SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer: https://t.co/gvVmbYEQmn
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) June 24, 2021
Short Review: 7.5 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): A combination of VanderMeer's ecological weird scifi with a spy thriller results in a novel where how much the events of the plot matter is a question, but is compelling nonetheless.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) June 24, 2021
2/3
Hummingbird Salamander is the latest book by weird/ecological SF/F author Jeff VanderMeer, most famously known for his Southern Reach trilogy (or the trilogy's first book, Annihilation). VanderMeer's prior work has nearly always captivated me, even when I haven't necessarily loved it, featuring scifi and fantasy worlds that are downright strange results of modern day environmental/ecological/bio-technological processes. So despite my bouncing off his last book (his YA Fantasy "A Peculiar Peril") I was excited to try his latest when it came out.
And Hummingbird Salamander is a fascinating novel that will give people serious vibes of Annihilation, especially with its main character "Jane." The novel essentially takes VanderMeer's exploration of inevitable environmental disaster and his prior use of protagonists with serious past issues making their internal lives and narratives a mess...and combines it with a spy thriller, as Jane winds up falling into a conflict between an environmental "terrorist", her evil corporate family, and others with their own agendas. It's a fascinating book in how much things can just happen and fall out of control and yet not matter, leading to an ending typical of VanderMeer in the questions it leaves open.
-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
When a barista hands "Jane Smith" receives a mysterious envelope with a key to a storage unit, she has no idea what to expect. Jane is a security consultant, working for a company to help find other company's security gaps and to then offer to fix them. Her job is stable, she has a seemingly loving husband and daughter. Jane has no reason to upend her life for a mysterious note.
But Jane goes to the storage unit anyhow and finds a taxidermy hummingbird, of a kind dying out, and a message:
Hummingbird
.. .. ..
Salamander
----Silvina
The message ignites old memories in Jane, of an abusive past, a lost sibling, and a life long forgotten, and sends her on the trail of Silvina, the recently-dead daughter of an industrialist suspected of being an ecoterrorist. And as Jane upends her own stable life to figure out the trail, to find the Salamander, she finds herself and all she once cared about targeted by those searching for what Silvina left behind.
But for Jane the biggest question isn't her survival, but what Silvina's message means about her past....and the world's future.
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Hummingbird Salamander will call to mind for a lot of readers VanderMeer's Annihilation. Like that book's protagonist (The Biologist), this book's protagonist Jane tells the story entirely in the first person, with so much of the narrative going on in her own head. Jane is thrown off by the message and the hummingbird, such that her job, her husband, and her daughter cease to be important to her - if they ever were (Jane suggests that these were important, and takes some action to try to make up for what her inattention is doing to her daughter, but it's very much too little to really matter which raises the question of how much Jane is lying to herself). Instead, she's caught wandering in her own narrative between the past, where her brother was found drowned after years of abuse from her grandfather, and the future, where Silvana's writings suggest that the world is doomed.
And of course all of this is wrapped in a spy narrative, as Jane attempts to decipher Silvina's trail, based upon both public knowledge and the message of the Hummingbird Salamander. So you have mysterious assailants and spies, you have a stalker texting Jane repeatedly on a phone, you have Jane's attachment to her bag (The "Shovel Pig) and her new phone (the "Bunker Hog" or "Bog") that she acquires along the way to try and keep her sleuthing off the record. And Jane is totally out of her depth, security minded as she may be, as she investigates what in other hands would be a story of conspiracies that would lead to a chance for Jane to save the world in the end.
But this is VanderMeer, and he's not interested in a story that simple. So the conspirators are fighting over something that may or may not exist, and the story is as much about Jane's rediscovery of what happened in her past, the abuse she and her brother suffered, and what was really going on back home. And again it's about a future where the world is already on its way to destruction, with animals and the environment dying more and more every day (the book takes place in a near-future where more ecological devastation and drone surveillance is ever present, even as so much remains the same). An so the question Jane has to deal with is whether Silvina is mad or merely prescient, and whether or not she has any answers as to how to save the world or not - and whether those answers are worth hanging onto. Like Annihilation, VanderMeer ends this one without any clear answers, as Jane makes a choice....one whose effects are left entirely to the imagination.
It's a fascinating way to end a novel, where how much anything that happens really matters is a question....and yet it still works, all along the way. It's not a standout like Annihilation was, but it's impressive and well worth your time.
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