Authority (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

It's oddly refreshing to come across a book and realize I can't neatly fit it into a specific genre. Like yes, at it's core this is basically a mystery, but this is no Agatha Christie novel. There's no point to paying attention to every single passing detail and comment so you can figure it out before the big exposition reveal at the end. Because there are no explanations, and that's exactly the point. Is it horror? There are some spooky bits that are definitely supernatural, but everything is played so straight without a hint of camp that it doesn't exactly hit the right tone that you'd expect, and there's so much other stuff happening in between that that label doesn't really stick either. It's kind of its own thing.

This book felt like puzzle where you're intentionally not given all the pieces and you're meant to extrapolate between the gaps, but some of those gaps are pretty damn big and leave a lot to the imagination. It's also a book that you could power through, focusing only on the scenes with dramatic action, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice; this is a book that asks you to be patient and read between the lines. Some people might find that frustrating, but it was a fresh take on telling a narrative and it almost felt like it was refusing novel-writing conventions on purpose.

Independent of the plot, i really enjoyed the characters and their dynamics. The protagonist, who calls himself 'Control' (and ironically has no control over 99% of the things that happen to him) is tasked with coming in as a new director of a clandestine government agency. But when he introduces himself with this codename to his new second-in-command assistant director on like the first page she responds something to the effect of, "You want me to call you 'Control'? Why, because you don't have any? Fine, call me 'Patience' then," and their relationship is just consistently antagonistic from that point on, which I found really amusing. Then Control's mother who's some kind of deep-state spy shows up, there's the biologist from the first book, a bunch of whackjob government office workers; for a book with not a ton of dialogue, the cast still managed to stand out for me.

Very different vibe from Annihilation, as many people warned me going into it, but I'm almost kind of glad for it. It was interesting revisiting this setting from a different perspective and tone.

1) "During an admittedly up-and-down career, Control had started as an operative in the field: surveillance on domestic terror cells. Then he'd been bumped up to data synthesis and organizational analysis—two dozen or more cases banal in their similarities and about which he was forbidden to talk. Cases invisible to the public: the secret history of nothing. But more and more he had become the fixer, mostly because he seemed better at identifying other people's specific problems than at managing his own general ones. At thirty-eight, that was what he had become known for, if he was known for anything. It meant you didn't have to be there for the duration, even though by now that's exactly what he wanted: to see something through. Problem was, no one really liked a fixer—'Hey, let me show you what you're doing wrong'—especially if they thought the fixer needed fixing from way back.
It always started well, even though it didn't always end well."

2) "But the truth did have a simple quality to it: About thirty-two years ago, along a remote southern stretch known by some as as the 'forgotten coast,' an Event had occurred that began to transform the landscape and simultaneously caused an invisible border or wall to appear. A kind of ghost or 'permeable pre-border manifestation' as the files put it—light as fog, almost invisible except for a flickering quality—had quickly emanated out in all directions from an unknown epicenter and then suddenly stopped at its current impenetrable limits.
Since then, the Southern Reach had been established and sought to investigate what had occurred, with little success and much sacrifice of lives via the expeditions—sent in through the sole point of egress. Yet that loss of life was trifling compared to the possibility of some break in containment across a border that the scientists were still studying and trying to understand. The riddle of why equipment, when recovered, had been rendered nonfunctional, some of it decomposing at an incredibly fast rate. The teasing, inconsistent way in which some expeditions came back entirely unharmed that seemed almost more inexplicable.
'It started earlier than the border coming down,' the assistant director told him after lunch in his new-old office."

3) "The note on the biologist was the most extensive and caused Control to vibrate with additional questions.
'Not a very good biologist. In a traditional sense. Empathic more toward environments than people. Forgets the reasons she went, who is paying her salary. But becomes embedded to an extraordinary extent. Would know Area X better than I do from almost the first moment sets foot there. Experience with similar settings. Self-sufficient. Unburdened. Connection through her husband. What would she be in Area X? A signal? A flare? Or invisible? Exploit.'"

4) "There was also an impulse, once he was on his way, not to return to the Southern Reach at all—to bypass the director's house, too—and detour onto a rural road, take it over to his father's house, some fifty miles west.
But he resisted it. New owners, and no sculptures left in the backyard. After his dad's death, they'd gone to good homes with aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, even if he'd felt as if the landscape of his formative years was being dismantled, piece by piece. So no solace there. No real history. Some of his relatives still lived in the area, but his father had been the bond between them, and he'd last known most of them as a teenager."

5) [SPOILER]
"This new landscape above the Rock Bay inlet was even more foreign to him, and colder—and a relief, as if Area X were just a climate, a type of vegetation, a simple terroir, even if he knew this wasn't true. So many shades and tones of gray—the gray that shone down from the sky, a ceaseless and endless gray that was so still. The mottled matte gray of the water, before the rain, broken by the curls of wavelets, the gray of the rain itself, prickles and ripples against the ocean's surface. The silver gray of the real waves farther out, which came in and hit the bow as he guided the boat into them, rocking and the engine whining. The gray of something large and ponderous passing underneath him and making the boat rise as he tried to keep it still and motorless for those moments, holding his breath, life too close to dream for him to exhale.
He understood why the biologist liked this part of the world, how you could lose yourself here in a hundred ways. How you could even become someone very different from who you thought you were. His thoughts became still for hours of his search. The frenetic need to analyze, to atomize the day or the week fell away from him—and with it the weight and buzz of human interaction and interference, which could no longer dwell inside his skull.
He thought about the silence of fishing on the lake as a child, the long pauses, what his grandpa might say to him in a hushed tone, as if they were in a kind of church. He wondered what he would do if he couldn't find her. Would he go back, or would he melt into this landscape, become part of what he found here, try to forget what had happened before and become no more or less than the spray against the bow, the foam against the shore, the wind against his face? There was a comfort to this idea almost as strong as the urge to find her, a comfort he had not known for a very long time, and many things receded into the distance behind him, seemed ridiculous or fantastical, or both. Were, at their core, unimportant."

It's impossible for me to think of this book just on its own merits and not couched in the fact that I read this after ripping through Annihilation in a day, hoping for more half human monsters stalking through reeds. Even though I knew it was completely different, even though I finished VanderMeer's Ambergris earlier this year where every book is vastly different from the previous one, I was disappointed as I was reading. I was always holding my breath for that sharp turn back into waxing poetic about the eerie flora and fauna of area x.

But if I put aside the fact that it did not drip feed me more of exactly the same (which I desperately want, annihilation was too short!!!) it was a slow, creeping, itchy book, and it was good. Where annihilation was like panicked ripping through a wall of vines to see what is behind in real time, something breathing down your neck, authority was a slow, itchy burn of papers being read on what was found behind those vines from the vantage point of a disinterested office superior, something still breathing down your neck.

I was never totally sure if the characters were acting on their own, or if maybe they were area x's creatures. The mysteries of previous expeditions being laid out, answering some things and creating lots more questions, over the MCs week at the southern reach were immensely satisfying in a way that was completely different from experiencing them first hand, with a dissasociated floating instead of a sense of urgency. If you go in expecting this to be Annihilation (it's hard!!! Annihilation was so good!!!!) you will probably be disappointed. Let this be its own weird creature and sit and swirl in its own tank instead.