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Bradley Dean

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Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)

by Jeff Vandermeer (Goodreads Author)

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Reading for the 2nd time

read in November 2021

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Bradley Dean said: " There’s something quite interesting about reading this book having already watched the film adaptation directed by Alex Garland. In my mind, the book and the film should be viewed as two completely separate entities. Of course, they are both rooted i There’s something quite interesting about reading this book having already watched the film adaptation directed by Alex Garland. In my mind, the book and the film should be viewed as two completely separate entities. Of course, they are both rooted in the same ideas and general overarching story but beyond that, they are mostly very different.

Annihilation is a story about Area X, about change, and most importantly about power. Area X is an area of natural beauty that is described as being full of transitional environments, those being beaches, salt marshes, barrier islands and the likes. However, this environment is not what it seems. A strange phenomenon has been occurring in Area X, one that doesn’t seem to have any explanation. A shady agency called Southern Reach has been tasked with analysing the area to figure out what has been happening, to do this they have been sending in expeditions of scientists and military professionals to observe the landscape. We follow the twelfth expedition, a group of four women: a surveyor, a psychologist, an anthropologist, and our main protagonist a biologist. They are sent into Area X with very basic equipment and told to record their observations along the way.

Throughout their time in Area X, the team begins to splinter, the biologist doesn’t trust the psychologist as team leader, believing that she is using hypnotic suggestion to direct the group. They encounter abandoned villages where nature has regained its foothold, a great tower descending into the Earth with never living writing on the walls. They discover evidence of what happened to other expeditions and uncover the fact that this area has been undergoing change for a lot longer than they were led to believe.

One of the things I enjoyed so much about this book is that from the outset there is this never ending, and incredibly unnerving, sense of dread in the writing style. I would describe it as an almost Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Through the biologist’s eyes we see that everything in Area X is being corrupted; fungal spores that infect everything, humans with wounds that grow in ways that simply are not human. The biologist herself undergoes some sort of change whilst she is there, but whether that is a biological change, a spiritual change or a psychological change is a good question. In my mind all three.

The theme of power seems to be the undercurrent throughout the novel. The Southern Reach have complete power over the expedition, the psychologist has power over the rest of the team, nature is asserting its power over the human landscape. This is where the biologists big change seems to be most prominent. Through infection by the fungal spores from the writing she begins to see the realities of Area X, she sees that nothing can stop it and that there is nothing for her outside of it. As such, she strives out on her own in an attempt to better understand three things: herself, her relationship with her husband who formed part of the eleventh expedition and to understand her part in this weird place.

I really enjoyed this book and found it to be an incredible look at human nature in relation to its environment. I would highly recommend it to anybody that loves the absurd and the creepy. ...more "

Nov 27, 2021 07:05AM · see review