I’m a fan of Jeff VanderMeer, having enjoyed and recommended both the Southern Reach Trilogy and Bourne. However, I just couldn’t grab hold of this one. A short novel, but a weird one, even at VanderMeer standards. It felt like it needed something to tether the various ideas together.

Until now my experience with Jeff Vandermeer has been restricted to reading Borne. I liked Borne so much, loved it even. So when I saw a new book of his come up on Netgalley, I requested it right away without even reading the plot…or finding out that it is, in fact, a sequel of sorts to Borne. That should have just been the added bonus, but thing is my memory being what it is and my reading being as prolific as it is, I didn’t remember the minute details of Borne’s plot, such as dead astronauts mentioned in the book. I reread my review of Borne and it did jog the memory to the general idea of it, but nothing about dead astronauts. Well, apparently they got their own book. Although to be fair it shared a lot of page space with other side plots, some tangential, some featuring a prominent Borne universe character. And mind you, Borne universe is a place so wildly imaginative, so strikingly original in its mixture of biology and technology that it is well worth another visit. But this wasn’t the visit one might have planned. In fact, not quite sure what this was. Initially I remember having some trepidations about reading the New Weird Vandermeer is so famous for, but Borne made the genre so accessible and enjoyable with Borne, I figured it was safe to continue. But no, he was just saving up the real weirdness for this book. This is so very weird, so stylishly stylistically bizarre…that, frankly, it’s kinda offputting. And that’s weird in itself, because Vandermeer is such a terrific writer, his language is a thing of beauty, a genuine pleasure to read. But one cannot survive on language alone and plotting here is all over the place, it does technically maintain some semblance of linearity and rationality, but it’s so overdone and convoluted and needlessly longwinded, it’s difficult to get into or (conventionally, at least) enjoy. After a while you start realizing the narrative tricks Vandermeer utilizes and he doesn’t just use, he abuses them all. The repetitions, the juxtapositions (like something right out of the Tale of Two Cities), the repetitions…again. This thing…where he alternates a set of the same sentences for pages (seriously, pages) on end, sometimes with minute variations, sometimes without, only to highlight the punchline at the end. Such as…what the f*ck am I reading? what is this? Is it suppose to be like that? (this goes on for 3 pages) to be followed up with…Yes. Because Weird is the name of the game. Vandermeer literally uses the same trick 3 times within the same lengthy chapter of the book. So yeah, after a while, it just gets tiresome. And the entire reading experience almost never coheres into something engaging and the direct connect with Borne doesn’t even show up until the very end. It’s all these gorgeous linguistic trees that never add up to a forest. And outside of that, the main thing the book had going is how quickly it read, maybe 215 minutes or so. But the overall experience is…bewilderment, mainly, at the fact that this is how what follows the lovely Borne and this comes from the same author and this is probably totally gonna blow someone’s socks off. Different strokes and all that. But for me, it was a major disappointment and a waste of time, despite all the gorgeous imagery. Thanks Netgalley.