n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.returnreturnThat VanderMeer takes a ‘less is more’ approach is embedded right from the moment the reader discovers that they will not learn the characters’ names. This sets out a ground rule—that you will barely get the amount of information you need, and not a comma more—and it reinforces the strange, strained relationships between the scientists, who will share a transformative experience without knowing anything about each other, and between their expedition and Area X, an intensely, compellingly weird landscape. returnreturnThe story is a first-person narrative, the ‘I’ is a product of an isolated youth, an ‘expert in the uses of solitude’. This makes for an interesting point of view, especially here. The question of the reliability of the narrator naturally enough arises, but is more difficult to answer when events recounted never seem to amount to more than hints as to something else: the past, the future, a different interpretation. returnreturnThe very first feature the four scientists encounter is the foot of a stone stairway that tunnels down into the ground, which the narrator stubbornly persists in calling a tower. The scientists are part of an official investigation into the ‘mysteries’ of Area X, but all they really discover, even those that survive, is that the mysteries are far more evolved than anyone expected. They entered the Area X territory in the hope of finding out about its mysteries, but three out of four do not survive their encounter with its unmediated reality. They arrive under instruction to record information about Area X but Area X seems, in its unexplained way, to be recording itself, keeping the scientists’ records as well as their remains. returnreturnBy the end, the narrator has acknowledged the collapse of her "compulsion" to "know everything"¸and that even if she had clung to it, “our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish." What makes this compelling is that it is an admission not of defeat but of a radically altered perspective of her role in relation to uncanniness, which, under the circumstances, seems the only sane admission to make. returnVanderMeer pulls off the remarkable feat of presenting an immensely rich and immersive story in a narrative style that is elusive and ambiguous and a linguistic style that is reticent yet precise. This is a compelling combination.