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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.

2022 reread: I’ll start with the good: Acceptance is much better than Authority. The story returns (for the most part) to Area X, and there’s some beautiful, eerie nature writing. Unlike the first two novels, we get multiple perspectives and narratives set in different locations and time periods, most of which are much more interesting than Control’s story in Authority and one of which (the director’s perspective) is told in second person, which works perfectly with the tone and injects a bit of the surreal, off-kilter quality that VanderMeer did so well in Annihilation. And VanderMeer provides more background on some key characters and gives glimpses into the nature and creation of Area X itself. In my opinion, the most interesting part was following Saul (and the Science & Seance Brigade) pre-Area X—even watching his journal entries slowly deteriorate was fascinating.

But on to the bad: Acceptance is still not very good. Parts of it were just a slog, and the non-ending doesn’t make that slog feel especially worthwhile.

Almost all of the characters undergo great physical changes, but very little (if any) emotional change: they remain static and two-dimensional, unlike in Annihilation where the biologist’s emotional journey was central to the narrative. Moreover, they are very passive for the majority of the novel, which feels more like a description of a group of people observing strange things, wandering around Area X, etc. with a ±ô±ð³Ù’s-²õ±ð±ð-·É³ó²¹³Ù-³ó²¹±è±è±ð²Ô²õ attitude than a group of characters with defined goals, compelling motivation, etc. As a result, there’s plenty of conflict, but very little tension; there are high stakes, but nothing really feels like it matters. In a sense, the novel is an extended reaction shot, which is just not that interesting. Breaking the story up into multiple perspectives doesn’t help, as it makes the novel feel even more fragmented and unfocused.

This seems like it may be intentional, as it seems that a theme of the novel is the uplifting idea that humans don’t have purpose: "She knew where it would all lead, what it always led to in human beings—a decision about what to do. What are we going to do? Where do we go from here? How do we move forward? What is our mission now? As if purpose could solve everything, could take the outlines of what was missing and by sheer will invoke it, make it appear, bring it back to life." It’s altogether fairly depressing and nihilistic. Later on, the biologist writes, "'The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse.'"

Finally, many of the (partial) answers that Acceptance provides…are actually a bit of a problem. When the curtain is pulled back, the great and powerful Oz is revealed to be a little dull—or in this case, extremely weird. Organisms that characters glimpse out of the corner of their eye in Annihilation are described in detail in Acceptance, and that clarity in many ways erases the sense of dread. Instead of feeling alien and unknowable, they are still alien but just bizarre. (I’m thinking specifically of (view spoiler)[the Crawler, the moaning creature, and what the biologist becomes (hide spoiler)].) It reminded me more of one of VanderMeer’s other novels, Borne, which I DNF-ed a few years back because it was too weird for me.

