Acceptance
Jeff VanderMeer
A not entirely satisfying resolution
Acceptance, the third novel in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, was exactly what I was looking for. But somehow it was, at the same time, unsatisfying. The strongest novel in the series is the first, Annihilation, which is mostly about the woman known to us only as "the biologist." It was terrifying in the sense described in the Stephen King quote
Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...
What makes this kind of terror effective, obviously, is that you never quite know what's going on, or what there is to fear. In Annihilation, VanderMeer absolutely nailed that. Authority lifted the curtain a little. The central character is an intelligence operative called Control (also John Rodriguez). Control knows a bit more about what's happening at the Southern Reach and in Area X than the biologist did. Still, he's enough in the dark that the terror is still compelling. By the time I finished Authority, I was ready to get some answers.
When I say Acceptance was exactly what I was looking for, that's what I mean. The problem is that (1) If you give answers, you necessarily dispel much of the terror, and (2) the answers were, in some respects, kind of dumb. (I'll not spoil by explaining what I mean by that.)
In the course of Annihilation and Authority, we got to know several characters. The principal two were the biologist and Control. But in addition there were the Lighthouse Keeper, the former Director of the Southern Reach, and a few others. Acceptance is told from several points of view, but the most important are these four. In the course of Acceptance we find out the history of Area X and the Southern Reach from those four points of view.
I'm definitely glad I read it. After Annihilation and Authority I needed to know more, and Acceptance gave me it. But it is simply not as good a novel as the first two. There is now a fourth novel, the prequel Absolution, which I will read.