Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

Wow! Now that I've finished the final book (so claimed by Vandermeer) in the Ambergris cycle I'm looking forward to waiting a while and then going back and re-reading all three books at once (this one, City of Saints and Madmen, and Shriek). I'm really all over the place on Finch and have a feeling that I need to jam all three of these mind-altering shrooms into my brain at once now that I know how it ends... If 'ends' is the right word to use. Anyways here are some preliminary notes...

Finch is both a departure and a return in comparison to its two predecessors. Ambergris is an occupied city and title character John Finch is a uneasy collaborator working as a detective for the gray caps, a terrifyingly uncanny fungal race. (Though as with most myths of 'evil' natives, VanderMeer is careful to note that humans, not the gray caps, started the butchery.) While CoS&M was a collage of texts and Shriek was an argument between two writers (brother and sister), Finch is a noir detective novel who's required reading list of clues is in the first two books. (Vandermeer claims the books are independent, but interdependent portals all leading to the same cavern might be more accurate.) The book is a detective novel that by the usual conventions should aim to solve the mystery that VanderMeer has so artfully created behind the many fictional author/characters who quarrel with each other. Yet the book resists a neat resolution, which in the end both disappointed me and made me happy that the author hadn't killed the mysteries that flow through his books like life blood.

The first twenty? pages of the book's choppy noir sentences were a chore for me. I've got a bad history with sentence fragments. A local sports writer decided this was the bees-knees to dramatic reportage. It. Was not. But give VanderMeer a chance. He isn't some naive hack. My advice to anyone who doesn't like the hard-boiled sentence fragments of his prose is to persevere until Finch eats the brain-bulbs. Once you've gone down that rabbit hole, if you still don't like the trip then it might be fair to drop it. For me, the hinge scenes of the bulb visions is where I got the grin, stopped continually noticing the craft and began to imbibe the story.

Some of my disappointment about the end of the novel stem from John Finch being a passive character. This is the danger when an author has created such a vivid and deeply textured world. In the end it feels that John Finch isn't an active agent who's actions effect the plot of the story. He is ultimately just a tool of the world (and the author). At least this is my preliminary report. I re-read the last thirty or so pages of the book trying to pin down what I was feeling. It may be that the first two books in the Ambergris cycle avoided this sense of passiveness because the author-characters did do something: they 'wrote' their texts. In contrast John Finch gets swallowed by Ambergris and then is spat out at the end.

Ah, but John Finch is an author! As a detective he writes reports for the grey caps -- a viable text in VanderMeer's collage. But what happens to Finch's final report? (Flip-flip.) He writes an evasive report, not giving away anything to his gray cap overlords, puts that aside, then writes, in part: "YOU'LL ALL GO DOWN WONDERING HOW IT HAPPENED. I'LL NEVER UNDERSTAND YOU, BUT YOU'LL NEVER UNDERSTAND US, EITHER." Then everything is ripped up and shoved down the ghastly sphincter that the gray caps use for communiques, along with whatever broken shards of refuse Finch can smash and shove down the protesting hole. The more I write about it the more I love that VanderMeer insists on the mutual incomprehensibility of human and gray caps. That feels far more real than the anthropomorphic characters that usual populate our safe and self-satisfied comfort food fantasies. The universe is weird and unknowable. Each one of us is unknowable. These odd marks on paper (and computer screens) are our only clues.

Oh and let me quickly note the amazing grossness of Finch's gun. The drippiest phallic symbol ever inflicted on a noir novel. And that Philip K. Dick moment early on in the novel when I wondered just who the hell John Finch was, and did he even know who he was. It is a tribute to VanderMeer's craft that he could have such a discombobulated POV character and still manage to evoke the complex world of Ambergris.

So despite the difficulties and initial dissatisfactions, it is because of the high level of writing and scope and ambition that I feel compelled to take Finch so seriously and to think about this book far longer than any other book I've read in a while. If you take your fantasy/sf serious, if you want to be challenged and step over the bounds of the mundane, this is a book for you.