Review of Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer’s 2001collection City of Saints and Madmen was a tour de force.  Putting Ambergris on the map, it presented vignettes from multiple perspectives of a fantastical city: scattered amidst historical monologues and art house pieces, interviews with crazed writers and fictional glossaries are stories of the strange and Weird.  Shifting gears, VanderMeer followed up the collection with Shriek in 2006.  Approaching the fungal metropolis from a personal point of view, the character studies of a socialite and her historian brother anchor what is by comparison a more subdued but no less creative text.  But even after the second book, questions remained—what about the Gray Caps, the underground, what ever became of Duncan Shriek, what of Ambergris’ true history, among others.  Thus for the third Ambergris book, VanderMeer did what any writer would do who wants to get under the skin of their own creation: he wrote a detective novel in an attempt to uncover its mysteries.  Putting an exclamation point on the Ambergris series, Finch is that novel.

Though the perspectives vary significantly throughout City of Saints and Madmen, there is a classical feel to the collection, a sense that the stories are written in modes more akin to yesteryear than modern times.  Shriek saw the clock roll ahead; Ambergris was still not the modern metropolis one thinks of New York currently as, for example, but instead a previous iteration, perhaps mid 20th century.  The clock spinning further ahead in Finch, the setting is contemporized.  While far from obvious, the fungal city nevertheless has a turn of the 21st century feel to it.  The surface details as wonderfully Weird as VanderMeer’s imagination has proven itself to be, rather the shift is seen in the function of the elements deployed.  And none moreso than the state of socio-politics.

Review of City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer

I cannot think of a suitable place to begin my review of Jeff Vandermeer’s 2004 City of Saints and Madmen, my notes shooting off in wild directions.  I guess the title sums up the book perfectly; it is a smorgasbord of odd, paranormal, tragic, sinister, delicate, macabre, slithering, comedic, dreamlike, twisted ideas, with the eerily weird, eerily strange forever hovering in and around.  But as abstract as it may be, Vandermeer always keeps one toe in our reality, making the collection an art piece that can be enjoyed at several levels.

City of Saints and Madmen is an extremely varied conglomerate of writing.  From short story to transcribed interview, historical abstract to scientific monograph, letter to appendix, bibliography to memoire, all the pieces directly and indirectly describe the fictional city of Ambergris and its variety of inhabitants, human to mushroom.  The streets and buildings, homes and back alleys a muddy labyrinth of the industrial era, the mood of moist fungus overhangs all.  “The Story of Mr. X” regards a writer held against his will in the basement of a building.  “The Cage” tells of an antique collector and a strange piece he feels compelled to buy one day from a family experiencing a plague (of sorts).  “King Squid: Being a Brief Monograph Explaining Both the Phenomena of the Giant Freshwater Squid of Related Squid Folklore (Including the Festival of the Freshwater Squid)” is a monograph by Frederick Madnock on the rumors and scientific merits of the creature—entirely fictional, of course.  And there is much more, including an encrypted story within a story and the laugh-out-loud bibliography to Madnock’s paper.  Each piece with its own typeface and layout, the book was obviously prepared with care and an eye to the aesthetics beyond semiotics.  The entire book tied together by place, name, and idea, it was also prepared with multiple purposes in mind.