So I recently finished reading the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, and I have a lot of thoughts on it. I’ll do my best to avoid major spoilers, but I’ll probably end up spoiling some of it, so I’ll mark those parts as best as I can.
Overall, I can say that it started out strong, but ended rather mixed. I really enjoyed the first book, with its creeping sense of escalating paranoia that kept me glued to the page right to the end. This book won the Nebula Award in 2014, which was how I discovered it, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a Hugo/Nebula award-winning book from the past decade that I actually enjoyed.
The second book had some good moments, but overall I felt that it suffered from second-book slump. Which is understandable. It did a decent job of setting things up for the third book, but it lacked that sense of creeping, paranoid danger that really drew me into the first book—or rather, the danger was dialed down to the point where it just felt creepy instead of gripping or suspenseful.
Also, even though it explained a lot more than the first book, I don’t feel like it explained enough. This is probably because the book is clearly written to be deconstructed using the kind of literary theories that English majors spend most of their time in college learning about. There’s a lot of vague symbolism and recurring motifs, which makes for some very obtuse reading. The quality of the writing somewhat makes up for that, but if the first book hadn’t captured my imagination so much, it definitely would have felt like a slog.
And then, the third book. In some ways, I really enjoyed it. In other ways, I feel like it suffered from all the same problems as the second book, with a frustrating number of loose ends. But if any more loose ends had been tied up, it probably would have felt a bit like the ending to Lost. Which makes me wonder if behind all the pretty writing and other literary tricks, there isn’t a whole lot of substance behind any of the books in this trilogy.
But the thing that really got to me was the trope where a character is LGBTQ for no other discernible reason than to make him sympathetic—as if all LGBTQ people are sympathetic or virtuous by default. [Minor Spoiler] This particular character is also the only Christian in the trilogy, which makes me wonder if VanderMeer believes that being a Christian automatically makes you villanous by default—especially given the eerie strangling fruit sermon in the first book. [/Minor Spoiler] I see this trope fairly often, especially in modern science fiction and fantasy, and it’s super frustrating because of how it ties in with all of the other grooming and gaslighting that comes along with the religion of woke. At least if it was preachy, there would be some sort of message to ponder and digest, hamfisted as it might be.
But the saddest thing is that I can’t tell if VanderMeer fell back on this trope because he actually believes it, or because he knows that his audience (which seems to be rich, woke English majors drowning in student debt) requires it. In other words, is he merely responding to his audience, or is he leading them? Probably some of both, with a little bit of “I’m a straight, white male, so I have to prove that I’m not a white supremacist” thrown in.
Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot about this trilogy that I liked, and literary deconstruction aside, it’s clear that VanderMeer can write. But after finishing the trilogy, I don’t think I’ll be picking this one up. Unfortunately.
