Review: Annihilation

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I saw the movie made from this book before reading it, and I must say, this is one of the rare cases where the movie makes more sense. (I would encourage you to watch the film; it stars Natalie Portman and was written and directed by Alex Garland, who also did Ex Machina.) Of course, there were several changes made in the film version, which inevitably happens, but in this case, the changes were for the better.

My biggest gripe with this book, I think, is the vagueness and the stubborn, coy ambiguity. I realize this was intentional on the author's part, but when your characters don't even have names (they're just called "the anthropologist," "the psychologist," and the narrator is "the biologist") it's hard to get invested in them as people. This vagueness also extends to Area X: it's just an ill-defined area where people vanish and weird things happen, and there may be an alien being that the narrator can't even properly perceive. There is a heady sense of wrongness about the whole thing, and the atmosphere is suitably creepy, but when you're not getting any hints about why that might be, it turns the reader off eventually (or at least it did this reader). The biologist gradually realizes everything she has been told about Area X is a lie: no one, least of all the Southern Reach governmental agency who sent them in, has any idea how long Area X has been there or where it came from. Which makes all the expeditions (and there have been far more of those than she was led to believe) something like sacrificial guinea pigs. Including her husband, who volunteered for the eleventh expedition and who came back and eventually died of cancer. (And possibly that wasn't even her husband, but an Area X-produced doppelganger.)

Nearly all of this short book--only 195 pages--takes place in an internal context: inside Area X, inside the "Tower" (the tunnel spiraling into the earth) inside the lighthouse, and inside the seemingly alien being, the Crawler, who turns out to have sucked the lighthouse keeper inside it and is sustaining his body (which is another kind of horror) and finally inside the narrator, the biologist, who has a running series of flashbacks exploring her childhood and her relationship with her husband. Because of this, nothing ever gets answered and we get no real hints of what is going on here. Now, to be fair, perhaps this changes in the subsequent books in the trilogy. However, when I reached the end of this book, I realized I didn't care about any of it, and I am not likely to go any further.

Watch the movie instead. I think you'll get more out of it.

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