Absolution

In the years since I finished reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I’ve never stopped thinking about this world.

VanderMeer unites biophilic cosmic horror like HP Lovecraft; furnishes passionate descriptions of the majesty of nature like Jane Goodall or Sir Richard Attenborough; unmoors the reader with paranoia and conspiracy like Philip K. Dick; and stuns with affect-blunted narrators like Camus.

Fans had assumed that VanderMeer was done with the series after the third book in the trilogy. But I was surprised and intrigued that a fourth book was coming, some six years after the last volume appeared: Absolution.

Having listened to the audiobook narrated by Bronson Pinchot (yes, him!), I can say that Absolution was a worthy addition — perhaps the best in the series — to the Area X universe. The book works well in audio format and Pinchot in particular was an inspired choice.

Structure

First, let’s put the big question to rest: the book doesn’t do anything to resolve the mystery of Area X — no key for unlocking, uniting, deciphering, or conquering. If readers wanted VanderMeer to make his universe smaller, I think he’s bound by his artistic project to refuse to cater to that impulse. To button it up with a unifying thread would have done harm to the gem mined from VanderMeer’s imagination. The Area X phenomenon is vaster than anyone could’ve ever understood; its force will never be contained. It will always reverberate, menace, and shimmer.

Absolution does enrich the mythology and suggest the scale of VanderMeer’s imagination, doing so through three novelettes: “Dead Town,” “The False Daughter,” and “The First and the Last.” The first story provides backstory explaining why biologists and researchers were unprepared for the initial study of Area X. The second story fills in the character of Old Jim as seen during Acceptance. The third story fills in the character of Lowry as seen in Authority.

Content

The first story, “Dead Town,” is the weakest of the three, but it may be intentionally so. It functions less as a new addition to the saga than as a recap flashback — the kind a prestige drama deploys at the top of its episodes to reorient viewers.

It’s been something like six years since the original trilogy ended; this story serves to remind readers what a Southern Reach story is like. At first it’s scientific, then it’s uncanny, then it’s frightening, and then it’s psychological. It’s not a gentle register. After arcs of research and cataloging and nature, the life-gobbling will of life is recapitulated: deformed rabbits eat crabs vapidly as a titanic alligator stalks the swamp.

Perhaps this tale’s greatest utility is to introduce “Dead Town” as a setting within Area X. By having something remain constant between the vignettes, we’re able to recognize elements of the place or use the locations’ decay over time to get a bit of a model for what Area X is doing to the original Earth under (or within?) it. As the lighthouse was an orienting point in the ungraspable, Dead Town is the last step from our world into Area X before the shimmer or barrier emerges.

“The False Daughter” is where the book finds its footing. The Southern Reach administration dispatches a rational observer — someone whose mandate is to measure, categorize, and report. The conceit, as always, is control. And as always, Area X refuses it; it mocks it. Paranoia accumulates; agendas conflict; time distorts in ways that resist comprehension. No matter how prepared or ostensibly objective the observer, they are outmatched. Control ultimately succumbs, reinforcing what the original trilogy made plain: Area X will not be administered.

Then finally there is “The First and the Last,” and this is where the book earns its place in the canon. Some people hate this story, and I get it. Lowry is a bad guy from Authority. The story also contains more uses of the word “fuck” than is even believable. I loved this one the most because it was the most relatable: encountering Area X, the only sane response is gibbering, drooling insanity. But with enough ego and a backpack full of drugs, you might just make it through. That’s what Lowry’s survival suggests — he was, after all, the only one to make it out of the first expedition.

In Defense of “The First and the Last”

OK, let’s talk about fuck and fucking.

In the Area X universe, most characters have a weird, flat, psychopathic or neurodivergent (or both) narration. Oddly, they maintain this voice while being faced with phenomena whose only reasonable response is: “Holy fucking shit.” The fact that three books went by without someone going “I was scared out of my wits and ruined my pants” is weird. It seems like everyone who enters the Southern Reach checks their emotional core, their humanity, at the door. Lowry does not. He curses; he pines…no, actually, he doesn’t pine, he wants to fuck; he swears; he’s actually a legible human in this tale. He’s not a nice human, but in a series where humanity gets redefined at the molecular level, it was great to have someone actually take my experience as a starting point.

Having survived a time-space rift tunnel where he popped out on the other side of a not-really-Earth but on Earth, Lowry took as many drugs as possible. You can tell when he’s on drugs by when his cursing comes back. And therefore, at the opening of this story, we know Lowry has taken every pill he could find. So with each “fuck” he’s ratcheting up how scared he is. What a relief! In the expeditions we learned about in the trilogy, we know the participants were drugged, sedated, transferred blindfolded, and under hypnotic suggestion to keep calm. The anti-case of all that is the scared, gibbering, sobbing, cursing Lowry.

And while Lowry is a shitstain of a human, his motivations are relatable: greed, power, getting dirt on his superiors, and ego. He’s a handsome jock with a very high opinion of himself. He even relates the size and majesty of his penis as further testament to his unassailable ego. This gives him the conviction that “Area X won’t get the better of him.” And then Area X starts to wear him down, starts to unwind his conditioning, starts to erode the buffer of drugs he takes to not simply lose it. We needed such a, well, dick in order to feel the breadth of how Area X picks people’s sanity apart.

Praise for Pinchot

If you’re deciding between page and audio: choose audio. Pinchot’s performance in “The First and the Last” alone is worth it. His opening narration is a firehose stream of the word fuck, punctuated by bare sentences of primal rage and fear. Consider what that demands as an artistic challenge: say the word fuck scores of times with artistry, each one different, with the purpose of revealing the teaspoon-size bits of terror that a human would face on discovering oneself alive on the far side of Area X’s shimmer.

Pinchot’s gift lies in voicing characters who are simultaneously understandable and repellent — and he has experience. Recall Elliot, the character he created in Tony Scott’s True Romance: a Hollywood suck-up who stumbles into the margins of a massive drug deal and then turns state’s evidence in the most climber-ish, garish fashion possible. It’s Pinchot’s “Serge” from Beverly Hills Cop hopped up on looksmaxxing influence videos. It’s this odd ability to inhabit the loathsome or daft that let him nail the artistic assignment of voicing Lowry having a panic attack.

My hat is off to Pinchot as an actor who has had to contend with — and continues to contend with — the long shadow of a much-beloved, family-friendly sitcom character from the 1980s. I won’t name the character and turn his present work into a nostalgia pretext. I’m sure Pinchot had to break through casting director’s prejudices and I see he’s kept working across the decades — especially in voice. I think all that “just doing the craft” work has paid off in this performance. He’s able to voice thoughtful women, crusty men, and sociopathic assholes equally well in a tight, relatable package. Hats off!

Conclusion

All told, Absolution is a ripping set of yarns that enriches the mythology of Area X without over-explaining it. It gives welcome history to the Southern Reach and the power-obsessed bureaucrats who run it — and the cabal they formed with occult-obsessed “researchers.” I did hope for some answers — but maybe not too many. VanderMeer delivers exactly that calibration: enough new legible data to feel the vague hope that Area X might become intelligible and enough cosmic horror to be quite sure that you can’t even understand the scale of your non-comprehension.

• Next: Fall of Hyperion