Acceptance: A Novel

INTRODUCTION

BY HELEN MACDONALD

"What this expedition member had brought to Area X," the biologist muses as she regards an agonized, once-human creature in Acceptance, might have contributed to this final state. Her theory holds for readers, too: what you bring with you shapes what Area X might make of you, what you might become. I’m not prone to talking about myself in a book introduction, but this time I must, because my reading of Acceptance is deeply enmeshed in where I first read it. I brought the Southern Reach series with me on a research trip to Midway Atoll, a scrap of land in the Pacific Ocean that until the 1990s was an American naval base, and according to Hawaiian cosmology is the place where souls come from and where they return to after death. I read Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance one after the other in crumbling military barracks while outside, government biologists surveyed bird populations and conducted intense campaigns against invasive species. And everywhere, occupying every square foot of the island except the airstrip, right across the ruins of parade grounds, gardens, and runways, were birds. Two million Laysan and black-footed albatrosses and Bonin petrels, species that had been nesting there for millennia. The manifold, conflicting histories, claims, and meanings of this place were so present and palpable, they gave me a kind of epistemological vertigo. I read the books and stood in ruins at what felt like the end of the world under clouds of birds that sometimes seemed manifestations of the resistance of natural systems to the trauma we wreak upon them, sometimes seemed things entirely, bewilderingly alien. And it felt, of course, that I’d been dropped into Area X. The war of Central against an enemy that refused to be defined or contained—here it was, in the bodies of birds incubating their eggs on collapsed radar bunkers, on beaches heaped with turtles basking beside heaps of plastic trash. Reading the series in this particular terroir made the island leak into the book and vice versa, so that even now I can’t quite prise the fictive from the real. I returned from Midway not quite the same person I was before, and Jeff VanderMeer was partly responsible. For which, much gratitude.

A vast number of critical responses to Acceptance and the Southern Reach books exist, musing on their relationship to subjects as disparate as literary genre, gender, identity, philosophy, espionage, the climate crisis, and environmental ethics. Reading these responses has enriched my thoughts, given me new vantage on the works. But reading about these books is a little like reading scientific papers about a seabird colony. You can find out a whole bunch of things about seabird biology and behavior that you didn’t know before. But when you think of a seabird colony, you don’t remember the papers. You remember the colony itself, the sensory shock of it, the way it hooks into you, the way the experience of being inside it changes you and your relation to the world. That’s how Acceptance lives in my mind. It’s soaked into my subconscious and continues to exist there, answering questions and posing new ones almost daily in a way that exegesis or theoretical speculation cannot.

In his essay Hauntings in the Anthropocene, VanderMeer suggested that "mapping elements of the Anthropocene via weird fiction may create a greater and more visceral understanding (render more visible)—precisely because so many of the effects of this era are felt in and under the skin, as well as in the subconscious." Exactly. And so this introduction will not attempt to explain or solve the puzzles posed by Acceptance, but will speak a little of what the book made of itself in one mind. For it’s clear that my reading of the series has been shaped by my own history as an amateur naturalist and a historian of science specializing in the history of natural history, and as someone who stood, bewildered, on an ex–naval base so full of life that even at night, wings brushed my face as I walked.

I came to Acceptance in a kind of hermeneutic fever, burning with questions and desperately wanting answers on the true nature of Area X, even though I knew the categories question and answer were ones Area X would laugh at. The novel opens with a scene from Annihilation: the death of the psychologist on the twelfth expedition (we learn she is the Southern Reach’s director). This time we are given the scene from her point of view, and Acceptance takes us forward in this way, switching between multiple timelines and revisiting characters we already met but only partially knew—Gloria, the psychologist/director, whose girlhood on that coastline has abiding relevance for her actions in the story; John Rodriguez, aka Control, a word whose multiple meanings—the exercise of power, an experimental necessity, and an institutional role—are bound up in his fate; Saul, the lighthouse keeper and former preacher, whose story is a tender and terrible tragedy; Ghost Bird, the biologist’s double, a person made by Area X and whose relationship to it is thus both complicated and transformative—and a whole panoply of other characters, some new, all made anew, rebuilt and recast. As I read, my questions about Area X became less insistent; what I wanted was to follow this cast of characters to better understand their various compasses and motivations: what pulled at them, what pushed them, what brought them to each other, and which beacons drew them, willingly or unwillingly, on their journeys, for Acceptance is, of course, a book of journeys both metaphysical and physical.

