Jeff Vandermeer's ABSOLUTION

Did I know, when I got my ARC of Absolution, Jeff Vandermeer's coda/prequel to his Area X trilogy, that I was about to add a new deity to my shrine of household gods? Of course I didn't. Should I have known that was a distinct possibility? Yes, yes, of course. 

 Listen.

 

When I was a kid, somebody gave me a rubber alligator that I imaginatively named Allie. I was fascinated by everything about it: the smell of the rubber, the textures of its skin and tail, the weird flexibility of its teeth, and especially its evil, oversized eyes. I used to take it with me into our wading pool of a summer, along with my barbies, knock-off and branded. At first Allie attacked them, of course. But later, when I decided it would be more fun if my barbies were villains instead of whatever they were supposed to be, I decided that he was their pet and ally, chiefly used to destroy tiny toy cities or help them to go on terrifying crime sprees. Allie made them badasses, though it would be years before I would dare to use such a word, that had "ass" in it. 

Many, many, many years later, Jeff Vandermeer, who had already written a whole trilogy in which the ecosystem itself has become a kind of villain/punisher figure, or, more accurately, has developed a whole new set of priorities that have nothing to do with humanity at all except in that humanity keeps sending walking and talking raw material into its clutches to play with, brought back these weird early memories of Allie when he wrote the best saurian antagonist since that crocodile ticked and tocked its way through Peter Pan, and he gave this saurian monster the best possible name: Smaug.*

But then, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, he, and his army of biologists who first introduce Smaug onto the Forgotten Coast that will be known as Area X in 20 years, immediately rename her The Tyrant. I hate this decision and stomp my ineffectual little foot at it, but this giant mutant alligator of preternatural awareness and uncanny ubiquity is referred to for the rest of Absolution as The Tyrant. Phooey.

But this is my review, dammit, so I'm gonna keep calling her Smaug.

Smaug and a few other gators introduced to the Forgotten Coast, play merry hell with the biologists who bring them almost from the very first. Collectively known as the Cavalry (Central's code word for the series of enormous" packages the biologists hump into the area, sufficiently large and heavy and mysterious to lead the suspicious locals to conclude that they're not alligators -- which the FC already has plenty of -- but bars of gold with which the biologists will buy necessities and bribe suspicious locals), they're allegedly being released to study their migration patterns and to see if any of them make their way back to their original habititats. Which, of course, they don't. Much more fun to drive scientists crazy with anomalous signals from their tracking harnesses, stalk scientists, mysteriously turn up dead yet still be giving off signals that indicate purposeful movement in other locations, etc. 

I would read a whole novel of this alone, but of course Vandermeer has other, bigger, weirder ideas. Like mysterious echoes of beautiful piano music that turns out to be the exact same piano music played by one of the latter day suspicious locals of Area X in, I think, Acceptance. You know, when Old Jim plays his hands off that one night in the bar. Except, you know, that's 20 years in these biologists' future. 

And the music is the least of their problems.

In these dreams, the meadow "had become some other place," ill-used by "constant battle." A weird green-gold light came from the horizon, framed by the cleft between two mountains. An army of "scientists and psychics" struggled "across a plane of sand and bones toward the light." Grim-looking men and women, "who looked like veterans of some longer conflict..." All three claimed to see figures "stitching their way" through the undergrowth outside of Dead Town, and that these figures wore "old fashioned armor and helmets and some rode upon horses." But these figures had no faces, only the toothed hole of a lamprey's open mouth, endlessly circling a limitless gullet (italics mine)**

This passage is an amalgamation of text from the notebooks of three of the biologists who first bring Smaug to the FC in the first of Absolution's three constituent novellas, "Dead Town," as pieced together by none other than Old Jim, long after Smaug and a mysterious humanoid figure called The Rogue have inflated into legend, yet some time before Old Jim becomes the piano-bashing barkeep of the original trilogy. 

Old Jim, it turns out, was indeed more than he seemed in those original three books. 

Which, now that I think about it, kind of correspond to the three novellas of Absolution: the first, Annihilation, told from the point of view of the 12th Expedition's Biologist, aka Ghost Bird, as she first encounters Area X, to "Dead Town," relating the story of a team of biologists sent to study the region 20 years before it became Area X; Authority, focusing on the bureaucratic eccentricities of the Southern Reach as experienced by the grandson, Control, of the great Jack Severance of Central fame, to "The False Daughter," which relates Old Jim's maddening and dangerous experiences with that same Jack Severance and his terrible daughter/Control's mother, Jackie, as they come to grips with how weird the FC is/was even before the Border came down and Area X became an undeniable thing; and Acceptance, weaving the two prior storylines together even as the whole weird train disappears into the Cacotopic Stain possibly a whole 'nother galaxy or universe, to "The First and the Last," similarly syncretizing the prior two novellas into an even weirder whole that also manages to make the original trilogy even weirder than it already was, just by context! 

Oh, but see all that stuff about "old fashioned armor" and a "plane of sand and bones" and whatnot? Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's goddamned time travel in this witches' brew of a fictional milieu, too. I can't swear on it; I think I need to re-read this whole quartet again, possibly in reverse chronological order, before I commit like that, but I'm pretty sure that both wibbly wobbly and timey wimey are at least factors, if not driving forces, in Area X. Though possibly they've only become so now, as is hinted in bits of dialogue like "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. It should be different already."

But lest I make it sound like Jeff Vandermeer has finally disappeared up his own asshole, I must take this moment to assure you that no, he is still very much here with us and still very much in control of what he is doing. This is still our man at the peak of his powers, and he makes sure he knows it by playing to all of his strengths: rapturously lovely nature writing, deeply researched and probably lived redneck anthropology, grotesque body horror, and, of course, wildlife behaving badly. As in rabbits devouring live fiddler crabs badly. To say nothing of the swimming, wallowing, munching, rushing, biting anomaly that is Smaug and her Manfriend.

Look, I could talk about this all day. I could rage on for a few hours about the howling fantods this book gave both me and my best reading buddy, SJ*** with its extended sequences involving house centipedes. I could share all of our slightly disjointed theorizing about who Smaug's Manfriend "really" is (we were both wrong, by the way). I haven't devoted any lines yet to how the character I despised the most in the original trilogy is now my favorite character in the whole cycle. He really loves drugs, you guys. Like a lot. You think Hunter S. Thompson loved drugs but that was a casual fling compared to how much this character regards drugs with the worshipful devotion of a Bacchante of old. And you really want to know who I'm talking about now, don't you? 

You've got to read the book your own self to find that out. Which, come on: you probably have it from Netgalley already, too. And probably already agree with me that while Absolution may not be the best Area X book, it is absolutely (heh) the most Area X book.

But I'm still gonna buy this when it's available. On audio. I can't wait to hear how a narrator handles this madness.

And yes, I still think Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay is still the retroactive origin point of this whole fictional universe. If that's even a thing. Well, it is now. I've made it one. Area X is Ground Zero of the Kilnification of Earth. If you get it, you get it.

*After the dragon in The Hobbit, natch.

**I'm much too lazy and fatigued from a vaccine hangover as of this writing to check the text right now, but I swear the bit I've italicized is more or less a verbatim description of one of the cacogens in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Possibly even that of my sometime namesake (in that I've copped its name for a gamer tag or social media handle more than once), Ossipago?

***Aka Popqueenie, who buddy read this with me and wrote of Absolution one of the most glorious book reviews of a glorious career of snarky book love. Go read it!