Area X gets weirder (and more male-driven) in Jeff VanderMeer’s fourth installment, the prequel Absolution.
I’m a big fan of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014). I’ve presented on it at conferences, taught Annihilation multiple times, and wrote a dissertation chapter on the trilogy. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these books—perhaps too much time to accurately write a review of the fourth book, Absolution, so do with that what you will. Also, there will be light spoilers for the trilogy.
The original trilogy explores a place on the Florida coast called Area X through multiple characters and points of view. Area X is a transitional environment where things that enter it do not remain the same (to put it mildly), with sometimes horrific results. The Southern Reach is a quasi-governmental agency created to control (or defeat) Area X and try to figure out what exactly is going on. By the end of the trilogy, it’s clear Area X cannot be contained.
Ten years later, VanderMeer has released Absolution, which takes place before Area X becomes the infamous location of the trilogy. Like the environment that VanderMeer has released this prequel into, much has changed—including VanderMeer as a writer. His more direct works (which is perhaps a misnomer) such as Finch (2009) and Southern Reach trilogy have been replaced with more dense, circular stories that give up linearity for the weird. While VanderMeer has always been part of the new weird, his later novels, such as Dead Astronauts (2019), really lean into the weird in terms of structure and prose. I wondered how he would approach this change in his style when it came to returning to Area X or if he would double down on his current style. He chose the latter, so while the novel doesn’t read quite the same as the original trilogy, it retains the weirdness.
Much of Absolution is told from the point of view of Old Jim, who owned the bar in the town on the Forgotten Coast in the original trilogy. In the prequel, we learn Old Jim was sent there by Central in an operation to see what was going on with the strange things happening on the Forgotten Coast (which becomes Area X). Old Jim has a rambling, near stream of consciousness style that makes for a dense, rich reading experience. He’s also an unreliable narrator, which adds another layer of weirdness to what is actually going on in the Forgotten Coast as it is difficult to discern what is trauma from Old Jim’s decades as an operative and what is actually something bizarre happening. Old Jim is obsessed with the Dead Town expedition, an early group of biologists that mirror the later expeditions into Area X in the original trilogy. He scours Central’s archives for notes from the biologists’ journals for clues of what actually happened before being deployed to the Forgotten Coast.
Without dipping into spoilers, there is a time jump to a later point in the Area X timeline, with the story told from the point of view of Lowry, an unlikeable drug-obsessed and “fuck”-addled member of the first expedition into Area X (and a character from the original trilogy). Much like Old Jim’s section, the writing is dense and fully stream of consciousness with an intense amount of profanity that adds to the difficulty of reading the prose out of pure stuttering repetition.
As these two sections suggest, the book is much more character driven and focused on the voices of these characters as opposed to uncovering the mystery of Area X, as in the original trilogy. The other main character is Cass, another Central agent who works with Old Jim to discover what is going. She is a spy but also a lookalike for his missing daughter, and the two become conflated for him as she becomes a surrogate for his daughter—not just his colleague. Her character felt most like a callback to some of the multi-dimensional women who populated the original trilogy, such as the Biologist.
Perhaps because this book functions as a prequel, there are very few answers in its pages. Much of the book is simply weird in the unique ways that VanderMeer explores the weird. What surprised me about this addition to the Southern Reach was the focus on the human. While the place of the Forgotten Coast and Area X are certainly important characters to this novel, the human voices are overwhelming in their narrative style. VanderMeer’s trilogy of 2014 had clear parallels to how environmental thinkers were engaging with the climate crisis, which has led to the 2014 trilogy being on many environmental and climate-focused reading lists and syllabi, mine included. In Absolution, the environmental commentary is much less clear cut. Some of this change comes from the characters. In this book, we don’t have a biologist point of view character to comment on the transitional environments or how humanity is impacting different species. Rather, these two men, Old Jim and Lowry, are infected with their jobs (and in Lowry’s case, drugs) as much as by Area X, which is supported by referencing Dr. Alison Sperling’s theoretical work on the body in the novel’s acknowledgements.
While weirdness for the sake of weirdness might be enough for some people, it wasn’t for me. Then again, I’ve spent a lot of time in Area X. If you preferred reading about the Biologist (from Annihilation) and Ghost Bird (from Acceptance), then Absolution might leave you feeling hollow. If book two, Authority, was your favorite of the original trilogy, then you will most likely enjoy this prequel that investigates these disintegrating human systems in all their toxic weirdness.
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Reference: VanderMeer, Jeff. Absolution [MCD, 2024].
Posted by: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.
