] had fucking experienced was the best possible outcome. That Area X would never not happen. There was no off switch, there was no other time in which it faded away or was not activated. But if it colonized the past, then everything would get worse, worse, worse.”

The titles of the trilogy’s novels carried a sardonic edge. For those not theologically inclined, ‘Absolution’ refers to the forgiveness of sins by ordained clergy (it’s not just saying sorry and someone saying OK). VanderMeer could very well intend it as an ironic commentary on the impossibility of such achieving grace (FWIW, he thinks the human race has 17 years). The alternative read is that, even in the face of “annihilation,” to love and to act is redeeming, even if only in the moment. We all may be finding out sooner rather than later.