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“We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.��

It’s a weird story, off-kilter and bizarre, of a world so surreal and fragile, almost like a fever dream, an unsettling hallucination precariously teetering on the edge of a nightmare and occasionally dipping into sheer insanity.

“The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we've alive.��

Imagine a nightmarish ruined city which is yet so alive and full of strange biotech from the Company (nothing good can ever come out of a company named “The Company��) �� a city ruled and terrorized by a monstrous colossal Godzilla-scale flying bear and its smaller bloodthirsty “proxies��, where a Magician (who mutilates feral children into mutant killers) is wrestling for control with that godlike bear, “autonomous meat�� can sometimes be found hanging out in the streets, with poisonous river running through it, scavengers scouring the streets trying to survive, and local biotech fauna including medical worms, attack beetles and alcohol minnows. If you want to survive, you hide and set traps and hope you don’t get mauled.

“In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time.��



“Come close, I could smell the brine, rising in a wave, and for a moment there was no ruined city around me, no search for food and water, no roving gangs and escaped, altered creatures of unknown origin or intent. No mutilated, burned bodies dangling from broken streetlamps.��

This is the place where Rachel, a scavenger for biotech and food, with little memory of how she got to the City, and Wick, a biotech maker and drug dealer, add a new member to their makeshift family �� the titular Borne, “like a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens��, not quite a plant and not quite an animal and definitely not human �� but certainly a person. And maybe a weapon �� because persons can also be weapons, can’t they?

“That’s the problem with people who are not human. You can’t tell how badly they’re hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don’t always know how to tell you.��

It’s a strange world, indeed.
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Strange setup aside, the story is actually pretty simple and straightforward. What makes it stand out, though, is a focus on unusual and yet deeply familiar to us humans parental bond (“I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing��) as Rachel finds herself basically an interspecies adopted mother to Borne, with the love and sacrifice and heartbreak that go along with it. Borne is a person that makes Rachel see beauty in devastation and brings purpose to the world of survival. It hurts seeing a child grow up too quickly as innocence, of course, cannot last.

“I’d been teaching him the whole time, with every last little thing I did, even when I didn’t realize I was teaching him.��

And so what if living creatures sometimes disappear when Borne is around?

“That was the moment I knew I’d decided to trade my safety for something else. That was the moment. And no matter what happened next, I had crossed over into another place, and the question wasn’t who I should trust but who should trust me.��

Another theme that struck a chord with me is not just the mother-child relationship between Rachel and Borne but also a tenuous, fraught relationship between Rachel and her partner Wick. Initially it seemed like a alliance of convenience, made for resources and survival and need for companionship, but along the way it slowly developed into something a bit more, an actual partnership and a bond that survives the tumult of Borne and the City and deceit and family dysfunction.
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What makes a person is a question at the heart of this book, as well as the allures and perils of parenthood and parental bond, and it’s explored constantly �� even to the point where it gets to be a little bit of a metaphorical dead-horse-beating situation. But what rescues it from the occasional veering into macabre Hallmark-ish territory is constant injections of weirdness where VanderMeer doesn’t hold back in creating the hellscape of the setting. I can’t help but feel parallels with Stephen King’s Dark Tower Mid-World with its post apocalyptic alternate-reality afterlife-like atmosphere, and Strugatsky brothers “Roadside Picnic�� with the monstrous strangeness and toxicity, and a bit of Miéville’s New Crobuzon, and, of course, VanderMeer’s own “Annihilation�� with all of the above. Plot to me was really secondary to the exploration of this world’s entrancing toxic strangeness.

“He knew now that he could be harmed. He knew now that he was vulnerable. No joy would be the same for Borne. No playfulness, either. Because behind it would be this certain knowledge: that he could die.��

Perfect this book certainly isn’t. There are quite a few plot threads that led nowhere, and a lot of strangeness that was hinted at but never really explored ((view spoiler)[foxes? (hide spoiler)]), not to mention the completely anticlimactic presence of (view spoiler)[the Magician who really didn’t matter (hide spoiler)]. But the atmosphere made up for plot shortcomings and overall I enjoyed the weekend spent in the company of Borne and Co.

“Those are three dead skeletons on the wall, Borne.��
“Yes, Rachel. I took them from the crossroads. I thought they would look nice in here.��

4 stars.

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Recommended by: Britton