Authority

There is a scene in Authority where scores of white rabbits are herded by handlers in hazmat suits towards a shifting, scintillating barrier in the middle of the wilderness. However, the moment some rabbits get through, the others emit piercing shrieks of horror and turn in abject panic to their handlers, biting and scratching in an attempt to get away from whatever lies beyond the barrier.

It is not, by far, the strangest or most haunting event in that book.

Authority is the second book in The Southern Reach trilogy. It largely documents the attempts of the protagonist, John Rodriguez – or Control as he prefers to be called in the book – to lead the organization in the wake of the events happening in the first book. This particular trilogy is a very strange beast; each book has a very different focus to it, yet they’re all connected by very strong thematic and emotional threads that make you feel like you’re just reading a big, interconnected book. It’s one of Jeff Vandermeer’s greatest achievements as a writer, I believe.

The first book, Annihilation, is a very surreal journey of its protagonist, the biologist, through the haunted wilderness of Area X, and is told in a manner that makes that believable. Descriptions of the wild, of the animals roaming through the area, the plants she comes across. It’s what someone like her would see in that place. However, Authority trades that surrealism for a different kind of weirdness: the strange, eerie quality that often occupies governmental organizations, making them feel otherworldly, belonging to a different sort of reality, and Jeff Vandermeer definitely nails that sort of feeling. It is a marriage of the stolid boredom of government bureaucracy and the unknowable quality of Area X, and it works beautifully.

Authority is also suffused with a massive amount of paranoia, with the Southern Reach being a secret organization tasked with understanding Area X, a place that seems to defy all understanding. No one is ever able to know how it came about to be, or what it purpose is, and even worse, everyone working in the organization seems to have an ulterior motive or reason that drives them, unbeknownst to their coworkers. Sedimentary layers of secrecy obscure any semblance of fact, and in the center of this, lies the disgraced spy Control, trying to make sense of it, a futile attempt to tell friend from foe. The paranoia also extends from the parallels between the boring government life and the paranormal, where the novel often posits that the weird actions of a Southern Reach employee could be due to them having done that job for so long that it’s gained an automatic, detached quality to it. Or it could be due to a paranormal contamination beyond the understanding of anyone working there. You can’t ever know.

The thing that reinforces that feeling is the complexity of the characters being presented in Authority. Vandermeer manages to imbue each of them with a unique personality that doesn’t feel rote yet remains relatable in a manner that allows the reader to create a personal baseline for their actions. Said baseline is what allows for moments that jar the reader, when characters act in a manner that veers wildly off their baseline, or in a way that indicates that what one construed as a baseline was merely a facade above a staggering descent. Control, being the protagonist, gets the lion’s share of said characterization, as the reader spends a great deal of time learning about his upbringing, early career and his thoughts and feelings about various events that peppered his life thus far. So by the end, one’s there alongside him, every step of the way along the winding road of Authority‘s mystery.

And mystery is something that Vandermeer is definitely a master of, especially when it comes to the build-up. It is easy, when given the chance to present a world of weirdness, to just go all out on that aspect, and constantly expose the audience to elements of surrealism that bombard them so regularly, just to drive home the fact that this is something different. However, this often runs the risk of having the adverse effect, with each bombardment lessening the influence of the weirdness, until it’s just not weird anymore. However, in these novels, the feelings of unease are presented subtly; they exist beneath the words, present but untold, for you to guess at if you’re looking carefully. And even when you’re looking, even if you can tell that there’s something wrong, you’re still unable to tell what the magnitude of that wrongness is. A few waves here, a bubble or two there, but the breadth of the leviathan that lies beneath the glassy surface of the world remains hidden. Until Vandermeer decides, in the horrifying climax of Authority, to allow it to extend a tendril into our world, just to show the reader that their assumptions about Area X are laughably limited. In a world where we use the word Lovecraftian to represent a certain type of otherworldly unknowable horror, I feel like the word is too limited to encompass the expanse of what the Southern Reach trilogy presents.

There are many ways to interpret Authority, and by extension the whole trilogy, with its intertwining of the beautiful and the terrible in Area X, the allegories of nature’s revenge levied against humanity’s foolishness and folly, and even the meanings we ascribe to words and descriptors, and how such meanings shape our experiences and understanding of people. It is that multitudinous interpretation that makes these books truly special, its shifting variables to be revisited and thought of, over and over again.