Area X: The Office Edition

 

Re-reading the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy demonstrated to me that I did not get it at all the first time. Jeff VanderMeer's writing is subtle and ... I had no excuse except I did not pay attention. 

<Spoilers!> 

On the first reading, I totally missed the nature of the conflict between John Rodriguez ("Control") and Grace, the assistant director of the Southern Reach agency. 

John was hypnotized by Lowry ("The Voice") over the phone. Duh! He was unconsciously carrying out Lowry's orders throughout the book, including putting bugs in Grace's office and searching it at Lowry's orders. Not only was he an idiot for discovering it too late, but so was I for missing such a crucial detail.

Even so, I quite enjoyed "Authority" both times, perhaps because I share two things in common with John: I too had a somewhat distant mother (not as distant as Jackie Severance) and I too worked in a giant bureaucracy and failed. VanderMeer admitted that the office environment at Southern Reach and the shadowy overhanging agency "Central," which evokes the CIA but could well be FBI or NSA or the military, was based on his own soul-crushing experience of working in an office. I know that feeling very well --- the daily confusion of "what the hell am I doing here?" and "what is going on?" 

Some readers prefer the fantastical and perilous environs inside Area X in the first and third book, but I realized that John's journey within the Southern Reach in the second book parallels the biologist's journey in the first book. The labyrinth of the facility and its employees may look familiar to us but, on close inspection, are no less absurd and bizarre than within Area X. Here it is made clear that outside and above the hopeless Southern Reach hovered the Central --- an invisible and more powerful force that monitored and interfered with SR's operations and personnel. This is also a hint for Area X and the force behind or above it. 

The biologist and John form another parallel between the two books. Both characters are what the world would consider "losers" by the usual standard, constantly on the verge of being fired (or having been fired) from their jobs and unable to form stable emotional bonds with other people. At the end of both novels, the biologist and John came to some tenuous relationship with someone else (not with each other) before they are swallowed and transformed by Area X. 

Compared with Annihilation, Authority is able to sketch out several distinctive characters through slow-burn details that are somewhere between normal and crazy, culminating in the famous scene with Whitby, which is straight horror. 

In his Reddit AMA, VanderMeer admits that he writes from his unconscious a lot, which is consistent with my impression of the trilogy. He grew up in Fiji and spends a lot of time outdoors in his current home in Florida. He claims that he never uses psychoactive substances while writing, despite the trippiness of his imagination, but then admits that many elements in the SR trilogy came from a dazed state from painkillers after he had a dental surgery. That sounds about right.