Book review: Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
Vaguely post-apocolyptic events, sci-fi lite and adventure all tick boxes for me, so there wasn’t much about Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation I didn’t expect to like. Plus, it’s the first of a trilogy – I love trilogies!
The summary please, Goodreads:
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.
This is the twelfth expedition.
Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
Sounds good right? WRONG.
This is nothing more than a poor (wo)man’s Oryx and Crake (a truly excellent book). Vandermeer’s style is stark and clinical and the whole time I was reading this I was having book déjà vu.
I figured out that Annihilation reminded me of Ann Patchett’s writing*, but Patchett does it better. Being clinical doesn’t mean characters need to be one dimensional, and I felt like all those in Annihilation were. No one was given a first name (they go by their job title), and, while the narrator is given a back story, it doesn’t make her any more likeable.
My other main gripe was the lack of explanation, or story conclusion if you will. Authors can throw in all the spooky weirdness they want, but some sort of reveal/explanation needs to be provided or the reader is left frustrated. A trilogy is not an excuse either. You need to give readers something per book or else they shouldn’t be split. No way I'm reading the second or third book after this one, so I have no idea WTF I was supposed to get from Annihilation’s bizarre lack of a conclusion.
To summarise – this would go into the list of books I’d actively advise friends against reading. The pros are that it was short and was a library book.
*Especially State of Wonder, which also has a vaguely similar theme to Annihilation. The other book was Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, again for the similar-ish theme but also for the hard to like protagonist.
