Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer Review

A patch of land is taken over by an alien presence - and is spreading. This is Area X. Expeditions have ventured inside its borders and few have returned, with the ones that have come back having been profoundly changed. And yet, after years of venturing into it, little is known about what is inside Area X. Now, the 12th expedition sets out to uncover the mysteries of the land and maybe even make first contact - that is if whatever’s taken over Area X is interested in making contact…

Alex Garland’s movie adaptation of Annihilation is one of my favourite films of the last 20 years but Jeff VanderMeer’s original novel is quite different from the movie - and I’m glad, and can understand why, Garland (a fine novelist in his own right) made so many changes when he came to make the movie. Because, although there’s a lotta interesting stuff here, VanderMeer is neither a good writer or storyteller and his novel is actually pretty bad.

Which is a shame as there are so many cool ideas here: Area X itself, the lighthouse, the inverted tower going into the ground rather than above it, the ruined village, the fact that nobody can seem to remember going to Area X and, once inside it, paranoia and all sorts of other psychological issues start plaguing the members of the expedition. There’s a disembodied wailing coming from the marshes, there’s legible but nonsensical writing appearing on the walls - that seems to be alive! The animals and crew members are all suspect, and the secrets in the spooky lighthouse are exciting.

It just never gels together smoothly as a great narrative. With most books, your brain tends to sync with the writer’s so that the book becomes easier to read over a certain amount of time - the better the writer, the sooner this happens. It never really happens with VanderMeer - the prose is always a struggle to read, and if you stop paying attention in the slightest then you’ll completely lose the thread of a scene.

It’s actually fitting that the prose has this quality to it because it mirrors the experience of the narrator inside Area X, which casts a strange fug over her mind, memories and general thinking. It’s also heavily descriptive, overwhelmingly so at times, and, given the story involves cosmic terror, you could draw parallels with HP Lovecraft who also wrote about horrors from the stars in an almost exclusively descriptive style. But I think both of these aspects are coincidental and the clunkiness of the prose is down to VanderMeer not being much of a writer. Some of the plot reveals are handled quite well though, like the true nature of the psychologist and what lies inside the lighthouse that informs the narrator about the previous expeditions and Southern Reach, the organisation conducting these expeditions, in general.

Like the movie, there are flashbacks to the narrator’s husband who was in the previous expedition and returned to her changed, but VanderMeer uses this plot device far too often. It not only bogs down the already leaden pacing of the story but doesn’t add much to it either - he isn’t the man she married, we get it. And the other flashbacks to her previous work in the field were pointless.

It’s also not clear what VanderMeer’s shooting for here - what we’re meant to take away from the story, either from a metaphorical perspective or a narrative one, as in what happens in the story and why - and the book has that in common with the film; although the movie’s ending is at least semi-understandable whereas the novel’s ending is basically gibberish until you realise there are two more books in this series and that it might’ve been planned to be explained in either of those (I won’t be reading them to find out).

When VanderMeer does write a dialogue scene, he pulls it off surprisingly well (unlike Lovecraft whose dialogue is often used as examples of how not to write dialogue) - the scene between the narrator and the psychologist at the lighthouse was compelling. It’s just a shame there are so few moments like this and that nearly all of the book is description, description, description (which reminded me of Victorian adventure novels, which also had heaps of description and because it has the air of unexplored wilderness, back when the world wasn’t fully mapped out).

VanderMeer is a fine ideas man - the different parts that make up Annihilation are wonderfully eerie and unsettling - but it takes a gifted storyteller like Alex Garland to assemble them into a coherent, exciting and much better narrative than what VanderMeer did in this book. I highly recommend the movie but don’t expect the same brilliance from the original source material.