Reading a fantasy novel is like waking up, unbidden, in the middle of a foreign country. You don’t recognize your surroundings, the flora, the fauna. People are using, as Steve Martin said about the French, different words for everything. You don’t know who the president is; you don’t even know if the country you’re in has a president. And yet there’s much that’s familiar about the place. You see people doing the same kinds of things people do everywhere. Two kids fighting over a bicycle. A man trying to flirt with a woman who doesn’t even know he’s there. Maybe a police car moving through the street, and people suddenly acting calmer. When we travel, we see not just what sets us apart, but also what brings us together.
Most fantasy novels use the idea that the fantastical world within the pages is connected to our world in some way, but few writers work those connections harder than Jeff VanderMeer, an award-winning fabulist with a distinctly literary sensibility whose forays into plot and style might begin as fantasy but end in a place that makes genre labels blanch. He is perhaps best known for the city he invented in which three of his books—City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword and now Finch—take place: Ambergris, a coastal town of fabulous wealth and churning poverty, cutthroat politics, frequent uprisings and the near-constant reek of fungus. It’s a postcolonial place, always dying and being reborn, new forms rising messily and incompletely from the piled ruins of the old.
The Details
VanderMeer matches his surreal, oddly relevant material with a distinct writing style that has changed dramatically and impressively from book to book. Shriek: An Afterword—one of the most underappreciated books in recent memory—is complex and baroque, gifted with not one, but two unreliable narrators, squabbling siblings who argue with each other on the page, often sentence for sentence, even as they try to relate what happened to them and their city. It draws as much from Nabokov, Proust and the modern-day memoir as it does from fantasy novels, and its technical sophistication is matched by emotional heft. The setting may be bizarre, but the love and animosity between the siblings is something anyone with a family can relate to.
Finch is set a hundred years after Shriek, and picks up more or less where Shriek left off. But where Shriek is sprawling and baroque, Finch is sharp and spare: Its touchstones are hard-boiled crime thrillers and existential fiction (which are close cousins anyway), but also the international section of today’s newspaper. The book is first and foremost a detective story, as its titular character, John Finch, is trying to solve a double murder. But Finch’s investigation takes him both into the heart of the city’s politics—Ambergris, or what’s left of it, has been conquered by an occupying power that maintains a strict yet shaky control of the place—and into the past, both the city’s and his own. As the plot grows denser and weirder, it also becomes deeply recognizable and startlingly timely.
On a certain level, Finch may be the first good American novel written about the second war in Iraq. But it’s also about Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, any unstable place in our world, any failed state, where the people who live there can still remember what it was like when things were better: when the water and the electricity used to work, and the buildings would be rebuilt if they collapsed, and people weren’t so scared all the time. How do people get out from under that psychological weight? How can an entire society do it? How can it move into the future without trying to move back into the past?
VanderMeer meets these questions head-on, and the result is a dark, disturbing, often moving book, but also one that, you know, matters. Finch, however, is also a wonderful introduction to Ambergris and the books VanderMeer has written that reflect our own world so uncannily. Read Finch, and then Shriek, and then outward—or should I say downward?—into VanderMeer’s other works, and thus get to know an author who has been quietly and steadily building one of the more interesting careers in the publishing world today.
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