A Fire That Knows Both Our Names: A Conversation with Jeff VanderMeer

Ten years after closing the door on the Area X Trilogy, I opened Jeff VanderMeer’s Absolution. A prequel, a sidequel, a complication to that which had come before. “There is a fire that knows your name,” promises the opening page, as VanderMeer returns us to The Forgotten Coast, a place slowly changing, slowly becoming strange, and already becoming the Area X readers first stepped into Annihilation.

Having just finished writing the field exams of my doctorate—in which Area X featured heavily––I began my review copy for the first time sitting outside in July, in one of the islands wedged into the Bow River in Calgary, Alberta, where I work and live. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a rabbit, one of the many hares that I share space with in that city, scamper in and out of sight. I should have taken this as an omen, as within that first section of VanderMeer’s work, many rabbits were waiting for me, with increasingly unnerving appetites.

For me, this promise of a return was enticing, but also curious. What, if anything, might have changed in the ten years since the author and his readers last entered the story? In October, I was fortunate enough to attend Wordfest, Calgary’s literary festival, and got to see Jeff VanderMeer in conversation with Stephen Graham Jones (another writer I both admire and have endeavoured to write upon). They each gave readings, they talked about their processes and the development of their works. It was fabulous, and I’m grateful I was there. But it wasn’t enough for me, so in the signing line as he doodled in my copy of Borne, I mentioned to VanderMeer that my review of Absolution was forthcoming, and I asked if he might be interested in sitting down for an interview with me.

In mid-November, in the midst of a massive international tour, Jeff was kind enough to sit down with me on Zoom for a little over an hour to talk about Absolution, his writing, and his return to Area X.

Ben Berman Ghan: My first question is about Absolution. I remember when I read that a fourth Southern Reach book was coming out, ten years after the original trilogy, one of the first things that struck me was reflecting on how both ecological and environmental horror—and inept government response to such horror—hangs over the original trilogy. I was wondering how the interceding decade has changed, or not changed, your approach to that horror and that response. Has the last set of years, of how government ineptitude has perhaps evolved regarding the environment, influenced your return to Absolution?

Jeff VanderMeer: Yeah, I always kind of hearken back to my novel Borne where people ask why did I just call the company, “The Company”? And my answer was, because that’s where we’re headed. We're headed toward this kind of weird post-capitalist situation where we have these conglomerates. We have situations where it literally feels generic in that sense. And that pertains to the Southern Reach in the sense that the government dysfunction—which often has to stand in also for corporate malfeasance in a way, because there's not room in the series for both entities to exist—the more absurd and cruder it gets, the more it begins to approximate the real-life situation. Because what we have right now are systems of both derangement and of oppression, that are also marked by what you might call oligarchical properties of incompetence.

You almost have to write badly to convey how stupid it is. You have to create something more sophisticated as a construct than what's actually going on. And so in Authority, a lot of people who don't work in office jobs with the government didn't get how accurate it was about dysfunction at that time. So it's been interesting to see people reread that and think that's kind of like how it is now, except it was like how it was then. It just wasn't as visible.

We have a lot more stupidity that's visible, a lot more incompetence, a lot more viciousness, so to speak, and a lot more lack of nuance and sophistication. I think those things and the emboldening of, let's say, even in Florida developers—which used to be something that came with embarrassment and some amount of shame or repercussions and now doesn't, in terms of actual environmental despoiling of the environment—that doesn't exist anymore.

So I think that Absolution is darker and the dysfunction in Central, the secret agency, is darker, more absurd. I tried to make it a little bit more entangled with this idea of Central being almost like the mafia, like a family organization with all of the nepotism issues and connections that creates, because that also feels like a way of getting at the truth about our situation.

Ben Berman Ghan: This novel has a powerful sense of escalation. I would say it feels like you start at such a great distance within the text, and then you get closer and closer to the narrative until you're inside the head of Lowry, who is such a claustrophobic and horrible figure. In that first section, with the biologists, it almost feels like watching a found footage horror, and it takes a while before the reader notices that Old Jim—who takes centre stage in part two—is there with you. How did you approach writing these three sections with their different tones?