One finds out a lot more about Area X in Acceptance; one is offered a variety of explanations and answers, all constrained by the points of view of the characters that offer them. Those explanations are revelatory, terrifying, and marvelous. But for me, what the book does most viscerally, and with extraordinary technical skill, is make you feel the characters’ conflicts and longings tidally, in your bones. VanderMeer has a phenomenal ability to articulate the complicated relationships of his characters. The forces pulling their connections this way or that, be they blackmail, fear, desire for intimacy, safety, or friendship. Their allegiance to one thing, or to another, or oftentimes both. I think of Ghost Bird’s complex blend of pity for and protection of Control; the reasons for Gloria bringing Whitby into Area X; the ways institutional and personal roles are shown as being acts, of a kind, and what might remain when those masks are stripped away. Acceptance constantly engages with the mysteries of understanding and uncovering the disguises we wear—and are. It shows us how identities are forged and sustained in the ongoing process of interaction with others—both human and inhuman—and through adaptation to the endless mutability of environmental conditions. In the series, and in Acceptance in particular, personal identities shift—sometimes gently, sometimes agonizingly—in relation to history and circumstance and the incomprehensible workings of Area X.

Shadows and hauntings are everywhere in its pages; it is a book of pairs and twins, things and their doubles: two lighthouses, the tunnel as a doubled lighthouse, people and their doppelgängers, people and their transformed selves. Saul and Gloria, Control and Ghost Bird, the biologist and the owl that may or may not be her husband, Henry and Suzanne of the S&SB. Doppelgängers in fiction tend to force characters to confront their divided selves, with results that range, here, from violent, terrified refusal to ultimate acceptance. And on another level, a different kind of twinning is at the heart of the reading experience: just as Area X creates doppelgängers, so does the book, generating doubles of its characters in the reader’s mind, where they take purchase and live. The novel is, in this sense, quietly, secretly, joyfully recapitulating the work of Area X.

It is the amateur naturalist in me that rejoices in VanderMeer’s descriptions of natural phenomena: the precise texture of waves; assemblages of wild flowers; sedge weeds and moss; garrulous, shifting flocks of blackbirds on a winter’s morning that tastes of salt air and flame. The immediacy and specificity of these descriptions ground the narrative in a world that is right here, for the coast in the book is a reimagining of a unique and very real place, the complex mosaic of habitats that make up the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. St. Mark, whose symbol is a mysterious hybrid, a winged lion.

But the historian of science in me revels at different things from the naturalist, because the historian has long been fascinated by the scripts we possess that teach us the correct ways to interact with the natural world and how to ask questions of it. As witting and unwitting agents coming into contact with Area X, VanderMeer’s characters are all, initially at least, following scripts they’ve been given, sometimes covertly and in bad faith, but often simply by the societal and disciplinary structures these characters work within.

In Acceptance, Control initially sees nature as something like a diorama, a backdrop to human concerns. Saul, before his remaking, follows the script of the amateur naturalist; he is a man attentive to light and weather and locality, and a careful recorder of species. The biologist is a field-worker who trusts in scientific objectivity, for whom the natural world is both an anchor for her identity and the subject of her intense curiosity, her desire to know.

But all these scripts about how to look at nature are partial apperceptions, limited views, and that understanding threads its shining way right through the series. The biologist muses, as she contemplates a tide pool starfish in Annihilation, the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all. Faced with an encounter with the terrifyingly real, her erstwhile script is wrenched away, along with a clear sense of who she is. Because what is really there, like Area X, is too complex in its workings, exists on too many scales, is too big and too small for us to ever fully comprehend. We defend ourselves against that revelation for our own self-protection. Literally. The more one learns about the workings of natural systems, the more our everyday notions of selfhood and humanity crumble away. It’s difficult to maintain the fiction of separation between human and nature, for instance, once you find out that there are billions of microorganisms in the human body, discover that we are not singular creatures but functioning ecosystems made of things that are not human but are us, all the same. Sometimes, as with the biologist, this kind of knowledge breaks in upon us. Sometimes it is unwelcome. Sometimes it’s prayed for. Sometimes it’s a thing we have to leap toward—leaps of faith and necessity repeat, in various ways, with various impacts, throughout the series. We aren’t what we thought we were.

