Hummingbird Salamander

What a lollapalooza of a novel! I have been a fan of VanderMeer's work for a long time, loving his weird world in the Southern Reach trilogy and the super-weird world in Borne and Dead Astronauts. This book is different but the same. It has no giant flying bear terrorizing a destroyed city, nor bushes shaped like humans. It is a thriller/noir story of eco-terrorism and a mysterious quest. One reviewer compared it to The Crying of Lot 49 and it does have that quality of a wild goose chase where everything either means something or nothing at all.Here's the thing: this novel is SO well written - the imagery, the characters, the tension, the chase and the action - that you are fully engulfed in the story and you can't wait to get to the end and then you don't want it to end. AND you cannot pick up another novel right away because it just won't be as good as this one. (I had to read some nonfiction for a while to clear my head.)The end is unexpected and perfect. Enjoy the ride getting there.

I’ll be honest: I finished the book feeling unsatisfied. I engaged early with the protagonist, who uses the name “Jane Smith,” and is built like a tall lumberjack. Right away, she informs that she is going to tell us how the world ended. She’s a cyber security analyst with a husband she calls Bear, and a teenaged daughter. I was compelled initially, but it didn’t sustain my interest consistently. I had to see what happened so I read the whole book, expecting that I’d appreciate the destination, if not so much the journey. With clues and mystery piling up, in this noir-ish fable with a physically clumsy amateur detective “Jane,” I started out intrigued. For me, most of the story felt exhausting and unwieldy, stiffly stylized and meandering. It’s as if I read a different book than those that enjoyed it.I think the combination of the noir detective and climate disaster dystopia turned eco-terrorism got too gawky, the way Vandermeer did it. He wrote his protagonist, a wife and mother, abandon her family for a dead woman scientist she didn’t know that left her a taxidermied hummingbird and a manifesto scattered like breadcrumbs, all to follow down a rabbit hole. While she saw the world was burning, the skies change to a chemical green tinge, and a murky pandemic invade the species. “Jane” casually cheated on her husband with strangers (even though she was introverted), engaged in casual violence, and watched others get casually beaten, battered, and killed.I’m confused as to why Vandermeer kept trotting out stereotypical villains and half-villains, who we obviously won’t care about, and set up scene after scene with these half-formed and half-baked characters. Some were caricatures that met cartoon fates. All the while, threaded through the novel, were the supposedly profound (?) words left by the dead Argentine scientist, Silvina, scion to a wealthy, powerful, criminal family. Criminal as in: wildlife trafficking and (maybe) bioweapons.Anyway, most of the stuff written by Silvina seemed rather trite and coyly abstruse. Occasionally, an author will disguise an inability to shine a light by keeping us in perpetual darkness. Vandermeer seemed that way, or maybe he deals better with the cerebral than the emotional, (which he then sentimentalized at key plot turns). The novel was often busy with extraneous details of hiding finding, texting, calling that were essentially meaningless after a while. Instead of enlightening me, I was drowning in the drawn-out repetition and sociopathy of it all.When everyone is a sociopath, what is really at stake? The world, I know--that’s what the author put up as the Holy Grail--saving the world. But Jane was constantly being beaten and bruised, either by accident or enemy. And we followed her step by step, car by car, and cars that trail cars, her and her “Shovel Pig,” her nickname for her jumbo handbag.I learned some things that the internet could have taught me about hummingbirds and salamanders, but the ultimate reveal of the bird and the amphibian were anticlimactic. As far as ecology and wildlife trafficking, what I learned was choppy and randomly sequenced, so I got lost in the weeds, or in the pervasive dark. There’s not much one can figure out, either, since new, essential facts are unveiled right before each small discovery, and the build-up of one thing after another and another gummed it up for me. That, and “Jane’s” lot and lode of injuries. Ouch!Then this over-the-top ending, which I think Vandermeer could have finessed more keenly. I can tell that he has talent, that maybe I’d like some of his other books. Perhaps this was a rushed quarantine-y book to meet the times. Or I’m just the wrong reader. The style felt forced and disingenuous. Of course others will find this exciting and adventurous, and I accept that I dropped out of caring about these characters left to save the world, even though I read the entire mythic tale, hoping to be converted. I’m sorry, Jeff Vandermeer, that I had to write this review. I can tell that this writer cares about humanity and other living things, more than what is conveyed, extinct or otherwise.2.5 rounded down

This is a powerful story of how one woman blows up her comfortable middle-class life in the Pacific Northwest set against the backdrop of ecological catastrophe and social breakdown, just a few short years in our future.It's a great read, a page-turner, as the protagonist follows the clues left by an accused ecoterrorist before her death. Very bad people start coming after her, but she won't relent in her search regardless of the consequences. She is tough and fights back.We learn about her dysfunctional family and childhood on a farm. She is full of anger. I found the character very compelling. More and more people are likely to make risky and dangerous choices as the ecosystem is destroyed and human society unravels.For several years in junior high and high school I kept tiger salamanders as pets that I had caught in the nearby woods. They were easy to take care of -- I fed them earthworms in the summer and mealworms in the winter. I eventually let them go back into the woods. That gave me a powerful connection to the novel.This is the first VanderMeer novel I have read. It won't be the last.

