Rating: 4/5, good
I saw the movie version of Annihilation before I read the book, and I really liked it. The movie does a great job of balancing its horror and science fiction aspects, and has a lot of great terrifying and surreal moments. The book is more Lovecraftian than the movie. It has more out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye creepiness whereas the movie has more present-threat scares. The book also explores the psychology aspect a bit more than the movie, with hypnosis and perception being major themes.
The book and the movie share the same basic idea: there’s a place called Area X, which is surrounded by a strange forcefield, within which living things change in eerie ways. Four female professionals: a biologist (the main character), a psychologist (the semi-antagonist), a surveyor, and an anthropologist are on an expedition to find out what Area X is and what is happening to the plants and animals within it. In both the book and the movie, the biologist’s husband, who went on the expedition prior to hers, returns and then falls ill, and this motivates her to go to Area X to find out what happened to him.
The creatures are significantly different between the book and the movie. I don’t want to give anything away, but I preferred the creatures in the movie a bit more. I found the creature in the book to be not intimidating, because it was basically a large banana slug, and I think banana slugs are pretty cute (I may be partial as a UCSC alum). The creatures in both the book and the movie have the power to dive into human minds, make them hallucinate, and edit their DNA. The movie has the alligator, the bear, and the doppelganger, while the book has The Crawler, a boar, and doppelgangers as well. I really loved the bear, so I was a little disappointed by The Crawler.
I feel like Annihilation was a book that I should have enjoyed more than I actually did. I love surreal stuff, body horror, psychological horror, creatures, and emotionally detached female protagonists, so this book was right up my alley, but I found it really boring and hard to get through. I don’t know if it’s just ADD or spending too long on social media shortening my attention span, but I felt like I couldn’t read more than like 3 pages without getting bored or distracted.
I felt like there was something kind of disordered about the writing style, like the details were just described in the wrong order, so I would have to go back and reread a lot to get the full impression, and this kept throwing me out of it. Reading this was a very frustrating experience. I wouldn’t say I hated it, the prose was okay, just very slow and dry. I often felt that VanderMeer spent ten pages on something that should have been two pages, and glossed over in two sentences things that should have been three pages.
Part of it could have been the scientific, detached attitude of the main character lending itself to monotone. Check out this paragraph:
Things only I could see: That the walls minutely rose and fell with the tower’s breathing. That the colors of the words shifted in a rippling effect, like the strobing of a squid. That, with a variation of about three inches above the current words and three inches below, there existed a ghosting of prior words, written in the same cursive script. Effectively, these layers of words formed a watermark, for they were just an impression against the wall, a pale hint of green or sometimes purple the only sign that once they might have been raised letters. Most seemed to repeat the main thread, but some did not.
These are really exciting things that would blow anyone’s mind, but the protagonist sounds like she’s describing shelves of cereal at the grocery store. There’s three sentences that start with the same word, and a lot of long sentences with commas and strings of complex dependent clauses. In the third sentence, the subject, “prior words”, is buried in the middle, after the description of its location. You’re told where to expect something before you know what to imagine there.
VanderMeer sets up placeholders before he tells you what to put in those places. It’s like the end of the first paragraph of the book, “Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.” This tells us to expect a threat. Rather than create suspense, I feel that this gives something away: we know there will be a threat, we just don’t know what yet. It’s a very logical, computer-sciencey way of thinking: fill in X. Area X? Maybe this is intentional…
Anyway, knowing the properties of X, does it matter what X is? It removes some of the suspense by creating parameters for the thing that does not yet exist in the reader’s imagination. Most of the time, when authors are trying to create suspense, they give some sensory scrap, like a scratching in the walls, but here VanderMeer’s telling readers the meaning before giving them the sensory experience… usually a sensation prompts us to try to make sense of that sensation, but when the meaning is given first it kind of takes away the mystery (at least I think so). I guess I like to make meaning on my own, I don’t like being told what something means before I get to experience it for myself. It’s kind of showing rather than telling.
VanderMeer does the same thing with the explorers: they’re known by profession, not by name. Is someone’s name and appearance an X, an abstract designation that the world interacts with, but the true nature of which the world cannot comprehend? Maybe that’s the idea VanderMeer’s getting at with the doppelgangers? They’re the same in name/designation, but they don’t feel the same to their loved ones. There’s a lot of exploration of depersonalization/derealization in this novel.
I might read the next book to find out if there’s something subtly intentional about the writing style, but I’m not super optimistic about the mysteries set up in this book having a satisfying explanation. I hesitate to embark on series books because they cost multiple times as much as a single volume book, but I might rent Authority and Acceptance from the library. Unfortunately, it looks like Authority has a different protagonist, so I’ll miss the biologist. I kinda liked her. It is neat having a female protagonist who’s far on the intellectual side of the intellectual-emotional spectrum. Acceptance seems to have mixed reviews, with some saying it answered everything and some saying it answered nothing.
Did you read any of the Southern Reach trilogy? What was your impression? Did you like the book or the movie better?
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