Jeff VanderMeer: Some people likened it to reading the first three of the trilogy, and I understand why, but there’s not a direct parallel because of the kind of opening up you’re talking about. There’s an opening up in the trilogy, but there’s a distance drilling down in Absolution, which is a different thing. So it's almost like you're up in the lighthouse, to begin with, and in the tower tunnel by the end, in a sense psychologically. And that's a different effect.

I'm really influenced by a movie called Chimes at Midnight by Orson Welles. Despite the fact that the film was shot on a shoestring, there’s an amazing battle scene which literally starts with an aerial view of the two armies, and by the end of the scene, you are down in the mud with them such that you just see a hand with a sword or a severed leg in the mud, and I thought it was an incredibly effective way of contextualizing.

So I thought with the biologist's expedition in the first section, that this would be a wonderful, almost clinical, dark fairytale kind of mode that would work well. I mean, you are always concerned with an entry point for readers, but I thought it would be useful. And then I was really excited—this is how the novel kind of came to life, once I realized that your experience is being mediated by Old Jim, who is down in the archives of Central putting this all together for you. That’s partly why it is so clinical. He's trying to analyze the situation. The whole style comes out of the fact that you're getting this experience basically through Old Jim's eyes. And when I realized that, I realized Old Jim is also the protagonist of part two. I’ve always liked the idea of characters continuing on in different forms.

One of my favourite novels, at least when I read it, was Consider Phlebas, which contains in the appendix some answers about characters that are emotionally devastating. So my thought with the Lowry section was that as we get in close, as we’re in the mud, flailing, you still get Old Jim’s perspective to some degree, and you still get new pieces of information about him that are potentially devastating. So he's still the thread through it all. And that's how I thought about the three sections, and I kind of wrote them all at the same time.

When I was tired of working on one, I would work on another. It was useful to have three distinct sections in terms of pushing information further back. I was like, “Oh, this can actually go in part three, or, oh, this is something I should just reveal upfront.” Because the other thing writers do stupidly sometimes is they think they've got some golden nugget of a reveal, and so they hide it and they hold onto it as long as possible thinking it should be at the climax. Sometimes, it's really good to push that stuff up. Once that comes out into the light, something even deeper and more interesting occurs later in the book.

Also, I just realized that Chimes at Midnight is hugely influential on part one, because that battle scene kind of happens at the end of section one, in the meadow in the mud. That’s how that came to be.

BBG: There’s something I wanted to pick out in relation to the lighthouse and its threads through the original trilogy, especially in regards to Acceptance and Absolution. How do you feel about continuity, and what role does it play throughout these narratives? There are all sorts of little things in Absolution that either contradict or complicate the original trilogy, almost like Area X is giving the finger to a reader who thinks they have it all figured out.

JVM: There are good reasons why certain things don't match up without giving away too many spoilers. So, I felt a certain amount of freedom from standard continuity because of those three things. Also, because you're often getting stuff through a character’s point of view that's reliable in their own mind, but they may not have all the information. I really like the reader’s perspective changing on events or people, based on some other perspective coming in, like a fact, like a point in time. A date is a certain thing, but someone's impression of how events went is subject to interpretation and is subjective. So I play around with that a lot.

And the real trick there is simply not to have so many red herrings that you create a situation where continuity begins to seem like a problem. Absolution is also a book that's meant, like the others in the series, to be reread. So I think on a reread, some of the continuity errors actually don't come across as continuity errors, but that's just me as the author protesting a little bit.

BBG: Something that I heard you talk about when you were here in Calgary in October was the way that you approach narrators and characters through the body, and how the body feels. I really love that as an approach to character writing. I’m curious both how that sense of inhabiting the body enters part one where there's so much distance, or are you still in the body of Old Jim? What was it like to consider the drastically different physicalities of Old Jim and Lowry, which are changing bodies, too?

JVM: In part one, which again has got this distance and this clinical note to it, as soon as I realized that was the style, then you have this question of: when does sensory detail enter beyond the visual? When does it seem more personal and coming from an individual, because the point of view is fairly limited, omniscient in a way you kind of roam between characters without ever really being in their point of view. And there was an element of the ending of that where I'd been really influenced by this book called The Book of Miracles from Taschen Books, which is a bunch of paintings of comets during medieval times, accompanying explanations of what people in medieval times thought comets were. They thought they were fantastical creatures, all kinds of stuff. In other words, they had no frame of reference for what a comet actually was in science.