In short, I do think Acceptance is worth reading, but only just. It’s not worth a reread. As such, here is my cheat sheet of all the revelations in the novel (in the event a fourth book is released—I will not be revisiting this book again): (view spoiler)[
- Area X seems to have originated from the “splinter� of light, which came to Earth in a comet, embedded in the lighthouse beacon (There came an incandescent light. There came a star in motion, the sun plummeting to Earth. There fell from the heavens a huge burning torch, thick flames dripping out behind it. And this light, this star, shook the sky and the beach where he had walked a second ago under a clear blue sky. […] For in the center of the light that had come storming down, an image had appeared, a pattern that he recognized: the eight leaves of the strange plant, each one like another spiraling step down into oblivion.), which was then released by Henry and possessed Saul. She saw or felt, deep within, the cataclysm like a rain of comets that had annihilated an entire biosphere remote from Earth. Witnessed how one made organism had fragmented and dispersed, each minute part undertaking a long and perilous passage through spaces between, black and formless, punctuated by sudden light as they came to rest, scattered and lost—emerging only to be buried, inert, in the glass of a lighthouse lens. And how, when brought out of dormancy, the wire tripped, how it had, best as it could, regenerated, begun to perform a vast and preordained function, one compromised by time and context, by the terrible truth that the species that had given Area X its purpose was gone. She saw the membranes of Area X, this machine, this creature, saw the white rabbits leaping into the border, disappearing, and coming out into another place, the leviathans, the ghosts, watching from beyond. All of this in fragments through taste or smell or senses she didn’t entirely understand.
- The plant with leaves that formed a rough circle was present when Saul found the “splinter� of light; both it and the cell phone (Lowry’s, from the first expedition, which does not work and is seemingly a copy) were found in “what Whitby swore was Dead Whitby’s backpack� after an encounter in the lighthouse. In the Southern Reach, the plant bloomed: “What did the blossom look like?� “Like an ordinary flower, with seven or eight petals. Translucent, almost white.�
- Then his eyes adjusted and the source of the light coalesced: a blossom. A pure white blossom with eight petals, which had unfurled from the top of a familiar plant, whose roots disappeared into the papers below. The plant that had enticed him on the lighthouse lawn, so long ago, to reach down, drawn by a glitter, a gleam.
- Area X experiences time dilation, which is why decomposition seems to occur so much faster within.
- Traveling through the door of Area X seems like it may take them through the ruins of Area X’s origin planet. They theorize that those that go through the border (eg the rabbits) may end up there…or it may be a delusion.
- Some characters think Area X is not on Earth (the stars, the time dilation, the border). Area X simply “camouflages� the sky.
- Whitby visited Area X with the director/psychologist on her secret trip.
- The director/psychologist had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer before deciding to join the twelfth expedition.
- The S&SB seems to be funded by Central—or perhaps just Henry and Suzanne: No Henry, no Suzanne that looked like them appeared on the lists of the S&SB members, no stray photos with members unidentified leaped out to reveal either of them.
- The biologist discovered she could stall the “brightness� by injuring herself.
- The biologist thinks she found her husband, transformed into an owl.
- The moaning creature is (or is a failed copy of) the psychologist from the expedition before the twelfth, and is a sort of human-hog hybrid: Sunken into the middle were the remains of a hideous skull and a bleached and hardened mask of a face that stared sightless up at them, fringed with mold and lichen. “The moaning creature,� she said. “The moaning creature we always heard at dusk.� That had chased the biologist across the reeds. The flesh had sloughed off, runneled down the sides of the bones, vanished into the soil. What remained was a skeleton that looked uncannily like the confluence of a giant hog and a human being, a set of smaller ribs suspended from the larger like a macabre internal chandelier, and tibias that ended in peculiar nub-like bits of gristle scavenged by birds and coyotes and rats. And, later: There also came to me the thought that perhaps what this expedition member had brought to Area X had contributed to this final state. And, later: They implant into the brain of the psychologist—on what will turn out to be the last eleventh—what Lowry calls “a pearl of surveillance and recall.� Some tiny subset of the silver egg that is Central, passing first through Lowry’s deforming grip.
- But to you it’s deadly serious, especially a list of “conditions required for Area X to exist� that include � an isolated place � an inert but volatile trigger � a catalyst to pull the trigger � an element of luck or chance in how the trigger was deployed � a context we do not understand � an attitude toward energy that we do not understand � an approach to language that we do not understand
- “It acts a bit like an organism, like skin with a million greedy mouths instead of cells or pores. And the question isn’t what it is but is the motive. Think of Area X as a murderer we’re trying to catch.�
- Under your watch, there are breakthroughs in expedition equipment, like enhanced field microscopes and weaponry that doesn’t trigger Area X’s defenses. More expeditions begin to come back intact, and the refinements in making people into their functions—the tricks you’ve learned from living in your own disguise—seem to help.
- She laughed at machines, not animals. “It definitely understands and acknowledges machines. It understands them better than we do.� She stopped to face him, to lend emphasis, and something like anger pulsed out from her. “Have you not understood yet that whatever’s causing this can manipulate the genome, works miracles of mimicry and biology? Knows what to do with molecules and membranes, can peer through things, can surveil, and then withdraw. That, to it, a smartphone, say, is as basic as a flint arrowhead, that it’s operating off of such refined and intricate senses that the tools we’ve bound ourselves with, the ways we record the universe, are probably evidence of our own primitive nature. Perhaps it doesn’t even think that we have consciousness or free will—not in the ways it measures such things.�
- Across the deepening blue, high up, something drifted that resembled ripped and tattered streamers. Long and wide and alien. Its progress so far up, so far away � Control thought of an invisible shredded plastic bag, eviscerated to elongate and drift through the sky � except it was thicker than that and part of the sky, too.
- If they now traversed a landscape transplanted from somewhere far remote, then what existed within the coordinates of the real Area X, back on Earth? (hide spoiler)]

Some favorite passages:

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.