Other things operate on and around us that are too big for us to grasp, like the climate emergency, and Acceptance crackles with that particular context. It grapples with the problem of how to engage with the hyperobject of climate breakdown, and one reading of Area X is as a displaced, reworked, urgent version of it; both Area X and the climate crisis have the capacity to burn through everything, anywhere in a text, anywhere in a life, with unbidden, sudden, terrible brightness.

I think, often, about how VanderMeer has described objects as the emissaries of people, and how important it is not to think of them as inert or lifeless in narrative. An object, he’s written, can contain whole worlds. This observation has the deepest salience in a reading of Acceptance, where the matter of what an object might be, in all its varied senses, is ceaselessly interrogated. A flower that is not a flower. A phone might be a very different kind of thing. A word. A plan, pages of notes, an alien intent, a need to know. I think of Acceptance, and I think of Midway. I think of Acceptance and I think of how its characters and the questions they pose live on within me. And I think of the book as an object that is an emissary, a deeply haunted and fierce unmasking of the fiction that humanity is separate from the natural systems that shape and support us. If there is a message Acceptance gives us, it is an imperative one. To go forward, to survive, we must understand this. Understand, change, and accept it.

000X: THE DIRECTOR, TWELFTH EXPEDITION

Just out of reach, just beyond you: the rush and froth of the surf, the sharp smell of the sea, the crisscrossing shape of the gulls, their sudden, jarring cries. An ordinary day in Area X, an extraordinary day—the day of your death—and there you are, propped up against a mound of sand, half sheltered by a crumbling wall. The warm sun against your face, and the dizzying view above of the lighthouse looming down through its own shadow. The sky has an intensity that admits to nothing beyond its blue prison. There’s sticky sand glittering across a gash in your forehead; there’s a tangy glottal something in your mouth, dripping out.

You feel numb and you feel broken, but there’s a strange relief mixed in with the regret: to come such a long way, to come to a halt here, without knowing how it will turn out, and yet … to rest. To come to rest. Finally. All of your plans back at the Southern Reach, the agonizing and constant fear of failure or worse, the price of that … all of it leaking out into the sand beside you in gritty red pearls.

The landscape surges toward you, curling over from behind to peer at you; it flares in places, or swirls or reduces itself to a pinprick, before coming back into focus. Your hearing isn’t what it once was, either—has weakened along with your balance. And yet there comes this impossible thing: a magician’s trick of a voice rising out of the landscape and the suggestion of eyes upon you. The whisper is familiar: Is your house in order? But you think whoever is asking might be a stranger, and you ignore it, don’t like what might be knocking at the door.

The throbbing of your shoulder from the encounter in the tower is much worse. The wound betrayed you, made you leap out into that blazing blue expanse even though you hadn’t wanted to. Some communication, some trigger between the wound and the flame that came dancing across the reeds betrayed your sovereignty. Your house has rarely been in such disarray, and yet you know that no matter what leaves you in a few minutes something else will remain behind. Disappearing into the sky, the earth, the water, is no guarantee of death here.

A shadow joins the shadow of the lighthouse.

Soon after, there comes the crunch of boots, and, disoriented, you shout, Annihilation! Annihilation! and flail about until you realize the apparition kneeling before you is the one person impervious to the suggestion.

It’s just me, the biologist.

Just you. Just the biologist. Just your defiant weapon, hurled against the walls of Area X.

She props you up, presses water to your mouth, clearing some of the blood as you cough.

Where is the surveyor? you ask.

Back at the base camp, she tells you.

Wouldn’t come with you? Afraid of the biologist, afraid of the burgeoning flame, just like you. A slow-burning flame, a will-o’-the-wisp, floating across the marsh and the dunes, floating and floating, like nothing human but something free and floating. A hypnotic suggestion meant to calm her, even if it will have no more effect than a comforting nursery rhyme.

