Finch | |||||
Jeff VanderMeer | |||||
Underland Press, 336 pages | |||||
A review by Christopher DeFilippis
His new novel Finch is no exception. The third and final volume of what VanderMeer dubs his Ambergris
Cycle, Finch sits comfortably alongside its predecessors, City of Saints and Madmen and
Shriek: An Afterward as another testament to VanderMeer's willingness to constantly question the concept
of a "traditional" novel and experiment with the form in an effort to transcend its limitations.
Whether he succeeds in this with Finch is arguable, but the novel certainly imbues VanderMeer's fictional
city of Ambergris with its trademark flair.
Finch returns readers to an Ambergris in strife. Fractured and weakened by civil war between House
Hoegbotton & Sons and Frankwrithe & Lewden, Ambergris became an easy target for the mysterious gray caps, its
mushroom-like underground denizens, who rose and conquered the city, subjugating it to martial law.
Fungus now blights Ambergris like a cancer, the air thick with spores. Formerly human Partials patrol the
streets, quasi-fungal enforcers who keep the populace in line while the gray caps build two mysterious
towers. But rumors of a resistance persist, fueled by subversive radio broadcasts from the mysterious Lady in Blue.
Straddling these factions is John Finch, a detective working for the gray caps who has tabs on the city's
underground. When Finch catches a bizarre double homicide -- one human, one gray cap -- that's obviously linked
to the resistance, he must work his shady connections to solve the case.
But Finch quickly discovers that he's in over his head, navigating criminal factions to crack the mystery, while
struggling to stay one step ahead of his gray cap bosses in a search for answers that may help the resistance
liberate Ambergris once and for all.
Finch is New Weird meets pulp noir, a hard-boiled detective story unwinding in Ambergris's surreal mean
streets. And in service to this atmosphere, VanderMeer writes Finch primarily in first-person sentence
fragments, terse prose meant to lend immediacy to the text and allow readers to experience the story on a more
visceral level, trolling Ambergris's dirty back alleys along with Finch.
But as I said before, it's arguable as to whether this unconventional narrative technique ultimately works to
the book's benefit; it all boils down to a matter of taste. I happen to enjoy a more dynamic, descriptive prose
style -- not purple, but buoyant. As a result, I was never able to fully immerse myself in the story, chiefly
because of the way it stuttered across the page.
That I found this to be Finch's primary weakness is ironic, because VanderMeer's masterful prose is what
converted me irrevocably to the Weird Fiction movement to begin with. The very first paragraph of his
novel Veniss Underground blew me away, and put me firmly on Team Vandermeer, never to look back.
The stories in City of Saints and Madmen are equally astounding, particularly "An Early History of
Ambergris." I was stunned by this absorbing tale, doubly so by the ancillary story contained entirely in the
footnotes to this "historic" pamphlet penned by fictional author Duncan Shriek.
Shriek becomes the focus of the second Ambergris book and his legacy plays a major role in Finch, set
some 100 years later. Shriek is the yeoman of the entire Ambergris Cycle, the narrative thread
that effectively binds it together. And in Finch, VanderMeer gives Duncan his proper due, definitively
concluding his story to satisfy fans.
What's less satisfying about Finch is Finch himself. It's obvious from early on that Finch isn't who he
says he is, that his nebulous past as a soldier in the war between the houses has driven him to adopt his new
identity. The problem is that by the time the book lets us in on the hows and whys, they have become largely
academic. You're fully vested in alias John Finch, and whom he might once have been turns out to be
tangential (and largely inconsequential) to the resolution of the book's main plot anyway.
On top of this, Finch spends a good majority of the novel wholly out of his depth, bouncing unwittingly
between rival factions working towards ends he can't figure out. As a result the story drives its title
character instead of the other way around. In the end, Finch comes off as little more than a walking plot
device that brings together the many disparate elements VanderMeer felt he needed to craft the conclusion
he envisioned for the Ambergris Cycle.
But I will give VanderMeer this: It's one hell of a conclusion. Despite my grumblings about how it gets there,
the climax of Finch is good enough to make you forgive the book's shortcomings. And so is the
depiction of Ambergris; even in decline, VanderMeer's fungal milieu is still in full, fantastic flower,
complimented by the many bizarre characters and creatures that Finch encounters -- not least of which is
his spore-infected, mutating police partner and best friend Whyte. Whyte is my hero.
Finch also gives readers a better sense of the world (and worlds) beyond the city of Ambergris, so
even if this is the last novel to visit the metropolis rising along the River Moth, there's nothing stopping
VanderMeer from returning to the same fictional universe (or universes) to start dazzling us anew.
Wherever he goes from here, we can be assured of one thing about Jeff VanderMeer's next book: it'll be
as unique as those that have come before it, and break new ground in New Weird.
Christopher DeFilippis is a serial book buyer, journalist and author. He published the novel Foreknowledge 100 years ago in Berkley's Quantum Leap series. He has high hopes for the next hundred years. In the meantime, his "DeFlip Side" radio segments are featured monthly on "Destinies: The Voice of Science Fiction." Listen up at DeFlipSide.com. |
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