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 nothing.

He had gloves on still, so he knelt beside the plant and reached for the glittering thing, brushing up against the leaves. Was it a tiny shifting spiral of light? It reminded him of what you might see staring into a kaleidoscope, except an intense white. But whatever it was swirled and glinted and eluded his rough grasp, and he began to feel faint. Alarmed, he started to pull back. But it was too late. He felt a sliver enter his thumb. There was no pain, only a pressure and then numbness, but he still jumped up in surprise, yowling and waving his hand back and forth.

She was thinking, too, about what she had seen on the journey into Area X, how it had seemed as if to both sides there lay nothing around them but the terrible blackened ruins of vast cities and enormous beached ships, lit by the roaring red and orange of fires that did nothing but cast shadow and obscure the distant view of mewling things that crawled and hopped through the ash.

Then another thought occurred, and stooping a bit, Saul pulled up the lens bag directly above the glass shavings. Sure enough, he found a fissure where the glass met the mount. It was almost like what he imagined the hole from a bullet might look like, except smaller. He examined the “exit wound,� as he thought of it. The hairline cracks pushing out from that space resembled the roots of a plant.

The gulping slosh under the dock as they lashed the rowboat to the pier, the lap-licking wash and retreat over the rocks below, the creak of the planks as they came up the causeway. The anonymous birds in the trees fell silent, but a throbbing series of croaks continued from various parts of the overgrown grounds of the lighthouse. Somewhere beyond that the deliberate footfalls of some medium-size mammal making its way through the underbrush. While above them the pale, almost luminous jagged spire of the lighthouse rose, framed by the dark sky and the stars arrayed around it as if it was the center of the universe.

More like a seaside carnival in the winter, in the off-season, when even the beach is a poem about loneliness.

Control woke to a boot and a foot, just six inches from where he lay on his side under some blankets. The black tread of the army-issue boot was worn down in tired ridges like the map of a slope of hills. Dried mud and sand commingled there and in the sporadic black studs meant to provide a better grip. A dragonfly wing had been broken along the axis of that tread, pulverized into rounded panes and an emerald glitter. Smudges of grass, a smear of seaweed that had dried on the side of the boot.

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot—choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spiders and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting out of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before; I use my actual voice rarely enough.

Such phenomena, experienced off and on these past thirty years, have also been accompanied by a changing of the night sky. On such nights, presaged only by a kind of tremor in the brightness within me, there is never a moon. There is never a moon, and the stars above are unfamiliar—they are foreign, belonging to a cosmology I cannot identify. On such nights, I wish I had decided to become an astronomer.

The stages you’ve seen described are identification, indoctrination, reinforcement, and deployment, but Grace has seen other documents that borrow the semiotics of the supernatural: “manifestation, infestation, oppression, and possession.�

The surf, like white flames surging and questing across the sand.

Out in the sea, he thought he could see the rippling backs of leviathans as they breached and then returned to the depths. There came the stench of oil and gasoline and chemicals, the sea coming almost up to his feet now. He could see that the beach was strewn with plastic and garbage and tarred bits of metal, barrels and culverts clotted with seaweed and barnacles. The remains of ships rising, too. Detritus that had never touched this coast but was here now. Above, the stars seemed to be moving at a tremendous rate, through a moonless sky, and he could hear the thunderous screams of their passage—streaking faster and faster until the dark was dissolving into ribbons and streamers of light.

The world went on, even as it fell apart, changed irrevocably, became something strange and different.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too.

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2015 review: (None; originally rated 3 stars.)