As the conversation unspools, you keep faltering and losing track of it. You say things you don’t mean, trying to stay in character—the person the biologist knows you as, the construct you created for her. Maybe you shouldn’t care about roles now, but there’s still a role to play.

She’s blaming you, but you can’t blame her. If it was a disaster, you helped create it. You just panicked, and you gave up. Not true—you never gave up—but you nod anyway, thinking of so many mistakes. I did. I did. I should have recognized earlier that you had changed. True. I should have sent you back to the border. Not true. I shouldn’t have gone down there with the anthropologist. Not true, not really. You had no choice, once she slipped away from base camp, intent on proving herself.

You’re coughing up more blood, but it hardly matters now.

What does the border look like? A child’s question. A question whose answer means nothing. There is nothing but border. There is no border.

I’ll tell you when I get there.

What really happens when we cross over?

Not what you might expect.

What did you hide from us about Area X?

Nothing that would have helped you. Not really.

The sun is a weak halo with no center and the biologist’s voice threads in and out, the sand both cold and hot in your clenched right hand. The pain that keeps returning in bursts is attacking every couple of microseconds, so present that it isn’t even there anymore.

Eventually, you recognize that you have lost the ability to speak. But you are still there, muffled and distant, as if you’re a kid lying on a blanket on this very beach, with a hat over your eyes. Lulled into drowsiness by the constant surging sound of the water and the sea breezes, balancing the heat that ripples over you, spreads through your limbs. The wind against your hair is a sensation as remote as the ruffling of weeds sprouting from a head-shaped rock.

I’m sorry, but I have to do this, the biologist tells you, almost as if she knows you can still hear her. I have no choice.

You feel the tug and pull on your skin, the brief incisive line, as the biologist takes a sample from your infected shoulder. From a great and insurmountable distance, searching hands descend as the biologist goes through your jacket pockets. She finds your journal. She finds your hidden gun. She finds your pathetic letter. What will she make of them? Maybe nothing at all. Maybe she’ll just throw the letter into the sea, and the gun with it. Maybe she’ll waste the rest of her life studying your journal.

She’s still talking.

I don’t know what to say to you. I’m angry. I’m frightened. You put us here and you had a chance to tell me what you knew, and you didn’t. You wouldn’t. I’d say rest in peace, but I don’t think you will.

Then she’s gone, and you miss her, that weight of a human being beside you, the perverse blessing of those words, but you don’t miss her for long because you are fading further still, fading into the landscape like a reluctant wraith, and you can hear a faint and delicate music in the distance, and something that whispered to you before is whispering again, and then you’re dissolving into the wind. A kind of alien regard has twinned itself to you, easily mistaken for the atoms of the air if it did not seem somehow concentrated, purposeful. Joyful?

Taken up over the still lakes, rising up across the marsh, flickering up in green-glinting reflections against the sea and the shore in the late-afternoon sun … only to wheel and bank toward the interior and its cypress trees, its black water. Then sharply up into the sky again, taking aim for the sun, the lurch and spin of it, before free fall, twisting to stare down at the onrushing earth, stretched taut above the quick flash and slow wave of reeds. You half expect to see Lowry there, wounded survivor of the long-ago first expedition, crawling toward the safety of the border. But instead there is just the biologist trudging back down the darkening path … and waiting beyond her, mewling and in distress, the altered psychologist from the expedition before the twelfth. Your fault as much as anyone’s, your fault, and irrevocable. Unforgivable.

As you curve back around, the lighthouse fast approaches. The air trembles as it pushes out from both sides of the lighthouse and then re-forms, ever questing, forever sampling, rising high only to come low yet again, and finally circling like a question mark so you can bear witness to your own immolation: a shape huddled there, leaking light. What a sad figure, sleeping there, dissolving there. A green flame, a distress signal, an opportunity. Are you still soaring? Are you still dying or dead? You can’t tell anymore.

But the whisper isn’t done with you yet.

You’re not down there.

You’re up here.

And there’s still an interrogation going on.

One that will repeat until you have given up every answer.

