Annihilation – Jeff VanderMeer

Rating: 4 stars

I found Annihilation to be shorter than I expected, but that wasn’t a bad thing. The book starts off reading as a lab report in some ways, but as the story progresses the stilted narration becomes more fluid, which matches the thematic elements of the story very well.

I made the unfortunate and all-too-common error of seeing the movie before reading the book, but I came out of the exchange happy. The book presents enough of a difference from the movie that nothing of importance was spoiled by seeing it first. I enjoyed the observational style of writing that transitioned to a more personal and overwhelmed take as the story progressed.

Like the movie, the plot records the progress of the protagonist (The Biologist) and the three other members of her team as they cross the the Area X to figure out what’s going on. The book pretty specifically doesn’t clarify what the whole deal is, so the reader must go through the adventure along with the narrator, the Biologist.

Like her companions, she is only referenced by her profession and not her name. The reasoning for this and much of what happens throughout the book is ours to discover. There are two sinister forces acting, the ‘they’ of the Southern Reach lab and whatever alien force is causing the ‘border’ and its expansion. Both seem equally opaque and create obstacles to the truth, as far as it can be divined. The government’s hiding is intentional and artificial, hence able to be deciphered to a far greater than the biological and inscrutable nature of what is probably the antagonist and the cause of Area X, the Crawler.

There are very few characters in the novel, and none of them are too sympathetic with the Biologist. To describe her, she is the voice of the author and reader. At the beginning, she seems logical and dedicated to science, but like the effects of Area X, she begins to rely on emotion and instincts to describe truly alien knowledge and conscience.

Besides the two we’ve talked about, there are three characters as far as we can call them that, the Psychologist, the Surveyor and the Biologist’s husband. There is also the Anthropologist, but she dies before we get to know her well. The husband doesn’t show up as living at any point of the story, but we learn about him and his relationship with the Biologist as the story unfolds. The Psychologist embodies the machinations of the Southern Reach with her hypnotic manipulation of the team, and the Surveyor cares about survival and getting through what is their obvious and impending doom.

I expected the book to be long and detail-oriented, but it wasn’t anything of the sort, more oblivious in a way that asks the reader to participate in the story and help solve the mystery along with the protagonist.