Swamp Men By the Bucketful

Review: Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer

Absolution is a new Southern Reach book by Jeff Vandermeer, one of the most groundbreaking sci-fi series to come out in the last twenty years. As a fan of the series, this book has an almost impossibly high standard to live up to and I picked it up with dread, half expecting crushing disappointment. Each of the previous three books in this series are masterpieces that are radically different from each other. Vandermeer not only has to deliver a satisfying Southern Reach story, he has to reinvent the wheel in how he gets there. It’s a tall order to keep pulling off that magic trick but he only has himself to blame in giving readers that expectation.

This literary sci-fi series has a simple plot at the end of the day. An alternate reality or dimension has taken over a swath of the Florida swampy coast and comes to be known as Area X. This alternate dimension defies human understanding of the laws of physics, identity and even what biological life is. And yet people are predictable. The more dangerous and incomprehensible Area X becomes, the more people are compelled to investigate at the cost of their lives, probably. It isn’t always clear if someone has died or been transformed in a way that also defies our understanding. The books are mind trips and each one of them is different as Vandermeer explores different modes of confronting the unknowable. The first book is the adventure logs that introduce us to the world, followed by the Kafkaesque office politics of the second book. In the third we get a sublime integration of the dialectic of exploration and control set up by the first two. And now we have this fourth book. What the hell is it?

Absolution is a book in two parts from two voices both from both before the Area X border goes up and shortly afterward. Voice drives this book into psychological exploration where there is little else to hold on to. When the world doesn’t make sense anymore, we cling to the workings of character. In Absolution, the commitment to voice driven storytelling makes it read more like mid-twentieth century modernism than the conventions of contemporary science fiction and fantasy. On a recent BlueSky post, Vandermeer writes,

“If a scene isn’t going well, I’ll rip the handwritten pages into shreds, and try to recreate it from what I can read, which may lead to something fresh. Or I’ll rip off about a quarter of the right hand side, meaning the sentences are missing words, and try to recreate, again, leading somewhere new. For me, it’s important not to care if I lose something in the process. I don’t even care if I misplaced handwritten pages, to be honest. I could lose a whole chapter and not give a crap. I think it’s healthier that way. They say kill your darlings in revision, but sometimes that’s too late.”

Absolution reads exactly as if it were written with this strange commitment to quirky somatic process. It is wild, fresh, maddeningly illogical and frustratingly dense. It’s a swamp that’s a trudge to get through until all of a sudden you are in a perfect pool of lotus flowers that’s also a monster that’s about to eat you. In this book and not the others from the series, Vandermeer feels like a 20th century beat poet moonlighting as a science fiction writer with all the flaws, excitement and unlikely sublime heights that comparison implies.

Old Jim commands the first part that takes place shortly before the boundary of Area X solidifies over a landscape of burgeoning weirdness. Old Jim is an aging veteran agent with heaps of baggage and bravado. His psyche is wracked with the kind of toxic doubt that made William Blake declare that if the sun and moon should doubt they would immediately go out. Old Jim doubts his sanity. He doubts why his estranged daughter broke off contact with him. He doubts his value and becomes a homeless drunk and then he doubts his nerve when Central, the shadowy government like entity wants him back. Old Jim knows better than to work for these people again but he is too self-pitying and doubtful to remember that and goes along. And then he’s back in the swamp, running a mission, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.

What Old Jim doesn’t get is that his doubt makes him an easy mark for exploitation by bad actors in Central. His arc is about finding his way out of doubt because the alternative is getting squished into a barrel of flesh for pickling. Yes, somehow we end up with people getting squished into flesh barrels and Old Jim looks like he would fit in a barrel just fine.

Vandermeer gets deep enough into the psyche of doubt that Old Jim can be a chore to hang out with at length across the pages. You want to shake him. You want to run the other direction just like an old friend opens up into a diatribe of self-pitying bullshit. But he is worth hanging out with because he does finally get somewhere even if where that is, leaps into unknowable landscapes we can't follow. I’m happy for him.

Absolution feels inspired by how looking at nature on its own terms can make a person trip hard. There is a famous Jean Paul Satre’s 1938 book Nausea where this famous existentialist has a confrontation with a chestnut tree,

Green blight covered it halfway up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather. The sound of the water in the Masqueret Fountain trickled in my ears, made a nest there, filled them with sighs; my nostrils overflowed with a green, putrid odor. All things, gently, tenderly, were letting themselves exist like weary women giving way to laughter, saying, "It's good to laugh," in a damp voice; they were sprawling in front of each other, abjectly confessing their existence. I realized there was no mean between non-existence and this swooning abundance. If you existed, you had to exist to excess, to the point of moldiness, bloatedness, obscenity.

Vandermeer’s prose often reads a bit like these old existentialists if Sartre were also a shithead secret agent on a classified mission. But the weirdness of this book grounds itself in awe for nature. Sartre continues about how his mind rebels against a raw confrontation with nature and tries to count, classify and measure one thing from another but it’s all meaningless and leads nowhere. That approach to Area X is a theme that hits all four books like a sledgehammer.

In the second part of the book, we get Lowry. My guess is that if Vandermeer had a character description he just said “FUCK” in all caps at the top and left it at that. The guy narrates his story dropping f-bombs like it is his job. It isn’t rare in this part of the book to encounter the word “fuck” three or four times per sentence, three or four sentences in a row. I almost abandoned the book because I was having so much trouble reading the prose through all the “fucks” but I’m glad I didn’t. Lowry takes us to the most sublime moments in the whole Southern Reach series, which is high praise.

There is something about Lowry’s drug addled, hyper masculine, fuck everything vibe. His stream of consciousness spew of aggression and horniness almost hide how scared he is. He rides that exaltation of four letter words to letting go and it helps him survive. There is this one scene I don’t want to spoil but Lowry breaks one of the biggest taboos in existence. We follow his internal dialog of how a desire forms, how the mind rebels against it and then returns to try and negotiate with the desire and builds to inevitable action. It’s an electric scene because anyone can identify with that dance of a desire we don’t want in our head even if the action it leads to is pure horror.

Now that I’ve finished the book and let it ferment in the flesh stuffed bucket that is my mind, I find it exuding wistfulness for a bygone era of literary men from the mid twentieth century. It’s an ode back to the days where formalism drove literary criticism and the themes of male aggression, insecurity, bravado and, let’s be honest, whiteness always topped the literary charts. It feels like a lost world now. Most of the bros who wrote and read those books have moved on to podcasting and making excuses for creeping authoritarianism. Today it feels like this loss of a great swath of the literary public has become a problem for everyone in this democracy. Because it wasn’t all that long ago when the American male ego at large was invested in achieving literary merit with all the deep reflection and thoughtfulness that went into that endeavor however flawed. Sure it was often myopic and terrible at making room for the stories of women and other ethnicities. But the movement also had its somatic process of thoughtfulness and its sublime heights that this book examines in a verdant kaleidoscopic prism.