Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

Publisher - 4th Estate

Published - Out Now

Price - £9.99 paperback £3.99 Kindle ebook

It is winter in Area X. A new team embarks across the border, on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind. As they press deeper into the unknown – navigating new terrain and new challenges – the threat to the outside world becomes only more daunting. In this last instalment of the Southern Reach Trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may have been solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound – or terrifying.

Warning - there will be spoiler from the prior books!

Usually we expect in fiction a resolution. The villain will be defeated; order restored and everything neatly wrapped up (unless it is made by Netflix). We humans love our patterns and expect tidy simple solutions. Weirdly this is not what we get in our own day to day lives which very seldom run like clockwork. In Jeff VanderMeer’s fascinating Acceptance we return to the mysterious Area X and what is left of the Southern Reach Authority for what was in 2014 expected to be the final time. It’s a tale that shows us the beginning of Area A, reveals more to the characters we have met along the way and while we get more answers we tantalisingly never get a full resolution.

To recap Area X is a mutinous zone that appeared on the American coast many decades ago. There is only one way in and those who have ventured have either not returned or came back completely different to how they were before (and often then died). The Southern Reach authority is a secret government agency investigating Area X and had been sending expeditions countless times to try and solve the mystery. The last expedition went wrong and key to that are The Biologist a unique woman who was fascinated by the area and who has been cloned with a duplicate nicknamed Ghost Bird. The latest Director of the Agency a man who likes to be called Control found he was not really in charge and instead being manipulated by the main power behind the Agency - Central. Together these two characters escaped Area X swallowing up the Agency building and have found a back door to it. What awaits them no one knows.

This is a novel that gives lots of answers but at the same time offers no best resolutions. We go back to the period just before Area X materialised on the coast and meet two key characters - The Lighthouse-keeper Saul - who we know is destined to become a strange hybrid creature known as The Crawler that writes an endless message of strange eerie words and also Gloria a young child who we know is destined to become The Director who recruits The Biologist and dies in the expedition we met in Annihilation; and whose mysterious secrets are Control’s main mission to solve. In some ways these scenes are quite traditional weird horror. The coast is being investigated by a shadowy paranormal science agency - very mid-twentieth century and it calls to mind cosmic horror of small American towns on the coast and mysterious events. We find mysterious islands that suggest something happened before Area X and there is throughout these sections a sense of ominous doom. When Saul gets infected by a strange presence we know this place is going to become Area X and watching a kind man being slowly transformed and haunted by something we know he will never understand until it is too late. It’s very effectively delivered all the way to the end that we know will take us back to where this trilogy started.

The second arm of the book explores Gloria who we tend to still think despite of Control as The Director just prior to her own expedition and death. She is a woman haunted and is drawn to Area X where her mother vanished. These scenes in some way call back to the conspiracy theory world we saw in Authority - agencies spying on their own, everyone having secret agendas and Gloria here actually becomes a very sympathetic character - we now understand her motives and that she was trying to do the best she thought possible: we also know her mission is going to fail and actually bring about the Agency’s destruction. It fleshes out the period Control arrives at and brings up new connections to characters we saw before and fleshed out the tension at the heart of the book - Central - an game y that wants to manage and explain everything which is up against Area X which really is so far beyond human understanding it’s like an any comprehending a nuclear reactor. Again there is a sense of doom here that things are out of control and hurtling towards destruction.

The last arc which is intermingled with the others follows Ghost Bird and Control making their own expedition to Area X following the events in Authority. Here VanderMeer agains makes us feel the weird beating of this place where humans do not exist and feels like a fully alive ecosystem of unknown origin that is very aware of those in it. This time the reader knows that Area X is sentient in some way and also that reality here is malleable. We start to get some answers - where is Area X and linking to Saul’s sections what may have caused this. We also get glimpses of what happened to the Biologist that Ghost Bird was created from and that reminds us this part of the world has its own rules and can change anything it wants. It’s unsettling and we see once again Control is perhaps the person least likely to cope with such a place. A place which to our minds is chaotic and unordered causes him the most stress and fracturing. Instead it is Ghost Bird that see to relax here and see the bigger picture. Perhaps landing finally to something changing but no one is clear on what’s next.

In many ways these are all atmosphere VanderMeer manages to make the reader feel a world that is constantly alien without making it too different - an uncanny valley on a huge scale. All the human characters can’t really get their heads around it just glimpses or theories and often their own desires get in the way of that. It can be scary, wondrous and very weird all at the same time. For me this is a reminder that no matter how advanced we are we still do not fully understand nature and ecosystems which makes our own efforts very likely to fail and make things work. Ten years later there feels a warning here of climate change reminding us that while we also will change the planet ultimately in the long term we just sow our own undoing and the Earth will grind on and if necessarily find ways around and through humanity. There is a glimpse of hope but in many ways this tale is a tragedy where the characters all learn they can’t change it all and instead just need to embrace the world and hope that gives them the insight needed. If you’re looking for neat answers and the chaos removed this book is not likely going to work for you but for me this works to make a reader feel just a little how small we humans can be against a universe we don’t yet understand fully.

Acceptance lives up to its title. It really delivers a complex and elegant ending looking back to the preceding books and helping us see the situation and characters in a new light. We know a bit more of how we got to this point and potentially where we may be heading toward but that’s all a signpost. I really enjoyed it and it’s been a unique reading experience I strongly recommend.

Now there is a new book in the series to come so join me soon to talk about Absolution!