A "review" of Jeff VanderMeer - Acceptance

Said you took a big trip, said you moved away
Happened oh so quietly they say
— David Bowie, "Everyone Says Hi"

If I told you it was a love story, you wouldn't believe me.

English is a funny thing. We have one word for love, and we use it in multiple contexts to cover a range of similar but definitely distinct feelings. The ancient Greeks famously had multiple words for love: eros versus agape, for example: romantic love versus divine love. You do not express your love for your significant other the same way you express your love for God, or at least perhaps you shouldn't. Serious theologians probably don't endorse that sort of rapturous exaltation towards the Almighty. Philia is yet another word for a different kind of love, hence the city named Philadelphia: literally, "City of brotherly love".

Apocalypse Now parallels to The Odyssey aside, I never did well in the classics, so I cannot decide if this love story is philia, brotherly love, or storge, familial love. But it's a love story, not-so-plain and not-so-simple, and told over a number of years. The core of the mystery is largely irrelevant, which is a gobsmacker of a shift in focus when we started this whole shebang with a tower that grew down. Whereas the first book was a mystery experienced by the biologist, and the second book a condemnation of the bureaucratic mediocrity of Control's complete lack thereof, the third book is an altogether new beast and one that is hard to describe.

Said you sailed a big ship, said you sailed away
Didn't know the right thing to say

If the first book is an account of someone who will distance herself from any and all obstacles in her singular purpose and her drive, not always alone but always and forever independent, then this book is the collection of multiple interwoven people and perspectives as their stories combine. As Thomas Pynchon puts it, "[T]his is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into—". I'd be lying if I told you Acceptance answers your every lingering question. Area X is not that simple, and I don't believe it will ever divulge its secrets. Maybe that was never the point.

Whereas Annihilation and Authority were single-source narratives, Acceptance does away with that structure and instead tells each chapter from a single person's point of view. This is a popular writing style nowadays, and I blame George R. R. Martin. My seething anger at the relative obscurity of Hugh Howey's amazing Wool (a nearly perfect book) notwithstanding, when the "one narrator per chapter" formula works, it works well. Acceptance is a collection of individual characters' experiences, both before and after, well, you know. I hesitate to go into detail here, because the unreal enigma that surrounds and pervades Area X is broken into two major epochs that define three distinct (if not amorphous) time periods: the before, the during, and the, y'know... after.

Should've took a picture, something I could keep
Buy a little frame, something cheap

I wonder sometimes what it would be like to live through something like the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Matter of Time", in which a man from the future time travels to the past to observe the crew of the starship Enterprise for what he states will be a historical event on a planet, and I don't need to look this up, called "Penthara IV". If you knew ahead of time that shit was going to get real, what would you do differently? Jeff VanderMeer puts a very humanizing touch on these moments in Acceptance, writing not just scenes set in the past, but scenes where characters reflect upon their pasts, too. And those moments are earnest and real: no one says "I'm going to be a hero today", they just go about their lives like normal people, feeling annoyed or irritated by minor inconveniences, or thinking fondly throughout the day of their significant others. These are perfectly average people racing headlong into perfectly abnormal circumstances and they have no clue what is about to transpire. Acceptance is simultaneously the documentation of their banal experiences pre-Y'Know and the in situ accounts of their actions post-Y'Know and it's jarring and intimate and wonderful. Each page is a person's thought process wherein you the omniscient reader can say, "If. You. Only. Knew...."

I'd love to get a letter
Like to know what's what

If I told you it was a love story, you wouldn't believe me.

I wouldn't believe me either. "Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms" is definitely NOT the kind of thing to write onto a heart-shaped notecard and tuck into a box of chocolates to give your sweetie on Valentine's Day. But I've already established that we're not dealing with eros here and there are many ways to say I love you. Acceptance is a meditation on that kind of love and loss, the kind that's felt at arm's length, or over the span of miles, or of decades.

The book is not so much a story of explanation, or exploration, or even of redemption, than it is of coming to terms with the unalterable events of the past, both of the factual historical events that a newspaper would publish, and of your words and deeds mired in the ignorance of your youth. Everyone handles regret differently.

Some people tenaciously hold onto the belief that it could have been changed and concretely focus on a moment, or a conversation, or an abstract idea like terroir that reinforces in their own mind the notion that all could have been or still be made right.

Others simply persist, doggedly moving forward onto their next goal. Or else they may stay rooted in one place awaiting a sign or a revelation.

And others simply breeze about, figuratively above it all, gaining a bird's eye view, remembering their mistakes, reflecting upon them and finally, formally, making peace with themselves.

The biologist dismissively shares her dreams of a creature in the first pages of Annihilation and the lighthouse keeper has staggering visions of piles upon piles of field journals in Acceptance. VanderMeer bends his trilogy around on itself, forming a loose circle. Or maybe it's a spiral, its helix linking back to itself almost like a DNA molecule of relationships that line up and lock together like nucleotides: the lighthouse keeper and the kid. The S&SB. The biologist and her owl. Control and his dumbass infatuation with Ghost Bird. Area X may be the thing that they have in common, but Area X is not the thing that connects them to each other, even when time and space may break them apart. Each is one half of a whole, and that other half is irreplaceable and permanent. A half's loss of the other half is the loss of the cohesive whole, a loss that is felt forever.

I have rarely been moved by the loss of a bird more intensely than in Acceptance and as a kid I once killed a blue jay with a BB gun just because I could. Compared to that, I think Acceptance is coming in second here. Everyone forges their own path in the face of regret, either going around it, or over it, or tunneling through it and maybe, hopefully, coming out the other side. The Southern Reach trilogy is a love story, a long and weird correspondence whose final love letter is long delayed and circuitously delivered and touching and sweet.

Perhaps the real lesson to learn about regret isn't about ignoring it or letting it gnaw away at you, but about trying to use it to learn and grow and yes, to accept it for what it is. Sometimes a mystery can't be solved, sometimes there are no real heroes. Acceptance is exactly what it says it is. You can dote on the particulars of the past forever if you want and try to comprehend the why of it all. Or you can figure out what you want to do with what limited resources you have left and hurry up and start doing it.

Don't stay in a bad place
Where they don't care how you are
Everyone says hi
Everyone says hi
Everyone says hi

Final thoughts: Jeff VanderMeer can spin a compelling yarn, but only under a certain narrow construct. If he strays beyond his area of expertise, he fails. It's a razor's edge between droll minutiae inside the mind of a loathsome one-dimensional character that bores like a hand drill into your skull and lavish, detailed meditations on the microcosms of the natural world whose rich and sensual descriptions border upon the pornographic. He built a world that is weird and wonderful and scary and, above all, enticing. Area X: it's not so nice a place to visit, and you definitely don't want to live there, but you may not have a choice. This trilogy would definitely be better as a single book, which you can actually buy, but lord almighty the second act is a total drag. If you want to stop after the first story, you can still walk away satisfied. If you want to complete the circle, insomuch as one ever can inside an impossible non-Euclidean bubble that defies the laws of physics, you can proceed, with caution. Extreme caution.