The Illusions of Control
Jeff VanderMeer’s extraordinary Southern Reach Trilogy.
Illustration by Emily Carroll
What is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy? VanderMeer is a three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, but these books aren’t exactly fantasy. They paint a bitter picture of a future harsh to humanity, but offer little in the way of Hunger Games-esque dystopian thrills and nothing at all in the way of a Katniss Everdeen-esque hero. The books have a mystery at their center, but it’s an apocalyptic mystery starring detectives who either don’t have the wherewithal to solve it, aren’t any good at solving it, or don’t care about solving it. Or all three. Because the concept of a “sleuth,” the one who pieces together the available data into a complete picture, is one form of human identity. And in the Southern Reach Trilogy’s naturalist Armageddon, your identity is the bad guy.
This year, FSG has published all three volumes of the trilogy in handsome, trippy little paperback editions, the better for binge-reading. With the conclusion, Acceptance, out this month, it’s worth looking at all three extraordinary books to see what makes VanderMeer’s trilogy such a frustrating triumph. And I mean that as a straight-up descriptor, not as a contradiction—Southern Reach is a triumph in many ways because it is frustrating.
There’s really no way to give the Southern Reach pitch without sounding high, so I won’t try. Basically, OK, there’s this area of the United States—possibly Florida, but it’s unclear—called “the forgotten coast,” and about 30 years ago it was mysteriously taken over by an environment called “Area X,” described by many who visit it as “a pristine wilderness.” Area X retains a few vestiges of the human society that existed there before this transformative event—some bits and bobs of houses, and more importantly, a pretty pivotal lighthouse—but mostly it’s a teeming, pollution-free natural habitat. “In the forest near base camp one might encounter black bears or coyotes,” VanderMeer writes. “You might hear a sudden croak and watch a night heron startle from a tree branch and, distracted, step on a poisonous snake, of which there were at least six varieties.” The unknown force that created Area X also surrounded it with a border that seems to disintegrate any object or creature that touches it.
The border does have one opening that allows humans to enter and (less frequently) leave. It is at this portal that a mysterious government institution called “Central” has established Southern Reach, the base from which a variety of scientists and other operatives attempt to study Area X. These attempts are feeble at best and disastrous at worst: Of the numerous expeditions dispatched into Area X, most have ended in the violent deaths or disappearances of all involved. Most of those who make it back return sporting a blank affect, their crucial journals left behind. Those returnees describe their Area X experiences with bland generalities before quickly dying of cancer.
At the outset of Annihilation, the first book of the trilogy, a woman who lost her husband in the aftermath of the previous expedition (officially called the “eleventh” one, but the numbering quickly turns out to be fudged by the higher-ups) successfully gets past intense screening from Central to join the “twelfth” one. What’s this woman’s name? We don’t know—the Southern Reach wants the members of the all-female expedition to know each other only by their functions: the psychologist, the surveyor, the anthropologist, and our hero the biologist. The idea is that the less they know about each other, they less likely they are to turn on each other under the influence of Area X. So it is through this deliberately alienating veil of anonymity that we follow their increasingly transformative odyssey to Area X’s foremost mystery: a cylindrical structure, mostly buried underground, with a spiral staircase leading down to a whole host of terrifying encounters.
But VanderMeer’s got an agenda with the lack of names as well, as quickly becomes clear at the outset of Book 2, Authority. Authority follows the frustrated attempts (and by the way, a great Snicket-y alternate title for this trilogy would be A Series of Frustrated Attempts) of a new interim director to get the Southern Reach in order, following the disappearance of its previous director on the twelfth expedition. So what was the previous director’s name? For a long time we don’t get one. She was “the psychologist” who accompanied “the biologist” on the previous expedition, and eventually we learn that her name is Cynthia … except it’s also not.
OK then, what about the interim director, what about our new hero, what’s his name? Well, we get it eventually, but mostly he’s referred to as “Control.” Now on one level this is a too on-the-nose irony for a character who quickly proves to have no control over anything, but it’s much more interesting as an homage—and a response—to an identically named character in John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
In le Carré’s novel, Control is the former head of British Intelligence who first uncovers corruption in his organization. His successor, George Smiley, has to draw on materials left behind by Control to root it out. Authority’s Control takes on Smiley’s role as successor-sleuth, but unlike Smiley, he’s dealing with a mystery that may have no solution. Going through his predecessor’s notes, he despairs: “How Control hated his own imagination, wished it would just shrivel up and turn brown and fall out of him. He was more willing to believe that something was staring out at him from the notes, something hidden looking at him, than to accept that the director had been pursuing dead ends. And yet he couldn’t see it. He could only see her searching, and wonder why she was searching so hard.” Human affairs, even labyrinthine espionage-based ones, may be ultimately comprehensible, VanderMeer suggests. But what’s happening in Area X is far beyond human—utterly outside the reference points humans use to perceive the world.