I was really excited about the idea of this very clinically told, dark, scientific fairytale that at certain points, these kinds of sensory emotions and details that live in the body kind of erupt.

My thought was that the Biologist encountering this character, known as The Rogue, at the end, would be similar to a medieval person encountering a comet. They would've had no context for it. It'd be very mentally destabilizing. So I was really excited about the idea of this very clinically told, dark, scientific fairytale that at certain points, these kinds of sensory emotions and details that live in the body kind of erupt. And one of them is toward the climax.

One thing that happens when you withhold that in the rest of a story, when it suddenly becomes bursting forth, it's even more intense. So I kind of hoarded up all of that for those climactic scenes, so that hopefully, you would be so immersed with them that you would feel them in a very tactile way, and you would be put right there in that scene, in a way that you hadn't been until that point.

A lot of times I'm really going for an effect in the reader that's almost subliminal. They may not recognize why they're feeling the way they're feeling, but in that first section, it's because of the withholding of emotion, and then the eruption of it.

That takes some stylistic cleverness, because you have to have moments before that prepare the reader, so it doesn't come out of left field. It's an interesting effect, when you withhold something and then you deliver it in abundance, that creates a real reaction in the reader. A lot of times I'm really going for an effect in the reader that's almost subliminal. They may not recognize why they're feeling the way they're feeling, but in that first section, it's because of the withholding of emotion, and then the eruption of it.

In regards to Lowry versus Old Jim—Old Jim was tricky because I got really deep into his interiority. I had to pull back a bit because it was getting a little bit too much, that the surface of the story was being affected because when you have so much interiority, the actual events that are happening can be submerged by the mind that you're filtering them through.

I cut about 20,000 words from part two, and I also pulled back, because as a couple of first readers said, he's got so much interiority, or so much in his head, that you don't need to worry about it seeming superficial. The idea there was just simply to kind of layer in with him, he's somebody who's an old veteran. To layer in the past with the present, and layer in the trauma of the past with the present, I thought was really important for that kind of character.

Here's somebody who's in a compromised line of work working for the secret agency, and despite a possibly violent past, which is alluded to, is still in his way trying to do the right thing. He's better than the people at Central who control him. I think that's always an interesting thing, to have a compromised character who you at least understand, even if you really pull back and think about what he's doing, you don't always like him.

And then with Lowry, it was just pretty much all bets are off. He's going to be under the influence of these anti-anxiety drugs. He's going to be dropping the F-bomb as a result all the time as a side effect, he's going to have all these anxieties and insecurities, which to my mind, when you build a complex character, you're talking about someone who's contradictory. So on the one hand, he's very off-putting in almost like a dysfunctional swaggering tech bro way, but he also has all these underlying insecurities. He's actually fairly sweet toward his girlfriend in ways, even though he is also kind of a dick.

But what I'm saying is he's a lot of different things. The propulsion is through the use of the F-bombs, the fact that he's in this altered state, which creates a different kinetic energy, which you've already been trained to recognize in the Dead Meadow scene in the biologist expedition in a sense. Some readers will find it a huge shock to the system and a break, but in some ways it's really continuing the kind of ecstatic vision, heightened state that you find actually at the end of the old gym section and also at the end of the Dead Dead. The not-dead astronauts, the biologist section, and then weirdly, the absurdism and the dark humour of the Lowry section allowed me to get to much more transgressive places in terms of the uncanny and the weird. I did not expect that, but something about how Lowry led to some of the most uncanny weird scenes I've ever written. I don't think I would've gotten there without his persona, and without the sense of humour.

BBG: There are moments where Lowry swears to such an excess that it's like every sentence, and then once in a while you'd be like, the drugs have worn off, or Area X has had an effect and it's stolen his profanity, it's stolen his F-bombs. How did you decide where and when you needed it to pull back and then drop it back on the page again?

JVM: I mean, to some degree it's dependent on the contingencies of the plot and when Lowry, the guy who has the drugs, is around. But it's also something which is meant to be a gift to the reader, which is to say there are a lot of answers in this book if you choose to believe them. The idea is simply that Lowry is actually coherent, and actually you can believe what he's seeing, the less he's swearing.