PART I

RANGE LIGHT

0001: THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

Overhauled the lens machinery and cleaned the lens. Fixed the water pipe in the garden. Small repair to the gate. Organized the tools and shovels etc. in the shed. S&SB visit. Need to requisition paint for daymark—black eroded on seaward side. Also need nails and to check the western siren again. Sighted: pelicans, moorhens, some kind of warbler, blackbirds beyond number, sanderlings, a royal tern, an osprey, flickers, cormorants, bluebirds, pigmy rattlesnake (at the fence—remember), rabbit or two, white-tailed deer, and near dawn, on the trail, many an armadillo.

That winter morning, the wind was cold against the collar of Saul Evans’s coat as he trudged down the trail toward the lighthouse. There had been a storm the night before, and down and to his left, the ocean lay gray and roiling against the dull blue of the sky, seen through the rustle and sway of the sea oats. Driftwood and bottles and faded white buoys and a dead hammerhead shark had washed up in the aftermath, tangled among snarls of seaweed, but no real damage either here or in the village.

At his feet lay bramble and the thick gray of thistles that would bloom purple in the spring and summer. To his right, the ponds were dark with the muttering complaints of grebes and buffleheads. Blackbirds plunged the thin branches of trees down, exploded upward in panic at his passage, settled back into garrulous communities. The brisk, fresh salt smell to the air had an edge of flame: a burning smell from some nearby house or still-smoldering bonfire.

Saul had lived in the lighthouse for four years before he’d met Charlie, and he lived there still, but last night he’d stayed in the village a half mile away, in Charlie’s cottage. A new thing this, not agreed to with words, but with Charlie pulling him back to bed when he’d been about to put on his clothes and leave. A welcome thing that put an awkward half smile on Saul’s face.

Charlie’d barely stirred as Saul had gotten up, dressed, made eggs for breakfast. He’d served Charlie a generous portion with a slice of orange, kept hot under a bowl, and left a little note beside the toaster, bread at the ready. As he’d left, he’d turned to look at the man sprawled on his back half in and half out of the sheets. Even into his late thirties, Charlie had the lean, muscular torso, strong shoulders, and stout legs of a man who had spent much of his adult life on boats, hauling in nets, and the flat belly of someone who didn’t spend too many nights out drinking.

A quiet click of the door, then whistling into the wind like an idiot as soon as he’d taken a few steps—thanking the God who’d made him, in the end, so lucky, even if in such a delayed and unexpected way. Some things came to you late, but late was better than never.

Soon the lighthouse rose solid and tall above him. It served as a daymark so boats could navigate the shallows, but also was lit at night half the week, corresponding to the schedules of commercial traffic farther out to sea. He knew every step of its stairs, every room inside its stone-and-brick walls, every crack and bit of spackle. The spectacular four-ton lens, or beacon, at the top had its own unique signature, and he had hundreds of ways to adjust its light. A first-order lens, over a century old.

As a preacher he thought he had known a kind of peace, a kind of calling, but only after his self-exile, giving all of that up, had Saul truly found what he was looking for. It had taken more than a year for him to understand why: Preaching had been projecting out, imposing himself on the world, with the world then projecting onto him. But tending to the lighthouse—that was a way of looking inward and it felt less arrogant. Here, he knew nothing but the practical, learned from his predecessor: how to maintain the lens, the precise workings of the ventilator and the lens-access panel, how to maintain the grounds, how to fix all the things that broke—scores of daily tasks. He welcomed each part of the routine, relished how it gave him no time to think about the past, and didn’t mind sometimes working long hours—especially now, in the afterglow of Charlie’s embrace.

But that afterglow faded when he saw what awaited him in the gravel parking lot, inside the crisp white fence that surrounded the lighthouse and the grounds. A familiar beat-up station wagon stood there, and beside it the usual two Séance & Science Brigade recruits. They’d snuck up on him again, crept in to ruin his good mood, and even piled their equipment beside the car already—no doubt in a hurry to start. He waved to them from afar in a halfhearted way.

They were always present now, taking measurements and photographs, dictating statements into their bulky tape recorders, making their amateur movies. Intent on finding … what? He knew the history of the coast here, the way that distance and silence magnified the mundane. How into those spaces and the fog and the empty line of the beach thoughts could turn to the uncanny and begin to create a story out of