Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy: Book 3 (Acceptance), by Jeff VanderMeer

"The world went on, even as it fell apart"

My review of the first two books is here.

*

I read this trilogy as a single volume, one 600+ page hardcover brick. And I was so annoyed every time I had to lug this book — a book that I wasn’t even really enjoying very much — with me on the bus to the office and then home again that it made me irrationally angry, and that definitely colored my perception of the book. Would my opinion of the novel(s) be different if I had read them as slim, single volumes? Or on my Kindle? It’s hard to say. But it’s funny the things that can affect our enjoyment of a novel. For me? I am glad this thing is done, because I am super over lugging it around. Don’t worry, I have a bit more to say than that.

**

As mentioned in the review of the first two books, the first book was thrilling and spooky and FUN while the second was preachy and dull and overwrought. The third book, unfortunately, takes more from the second than the first.

The biggest issue that I see is that the writer obviously wanted the series to be of a higher mind than the first book was, but I just don’t think he had the writing chops to pull it off. He wanted an elevated book, but he just couldn’t elevate his writing to where it matched the heights of his ideas. This is not an uncommon problem.

He wanted it to be about philosophy, about loss, about what it means to be human, about our relationship with the natural world, but I think he probably should have kept it a little more low brow, as he seemed to find it nearly impossible to keep the story moving while also delving into his Big Ideas(TM). Consequently, I found myself bored a lot — like, a lot — and almost gave up on the book several times, even once when I was a mere 20 pages from being done. More than anything, I wanted him to go back to the creepy early days of the trilogy and lose all the hackneyed freshman year Thoreau-isms. Alas …

*

The ending, though, was wonderful and well told and a fitting punctuation mark to the weeks I spent inside his world. If VanderMeer was truly committed to making this a thinking man’s trilogy — like, say, The Three Body Problem (which is remarkable and you should definitely read that series before reading this one) — I wish he would go back and read the final pages of books two and three and see what he was doing there and then bring that heightened sense of languid melancholy to the rest of the story. I think too often he forgot that what he was writing was essentially a very sad story, to the detriment of the books overall. Either that, or he should have stuck to the first book’s brilliant creepiness. But he did neither.

Also, it became obvious — again near the end — that the author owed a debt of gratitude to Peter Matthiessen and how he wrote about the wilds of Florida in Shadow Country. The way VanderMeer started writing about his fictional “forgotten coast” felt very familiar — not in an unpleasant way — and I wish he would have leaned into that a bit more. He became a better writer as the story went on, but in the end it just wasn’t enough for me.

**

One of my bigger pet peeves about the series was how the writer decided after the first book that he really didn’t want to explain any of the odd phenomena in Area X to us, the reader. I found this exasperating, for a couple reasons. First of all, it was a little too late at that point to go the way of The Road or The Wall and let the unspoken catastrophic event play second fiddle, but also instead of just ignoring the events of Area X and making it a story of how humans response to catastrophe and loss, he quite literally had his characters tell us, the reader, over and over again, that we humans are simply too thick to understand what had happened. Which, fine. That’s acceptable. But pretty annoying.

Well, it turns out I wasn’t alone in this annoyance, and the writer kind of agreed with me, as it seems the just released fourth book in the series ties up a lot of loose ends left open by the first three. Apparently, VanderMeer was not satisfied himself with how he left things there on the forgotten coast, which is vindicating.

Will I read the fourth book? Yes. I will. Probably. But definitely in paperback or on my Kindle.

**

Next up: Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry.

Thanks for reading!