“We were passing through a door of ghosts into a place of spirits.”
After Annihilation (2014) threw the reader into the mysterious Area X, to thrash around without any reference points while physics and biology ran amok, Authority (2014) pulled back to observe the enigma from secondhand sources within the safety of the Southern Reach headquarters. Both books were limited in scope (but not ambition), unfolding in confined locations, following mostly conventional timelines, and remaining confined to single points of view.
By contrast, Acceptance, the final volume in the trilogy, writhes against these constraints. It continues the converging narratives of the first two novels’ protagonists, Ghost Bird and Control, but restlessly bounces between their journey into Area X and two other strands of backstory. One of these concerns the Lighthouse Keeper, Saul Evans—a cryptic figure who appeared in previous installments in a timeworn photograph. It chronicles his interactions with the occult group known as the Séance & Science Brigade and the nightmarish shift in his conception of reality when he is pricked by a thorn. One of the characters who fills out the Lighthouse Keeper’s story is a young neighbor named Gloria, who grows up to become the director of the Southern Reach. Hers is the third weave of the braid, exploring the strange allure of the unknown as she plans a clandestine excursion into Area X with a fellow staff member.
Like the planetary intelligence in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961), Area X is as much a character as any of the humans fleshing out the Southern Reach trilogy. And yet also like the disturbing entity at the center of that story, the sentient swath of coastline that dominates these stories is ultimately unfathomable and incomprehensible. As Jeff VanderMeer jumps between timelines and perspectives, often circling back to examine events from a new angle and having characters question their subjective memories and perceptions, the texture of this final volume comes to mirror the uneasy, perplexing experience of its characters.
It doesn’t come to a tidy narrative conclusion, but then it was never going to, and the broader canvas of this third novel leaves the reader with some interesting bits of gristle to chew on. If Annihilation concerns the finitude of humanity’s collective knowledge, the anxiety such limits induce, and the variety of approaches taken to grasp beyond those boundaries, Acceptance brings that theme full circle as our characters conclude that trying to parse rationally the existence of Area X—or maybe existence itself—is ultimately a futile endeavor. At the very least, language is inadequate for the task.
Along with Authority, Acceptance was written in haste to capitalize on the success of Annihilation, and it does occasionally feel like it was produced at the end of a marathon effort. It’s a little bit repetitious, a little bit sluggish, a little bit perfunctory. I enjoyed it, but I’ll stick to my guns—all three books should have whittled down a little and made component parts of a single novel.