The Second of Three: "Authority" by Jeff VanderMeer

VanderMeer is one of my favorite authors ever and it is taking me a long time to get through his bibliography. This novel is the second of the Southern Reach trilogy. The first, Annihilation, is a fever dream of a novel, following an expedition team through a nightmarish sci-fi land they had been prepped to enter and gather information about. The area has one entrance and the team cannot leave. They encounter an unknown monster, which is never revealed to them. The entire novel is just the reader following the team around as they navigate this foreign place and its foreboding atmosphere.

This second novel in the trilogy is completely different from the first but serves its own purpose. This novel centers around Control, a newly hired director for the Southern Reach. He is charged with figuring out what happened to the expedition in the first book. This novel is so bureaucratic in nature. We follow a director traversing the obstacle of internal favoritism, his own past mistakes and the nepotism that got him this new job, and trying to decipher the secrets of Area X. While the first novel was vague and psychedelically creepy, this novel is unsettling in a different way. Control is in a setting we all know: a boring office. However, he encounters things like the previous director, who was a member of the past team, and her stacks of notes, weird writings on her office walls, and the disappearance of a team member being kept for interrogation. This novel presents itself as stable, but then creeps us out by producing events that leave us off balance.

 The ending of this novel sets us up for the final book taking place in Area X again. This middle novel feels like it creates a full circle back to the place of true interest but exists to make that return even more satisfying and unsettling. Sure, the first novel unsettled us, but when VanderMeer continues building the atmosphere around Area X even when the reader isn’t in it, the payoff will be even greater.

It is always interesting to me to see how authors handle the exposition of character building, and in this case, setting building. Area X is its own character in these novels and VanderMeer isn’t showing us just Control as a character in this novel, but is expanding our knowledge of Area X as a character.