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Synopsis:
The bone-chilling, hair-raising second installment of the Southern Reach Trilogy
After thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X—a seemingly malevolent landscape surrounded by an invisible border and mysteriously wiped clean of all signs of civilization—has been a series of expeditions overseen by a government agency so secret it has almost been forgotten: the Southern Reach. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.
John Rodríguez (aka “Control”) is the Southern Reach’s newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a series of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. But with each discovery he must confront disturbing truths about himself and the agency he’s pledged to serve.
In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Area X’s most disturbing questions are answered . . . but the answers are far from reassuring.
Review:
I have read Annihilation at least four times, each time with more interest and more understanding to what happened to the twelfth expedition in Area X, a piece of land that has become uninhabitable and devours every team of explorers that enters. Every time I have read Annihilation, I have started Authority, but I have never been able to get through the whole thing. Authority is less about exploring Area X as it is about office politics that shows how poorly the government is running the expeditions to Area X. The novel starts with a new director, John Rodriguez, nicknamed Control, coming to the job on the first day. Two problems face him as soon as he enters the building. The first is the return of the Biologist, the main character in Annihilation, who is found studying an empty lot and brought back for debriefing into the Southern Reach building. The second is the legacy of the director he is replacing, whom is the Psychiatrist in Annihilation, and leader of the twelfth expedition, and who disappeared into Area X. The Biologist might have clues to the mysteries of what happens inside of Area X and what happened to the rest of her expedition, but she is not talking. The whole of this novel is Control trying to figure out what happened to the Psychiatrist, what the Biologist knows, and why all of his coworkers seem to be conspiring against him.
VanderMeer takes a strange turn in this sequel to Annihilation, moving away from an environmental horror to a novel of office politics, and there are a few moments in this novel where the story is so slow that it is very easy to give up on this novel. I have given up the first three times I tried to read it. The problems that Control inherits and tries to solve grow deeper and deeper into a mystery that it is easier to just not care and stop reading. The truth is that I did not really know if I was going to get through it this time, or if it was going to be worth the effort. Jeff VanderMeer seems to enjoy these office stories (which he returns to in Hummingbird Salamander), but Authority does not have the same intimacy as Annihilation. In the end, I am glad to get to the end, and I do wonder what is going to happen next. This seems like the second in many trilogies, the one that is setting up for a fantastic ending.
Annihilation also stands alone as a great short novel. You do not have to read on in the trilogy if you do not want to, but Authority is a parallel as well as a continuation. The Biologist and Control are both in the same situation in their respective novels. The confusing bureaucracy of the Southern Reach is just as bad as the landscape of Area X. The people who are supposed to be leading the situation are untrustworthy and actually doing their best to manipulate them both into doing things they normally would not do. There are secret areas in both Area X and in the building of the Southern Reach, and both main characters are able to learn more than they are supposed to know. They both end up on the run because they know too much. In the end, the novels are similar to each other, and there are things in both of them that really deepen the mystery of what might happen in the third volume.
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