So I often pulled back for the most surreal scenes, especially toward the end, and that's where he's less on the drugs. It was kind of an interesting combination, the most outlandish things in that section you encounter are when he's not using the F-bomb. So you have to decide, are these things actually real or not? That's meant to be kind of a nod that yes, they're pretty much real. That was also keeping in mind that some people miss the answers in Acceptance, which I understand because I feel like Authority undermines your view of the world in such a way that you get paranoid enough that you don't actually believe the answers that I give you in Acceptance.

BBG: I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where the word “fuck” is serving such a specific function.

JVM: Well, the thing about it that's interesting is the cultural difference. I don't know how Canadians see the F-bomb, but in Montréal, they loved that section and they wanted me to read it unedited—in Glasgow, same thing. It's like they dropped the F-bomb as punctuation, just like Lowry does. So I was actually really surprised when some of my American audience was taken aback by that. If you go to certain review sites, you'll see people saying, “Oh, this is a five star book, but I'm taking off a star for the swearing.” And to some degree I understand it can be jarring. But the moralizing was really surprising to me. I did not expect it, and to me, I had such a great time writing it, and I dropped the F-bomb so much myself personally that I just didn't anticipate that. I don't think I would've changed my approach. I mean, the only thing I might've done is ease into the F-bombs a little bit, but that seems like a betrayal of Lowry’s point of view.

One of the best parts for me, craft wise, was a section where he crosses Area X and just fucking loses it completely and starts swearing. My task there was to have all of his swearing be basically sexual acts, anatomically impossible. And I'm actually really weirdly proud of that section, because it was really hard to write something that was anatomically impossible. That's why it's a fairly brief section. But these things are not evidence of the writer's style or craft breaking down. They're actually evidence of being able to, hopefully for some readers, create a very sophisticated effect.

That’s been interesting too, because some have seen the F-bombs as a breakdown. I think one reader was like, I read Annihilation and then I read this, and I can't believe how the writer's craft has gotten so bad in the interim. The presence of an F-bomb has nothing to do with whether a work is well written or not, one way or the other. So I pushed back a little gently on that, just because I want the readers who haven't read it yet to get some insight as to the process.

BBG: You mentioned a little about answers in Area X, and that leads me to my next question. There's still this sense of vastness beyond what Old Jim—and the reader, and Lowry—can ever truly comprehend or understand. I wanted to ask you about walking that line, the line of mystery in Area X.

JVM: Part of it is allowing the reader to fill in with their imagination. So I'll give you one example or with their own extrapolation, and then some things being overt, some things being alluded to.

One example of a detail that I think is important in Absolution that no one has really talked about yet, and maybe I made it too obscure, is that Old Jim and the biologists have these dreams of this medieval army going toward this green light. All you need to do is remember that in the first series, Central and Southern Reach wind up using old weapons, because the newer ones can be hacked. So that might by itself, as a detail or a memory of the first three books, recast what you think. And then again, it's very much constrained by character point of view. I've never been a fan of mysteries where they gather everyone into the parlour and the detective has some kind of magical breakthrough and intuition.

I really believe in, and am thankful for, reader imaginations, and the fact that with this particular series—which is about the unknowability of the universe—they've been willing to meet me at a place that requires much more work on their part.

I feel like giving the answers directly in this series would be like that. It would be very artificial. So I guess one answer is just simply that I really believe in, and am thankful for, reader imaginations, and the fact that with this particular series—which is about the unknowability of the universe—they've been willing to meet me at a place that requires much more work on their part. But also I think it's useful work. I think people like putting together the pieces.

BBG: We’ve talked a lot about the human characters, but what about the thing itself, what about Area X? What felt different returning to it as an entity, as a place? While horror might be the wrong word, so much of Absolution sits in a place of dread for me.

JVM: I had a lot of glee at the idea of telling the true story of the first expedition. I was first thinking, how is the Southern Reach going to be different? When we encounter the Southern Reach, it's this kind of defeated, bureaucratic-ridden organization that's failed over 30 years. The whole mood, morale, everything about it is kind of dismal. I thought when they first start out, they're not going to be like that. They're going to be gung ho, they're going to be swaggering, like Lowry. They're going to think there's going to be an off switch, which they refer to several times. Basically they're going to go in and it's going to be one and done, they're going to solve this problem, this Area X, in the way new organizations are maybe a little too arrogant. That got me thinking about what Area X itself would be like when it was first established. And I was like, “It's going to be much, much wilder. It's going to be much less consistent.”

