Every answer spawns more questions. Every promotion serves only to dig the hole deeper. Every program to bring order to chaos creates disaster, not dominion. Our strength as a species is our ability to plan; our weakness is our inability (and unwillingness) to imagine the successors of our success.
John Rodriguez, who likes to call himself Control, has been put in charge of The Southern Reach, a secret government program meant to manage Area X, a swathe of the southeastern coast where the landscape has taken on a life of its own. It sounds like a step up, but it feels like a step off a precipice and into an abyss.
Jeff Vandermeer's 'Authority,' the delightful follow-on to 'Annihilation,' his dark and terrorizing expedition into the ineffable Area X, takes a decidedly different track than the first book. Exploring how obtuse human personalities build a bureaucracy that's better at maintaining itself than accomplishing anything useful, 'Authority' adds a variety of perspectives to 'Annihilation.' As we understand a lot more about Area X, VanderMeer manages a very unique feat. He makes it fun, really fun, to read about what happens when we bump up against the limits of our knowledge. Call it terror with an edgy, cagey smile.
As the novel opens, Control has been brought in to take over from the previous director of the Southern Reach, to make sense of the last expedition, and bring some much-needed order and decisiveness to a project that is foundering badly. On one hand, it's hard to tell just how serious the problems posed by Area X might be. But from another perspective, Area X looks quite clearly to be the beginning of the end. The Apocalypse has arrived, but we can't even tell what the hell it is or means.
Control is our main voice in this wilderness, and he's an absolute hoot to read. VanderMeer walks a very thin line with such grace and confidence that he manages to pull off a very complicated ambience. There's a lot of very low-key humor to be found in 'Authority,' jostling up right alongside some very scary and unnerving glimpses of the unknown.
As Control looks into the written records and fragments to get to know his new bailiwick, we're granted a new understanding of what transpired in the first novel. But what we now know only indicates how much is unknown both to the reader and the characters. Our search for what's going on becomes intense and compelling reading.
The biologist from 'Annihilation' returns in 'Authority,' now re-incarnated as something more than what she was in the first book. But she's seemingly the least of Control's problems. The Assistant director, and the staff of the Southern Reach, are all the sorts of folks every one of us has worked with before. The difficult ones, the talented jerks, the pushy authority figures, the off-kilter dweebs whose inability to maintain a sense of balance might seem more humorous if it didn't threaten to gum up the whole shebang. They're all a blast to read about.
'Authority' proves itself to be a very potent version of workplace farce in a workplace where the consequences are prone to be cataclysmic. And while it and 'Annihilation' clearly demand resolution in the forthcoming 'Acceptance,' it's a fine launch, a long walk off the short pier of what we know into a future that makes no promises other than to surprise us with the sure and certain knowledge that we never knew what we thought we knew. If only we could encompass our ignorance, we would be impregnable.
05-12-14:Matt Taibbi Views 'The Divide'
Zero-Sum Economic Morality
In order for one to succeed, many must fail. The wealth gap and its consequences are, if not well understood, at least well publicized. The figures are out there and repeated to the point of meaninglessness.
Obviously, numbers can tell us a lot, but numbers rarely make us feel. Numbers don't tell stories in an engaging manner. In 'The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,' Matt Taibbi does tell stories, bring the numbers to life, in fact, to our lives. Taibbi explores a new America where there are two sets of written rules and laws, to ensure unequal justice.
Taibbi does start his book with some simple statistics; "Poverty goes up; Crime goes down; Prison population doubles." It's counter-intuitive, he argues, convincingly. What could drive the numbers in these disparate directions? Taibbi then starts the storytelling, and from that moment on, be prepared for a Dickensian, dystopian journey into two visions of America most readers of this book will find fascinating and horrific.
On one side, we have we have the executives of HSBC, convicted of aiding and abetting terrorists and drug cartels by money laundering; while the firm pays a relatively small fine, the men pay nothing and receive no punishment. On the other side, we have a man convicted of having a joint in New York who spends 46 days in Riker's Island. It's hard time, practically a training camp for future felons. And so it goes.
Matt Taibbi's brilliant, often raunchy prose makes this book a lot of fun. 'The Divide' is a hoot to read, and often laugh-out-loud funny, even when the tales that Taibbi is spinning so well might make you want to cry. But Taibbi manages to do a lot of work as well, writing about schemes so complicated they were difficult for US attorneys to adjudicate. Taibbi manages to write about them in an engaging manner that the lay reader can easily and enjoyably understand. His writing is full of verve and humor at the service of a serious and fierce intelligence.
But in order to make this book work as well as it does, Taibbi has to do more than spin fun and informational sentences. He tells a series of interlocking stories ringing back and forth from the very rich to the very poor. Each story in itself is a compelling work of portraiture, an intricate detail in a full-scale vision of the Victorian, dystopian hell that has enveloped most of America. 'The Divide' often reads like a 21st century Dickens novel, with real-life mustache-twiddling bad guys chucking as they steal millions or even billions from investors, and the powerless poor, trapped in absurd, Kafkaesque nightmare of fines, jail, more fines and more jail. Taibbi weaves together stories that are outrageous with stories that are moving, involving us with characters who are both.
'The Divide' is a pretty big book, but it does not feel like one. It's a quick read. Molly Crabapple provides some outstanding art to set off Taibbi's incendiary prose. The illustrations here feel integral to the work, conveying and reinforcing the surreal nature of what you read. What will become all-too-evident, alas, is that what at first blush seems surreal at second glance proves to be very real — in fact, your real life. We no longer need to concern ourselves with dystopian visions of the future. Instead, read this book about the present. Then, just look around.
New to the Agony Column
09-18-15: Commentary : William T. Vollman Amidst 'The Dying Grass' : An Epic Exploration of Simultaneity
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with William T. Vollman : "...a lot of long words that in our language are sentences..."
09-05-15: Commentary : Susan Casey Listens to 'Voices in the Ocean' : Science, Empathy and Self
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Susan Casey : "...the reporting for this book was emotionally difficult at times..."
08-21-15: Agony Column Podcast News Report : Senator Claire McCaskill is 'Plenty Ladylike' : Internalizing Determination to Overcome Sexism [Incudes Time to Read EP 211: Claire McCaskill, Plenty Ladylike, plus A 2015 Interview with Senator Claire McCaskill]
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Emily Schultz Unleashes 'The Blondes' : A Cure by Color [Incudes Time to Read EP 210: Emily Schultz, The Blondes, plus A 2015 Interview with Emily Schultz]
07-05-15: Commentary : Dr. Michael Gazzaniga Tells Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience Reveals the Life of Science
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Michael Gazzaniga : "We made the first observation and BAM there was the disconnection effect..."
04-21-15: Commentary : Kazuo Ishiguro Unearths 'The Buried Giant' : The Mist of Myth and Memory
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro : ".... by the time I was writing this novel, the lines between what was fantasy and what was real had blurred for me..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Marc Goodman : "...every physical object around us is being transformed, one way or another, into an information technology..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report UPDATE: Time to Read Episode 199: Marc Goodman : Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
