There’s No Escape From Contamination Above the Toxic Sea
This content was originally published by WAI CHEE DIMOCK on 5 May 2017 | 3:08 pm.
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Merijn Hos
BORNE
By Jeff VanderMeer
323 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
Jeff VanderMeer likes to imagine nonhuman life-forms. In one sense this is nothing new; it’s the pride and glory of science fiction. But most sci-fi nonhumans tend to be human in appearance, resembling us in size, anatomy and general disposition, and departing from us only in one or two highlighted traits: the ears and super-rationality of the Vulcans in “Star Trek,” say, or the supposed lack of empathy in Philip K. Dick’s androids. VanderMeer turns that differential ratio on its head. His nonhumans are genre bending and taxonomy defying. They have unclassifiable shapes, complicated smells and inexplicable behavior. Especially in their fungal forms, they can be both plant and animal, their alienness at once unabashedly fictive yet almost empirically cataloged. The golden green and highly infectious nodules in the Southern Reach trilogy (2014) show up as English words and sentences — literally, the writing on the wall. The gray caps in “Finch” (2009), new rulers of Ambergris, spend their nights building fungus-draped towers that look “shaggy, almost as if they had fur, were flesh and blood,” while emitting a “smell like oil and sawdust and frying meat.” The mushrooms in “City of Saints and Madmen” (2001) are blue-tinged, four or five feet tall, with a stem as thick as an oak; the locals nickname them “white whales.”
VanderMeer is that rare novelist who turns to nonhumans not to make them approximate us as much as possible but to make such approximation impossible. All of this is magnified a hundredfold in “Borne,” his new novel. At the center is the titular hero, a nondescript object when first introduced by the narrator and aspiring mother Rachel, who plucks him off the fur of the gigantic flying bear Mord. At that point Borne is no more than the size of Rachel’s fist, catching her attention only because “beacon-like, he strobed emerald green across the purple every half minute or so.” But he soon gets bigger, sometimes doubling or even tripling in size in a matter of weeks. He will eat anything: crumb, pebble, any worm or insect. Even though so much goes into him, nothing ever comes out, a fact that strikes Rachel as “absurd, even humorously sinister.” The sinister absurdity deepens with the disappearance of five feral children who have tortured Rachel after breaking into her hideout.
Borne, now, is suddenly able to talk, demonstrating knowledge of many things he couldn’t have experienced. He is also suddenly polymorphous, becoming a rock, a lizard, even a human. Rachel tries to parent him, educate him, but it’s pointless, because he’s already a nonstop learning machine, reading, sampling and incorporating into himself everything that comes his way. How can one educate a “hybrid of sea anemone and squid,” a liquid sprawl of “rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and sea greens”?
Nautical images are everywhere in “Borne,” though the setting is in fact land rather than sea. But the sea isn’t too far away — not far in memory, anyway, for Rachel is a climate refugee from a submerged archipelago, long dependent on the ocean for sustenance and learning the hard way that what feeds can also drown. She and her parents used to bring out their telescope to look for lights from neighboring islands, until one night they put the useless instrument away for good. The family fled their own island when Rachel was 6, moving from camp to camp, hoping to outrun disaster and never succeeding. Then her parents were lost as well. Rachel is now in a new city, scavenging on her own, finding shelter only when she takes up with her companion Wick in his much fortified and oddly sea-haunted Balcony Cliffs, a warren of apartments with marine objects etched into many of its secrets, including a “diagram of a fish curled inside the outer tube of a broken telescope and a metal box filled with tiny vermilion nautilus shells,” tucked away in a locked drawer.
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