A Review of Jeff VanderMeer’s “Ambergris”
Mushroom Art
Jeff VanderMeer is a genius. I can only make this pronouncement having now read the author’s Ambergris trilogy. Sure, I’ve read other works by the author, but nothing has been quite as mind-blowing as reading about the city of Ambergris and its sometimes mad, but mostly brilliant, inhabitants. What makes this work even more startling is that it came early in VanderMeer’s career. The Ambergris trilogy, which has been now collected in an omnibus edition containing all three works, came before the Borne duology and even the Southern Reach Trilogy. All in all, the novella collection City of Saints and Madmen (2001), and the novels Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and Finch (2009), are prime examples of world-building: making worlds seem complete and historical, and fully fleshed out. That world-building is what makes VanderMeer a genius. The books, which can be read individually, feel complete when brought together, like puzzle pieces that expose a larger whole.
City of Saints and Madmen, in its lead-off position, is perhaps the most brilliant of the three books collected here. However, it does bear pointing out that this is not a complete version of the novella collection. While it collects the novellas that were included in its original printing, plus one more (“The Cage”) that appeared only in subsequent editions, it does not collect all of the stories in the expanded editions of the book published after 2001. Still, City of Saints and Madmen is still potent, and the reason why is because it serves as an introduction to the city of Ambergris, both its human inhabitants and its mysterious “grey caps” — mushroom-shaped humanoids who live underneath the city, but who always seem to be on the periphery of the action. Some of this gets a bit meta at times — one novella, a written early history of the city, is so self-referential that it includes (groan!) footnotes — but VanderMeer manages to fire on all cylinders when he sits down to pen a rousing good tale. My favourite, “Dradin, In Love,” has a completely devastating ending that you won’t see coming.
Shriek: An Afterword is the longest book of the bunch, and it is meant to be an afterword to the early history of the city contained in City of Saints and Madmen. It is more a history or biography of the author of that history, Duncan Shriek, and his art dealing sister Janice. I won’t mince words: some of the story is a little dry and boring because Duncan Shriek, in my view, isn’t that interesting of a character, even if he does become a focal resident of the city by the time Finch rolls around. Basically, in Shriek, what you get is a story about Duncan and how the love of his life turned on him and started publishing books that counterpointed every facet of life in Ambergris and of the grey caps that he had authored. Even though a big part of the book isn’t very exciting (though part of it does take place during a very unusual war), it manages to cast a forward gaze to the era of Donald Trump and his reactionary politics. In a way, Shriek is a book that managed to predict the future some 10 to 15 years in advance.
If Shriek is predictive of America’s future, then Finch is a book that is mired in the present timeframe of which it was written: with references to twin towers, suicide bombers, and terrorism in general, the book is a mirror to America of the double-aughts. The tone of Finch is different from what precedes it. More of a hard-boiled detective tale than anything else, the book is set 100 years after the events of Shriek, a time where the gray caps have risen to take control of Ambergris and the titular character is a police officer who is investigating a rather bizarre double homicide. While the book is entertaining and fun, even if parts of it don’t seem to make much sense (in true hard-boiled fashion), it still has a much different tone than the rest of the Ambergris trilogy, though it is still a necessary read to round off what happened to characters introduced in the other books.
Overall, the Ambergris trilogy is an important read because, even if it was written or published in the 2000s, it has a lot to say about the pandemic we now find ourselves in the middle of. (The gray caps, for once, can release spores, it seems, that can turn humans into partial mushrooms.) It is also very, very weird, and delightfully so. It’s hard to peg Ambergris. While it gets dubbed as part of the New Weird movement or genre, and this is something that’s commented on in the work, it has elements of steampunk and slipstream fiction, along with some soft SF. Still, even if the work isn’t really any of those elements, just a fusing of parts of those elements, the collection is still astonishing for how real Ambergris feels as a city state. VanderMeer does an amazing job of making you feel that Ambergris is just a different version of New Orleans and maybe Memphis fused together. The River Moth, which Ambergris sits on, really could be another version of the Mississippi. These books are not perfect by any stretch, but they amuse and are a real treat to savour, and it will take you a while to get through these 900 or so pages, rife with footnoting and texts within texts. If that sounds like fun to you, I would invite you to celebrate Jeff VanderMeer’s wonderful brand of genius and weirdness. Read these books collected into one digestible place. They may, in the end, be so forward-looking that they will wind up reading you.
Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris was published by MCD on December 1, 2020.
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You may also be interested in the following reviews: Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne and Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