So it's not so much that it recontextualizes the doubling, it's simply that the doubling is more random and more prevalent in the first expedition. And part of that is because when I thought about the doubling in the first three books, it was mostly that Area X doubles when it's trying to understand what it thinks is a threat, it doesn't understand something about the particular person, it's analyzing. So it creates a double to understand them, maybe a double to send back across the border.

But in the first expedition, I thought, “Well, it's going to just be Area X establishing itself,” so it's going to be like wild magic almost. There's going to be a lot of things that happen that are almost like extreme weather, or just happening because the landscape is in the process of changing. So there was a lot of freedom in recontextualizing.

How do I create a sense of dread? This is something I've talked about with Victor LaValle and Steven Graham Jones, where you're studying movies and TV, you're looking at current novels, you're seeing the special effects. In a weird way, you're trying to embed them in an emotional context, but readers are jaded, because they get horror stuff from everywhere. So how can I make a moment of dread if I don't know what's out there, what they're going to become accustomed to, what they're jaded about?

And so I was consulting with fish biologists about the grossest skin that they've ever touched on a fish, finding out what current movies and TV are portraying as horror effects, and then kind of embedding this in a way where you create something that you hope is going to really seem horrifying because you haven't seen it before, you hadn't read it before. And you wed it again to an emotional context that makes it real. Without that, it's nothing.

BBG: I’ve heard you talk about how the inspirations for your books come to you in dreams, in these images. I wanted to ask about writing toward images or writing for images, with some examples being the scene in the meadow with the tyrant, and Lowry's approach to the White House, and the end of the discovery and the cannibalism. I was just curious how you approach writing toward imagery, if it's a destination that you're going toward, that you know you have to carve out? How do you get to the images that help to inspire the book?

JVM: Well, it's very different for each one. So if it's a recurring thing, I think of the Tyrant, the alligator as a recurring image, because in theory, every time you see more of the Tyrant, it should be more terrifying or magnificent or awe inspiring. You're literally leading to a climax with that character, so the imagery has to be thought out very carefully. There's a progression to it, and that leads to what I think is a pretty lovely scene with the alligator among these sunflowers.

I don't really have a problem with creating imagery that has some emotional impact or symbolic resonance. It just kind of comes to me naturally. Every writer has a different strength, I think that’s one of mine. Usually it's so wedded to character, that again, has some kind of emotional resonance. But then there's things you layer in, imagery wise.

There's a lot of public domain texts in these books that people don't know about, and I haven't talked about. There's a lot of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland in Acceptance. And for example, in the cannibalism scene, I thought it would be kind of cute to put in food imagery that I embed as Lowry's memory. That's actually from A Christmas Carol, because I think, sneakily, if someone's read A Christmas Carol, there might be this little echo in their head that they can't remember—is this my family dinner that I'm remembering? So I do some things with imagery, found imagery too, to hopefully create some kind of echo or resonance.

BBG: I'll just end on something open-ended for you, because you've talked about things that people have missed in this book, or things that you haven't seen readers talk about. I just want to give you the opportunity to share something you haven't gotten a chance to talk about in regards to putting out Absolution, or something just that you want to point to, or address in this novel for readers?

JVM: I do spend a lot of time thinking consciously about modern topics, like the topicality of things, and then thinking about how to reduce it to a theme, so it's universal. In Authority, there's a lot about hypnosis—it's really about the mind viruses that we encounter on the internet, and how they inhabit us.

In this book, there's a few things going on. One part of Lowry’s persona is kind of channeling the modern swaggering nihilism, I suppose, of tech bros. I find it very disturbing, and kind of like a modern religion in how people follow those kinds of people, even though what they're actually saying and doing is so dysfunctional and dystopic.

And then something like ghosting, which is a very modern phenomenon, and much more intense because of the fact we are drawn close to each other through texting. I thought, “Oh, this is really about abandonment.” So in part two, with Old Jim and his relationship with his daughter, that's really pulling on something that a lot of people have experienced in a much more modern context. So I do try with this series to use the kind of distance it has from reality to also bake in themes that are very contemporary—beyond the obvious about bureaucracy, about dysfunctional systems, and things like that. That's something I don't really get to talk about too much.