SpoilersI came to Hummingbird from VanderMeer's previous surreal scifi, having loved Borne, The Southern Reach trilogy, Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts. So when I read early reviews of Hummingbird suggesting it was a thriller, I confess I did not believe it. Surely there would be something different, something more -- a variation on a genre. And while there is indeed more, different, it is on top of an absolutely first-rate thriller every bit the match of the best of early Ludlum: an unlikely common-person hero who performs unexpected feats of survival and wit against shadowy foes, with world-scale stakes.I don't want to make too much of this, but another review of Hummingbird that I read a while back stayed with me through my read, and that was by someone who downrated it because they didn't find Jane's journey -- ditching her job, family and suburban existence to follow a murky mystery presented by an absent stranger -- credible or well-explained. WHY?? they whined. And I've come to the conclusion that reader didn't actually read the same book, because the entire manuscript could be said to be a study in Jane asking "why am I doing this?" That reader seemed to think the author missed the boat or didn't recognize how outlandish Jane's actions are and needful of explanation, whereas I found quite the contrary: the author, through Jane, seemed to want to push and push through the veneer of "normal" life, to try to discover exactly what it takes to shift us out of conventional comforts. Because that's where we are being forced, by history and by nature.So Jane is inventively and appealingly depicted as being the sort of person who might at least nominally be willing to contemplate throwing over the normal order. My nameless reviewer is so mystified at this that it's as if they can't contemplate any such person existing, let alone this particular one named Jane, which I think says more about them than about VanderMeer's story-writing.One of Hummingbird's final messages seems to be "what you so cherish in the depths of your monkey brain and hold up as the 'normal order' is very rapidly going to complete shit, so at what point, really, does breaking from that stop being revolutionary but instead a necessity for survival?" It's a gritty, difficult, unpleasant message and Jane is one of my favorite heroes in recent fiction for her whole personhood. (A lit major would gleefully point out the unequivocal feminist symbolism of literally abandoning husband, home, and child.)Silvina is the other hero, whom we never meet in life. And her heroism consists in taking the implicit riddle above -- how do you break the normal order, in a way that matters, and not lose either your soul or your life? -- and answering it to the hilt. When you take the path Silvina took, the world will make you out a nihilist pretty much regardless. So on the one hand you have Jane trying to peer behind that mask, always grasping to understand reality a little bit more clearly; and on the other, Silvina, whose reality has long since become so fractured, bifurcated.And in the end, when Jane's own reality has fractured at least as much, what is her frame of mind as she confronts the mind-bogglingly Grand Gesture that Silvina has been engaged in all this time? In what position is she to judge Silvina's intentions, or to frame an "appropriate" response of her own? "Appropriate" has been left in the dust.This riddle is largely left to the reader -- in the end, you know Jane's intentions, or think you do. But anything can happen, except the one thing we all want: for the world to be saved.

I bought Hummingbird Salamander (HS) on the strength of the movie Annihilation, based on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel. HS was one the most poorly written books I’ve read in 20 years. Fully a quarter of the sentences are incomplete, being variously nouns with no predicates, predicates with no nouns, lone dependent clauses, etc. Many paragraphs are single sentences that have little connection with the preceding ones. More often than not, VanderMeer uses periods where commas are more appropriate, giving the text a jarring, broken-up character that’s almost unreadable: “From the night before. A different shift. No chain of evidence.” There are pages and pages of incoherent rambling apropos of nothing. Apparently, VanderMeer wouldn’t know an adverb if it slapped him in the face: “Drove like I was a solid citizen. Parked in the driveway and got out casual.” Not only is the terrible grammar repulsive, the storytelling is grade school level. It is written in first person and the writing is so inept that I couldn’t have cared less what happened to the narrator because VanderMeer is so bad at character development. Open the book to any page and start reading; you will be appalled at the writing on that very page. This is a C+ in a sixth grade English assignment. To compare, I found the first chapter of Annihilation online, thinking that if the writing in Annihilation was the dog’s breakfast that it was in HS, the screenwriter for Annihilation had gotten robbed when he/she didn’t win an Oscar for turning it into an actual story. However, unlike HS, Annihilation read like an adult had written it. I fault the publisher and editor as much as VanderMeer for letting HS see the light of day. A plausible explanation is that VanderMeer wrote it as a joke to see just how far into absurdity he could push them before they pushed back. They didn’t. He must have laughed all the way to the bank. A truly awful book.