Review: Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer
Blurb:
From the New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer’s first novel, Veniss Underground, takes readers on a journey to a labyrinthine city of tunnels, and the dangers lurking behind each turn. This paperback edition features the bonus novella “Balzac’s War.”
In a dark and decadent far future, the city of Veniss persists beside a dead ocean. Earth has become a desert wasteland ravaged by climate change. Veniss endures on the strength of its innovative tech of almost Boschian intensity, but at what cost? Where does the line between “made creature” and “person” lie?
Against this backdrop, Veniss Underground spins the tale of Nicholas, an aspiring, struggling Artist; his twin sister, Nicola; and Shadrach, Nicola’s former lover. A fateful trip by Nicholas to the maverick biotech Quin will have far-reaching consequences for all three―and for the fate of Veniss itself, as insurrection stirs and the oppressed begin to revolt.
Veniss Underground is Jeff VanderMeer’s first novel, a spectacular surreal foray into a world as influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky as by Ursula K. Le Guin. Readers of VanderMeer’s later work will be enchanted and horrified by the marvels within, including the author’s signature fascination with the nonhuman and the environment. By turns beautiful and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession against a backdrop of betrayal and biological mutation.
This reissue includes a new introduction by the National Book Award–winning author Charles Yu and a bonus story from Jeff VanderMeer.
Review:
Upon my shelves currently sit an inappropriate number of unread Jeff VanderMeer novels, but since the fourth title in what was previously the Southern Reach trilogy will soon be making the series a quartet (though I prefer the taxonomy used by the original four Alien films: “quadrilogy”) I decided it was finally time to meander my way through my stack of VanderMeer’s earliest novels.
As with many of my reads here for SFF Insiders, I needed a book to read during my flights to and from a work event; and Veniss Underground happened to be the thinnest of my unread VanderMeers, so it got to accompany me into the skies.
And unsurprisingly, Veniss Underground was immediately fascinating. I’ve read a good bit of VanderMeer’s canon, but even so I wasn’t prepared for Veniss Underground. If your only exposure to the fiction of Jeff VanderMeer are the books of the Southern Reach trilogy/quartet and their incredibly verdant texture, you may be surprised to learn that Veniss Underground is more or less a kind of cyberpunk novel—at least at first.
The story takes place in a distant (or perhaps near) future, in which environmental decay has painted the world with all the usual trappings of the genre: poisoned, murky skies; sickly rivers; superintelligent AIs running the important parts of the world; packed cities built higher and tighter than any known today; and vast seawalls that protect these cities from the encroaching tide of ever-rising oceans. The world is different, yes; but many things remain the same. People still make art, the computers that run the world still need to be programmed, and people still need protection. The POV character of the first section of the book—a man by the name of Nicholas—is a sculptor of holo-art; his sister Nicola is a programmer within the more bourgeois part of the city; and Nicola’s once-lover Shadrach is an associate of a crime lord bioengineer named Quin.
As with all of VanderMeer’s work, his characters are more than believable. VanderMeer has this knack for hyper-specific characterization, including bits of offhandedly-mentioned character history or other specific quirks, tics, or personal preferences that make each character feel vividly real, perhaps—we might imagine—plucked out of VanderMeer’s own life if their behaviors and the ways in which they interacted with the world were not so phantasmagorical. They are real people made hyperreal, set into a world of eerie familiarity and unimaginable difference.
The main thrust of the story begins when Nicholas’ apartment is robbed, and his holo-art stolen. Short on funds and/or alternate career paths, Nicholas enlists the help of Shadrach to get himself an audience with Quin, intent on brokering some kind of deal with the mysterious crime lord to get Nicholas back on his feet. But all does not go according to plan…
The second chunk of the story takes place from his sister Nicola’s perspective; and most interestingly is written in the rare second-person perspective. This fact may be intriguing to you all on its own, but then consider that Nicolas’ portion of the story was told in first-person perspective; and Shadrach’s section of the story will later on be told in the familiar third-person. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced that before—a story told with three different point-of-view perspectives. I’ve seen stories jump between two, sure (typically first and third); but throwing the odd second in there was a wild touch. And yet, that section of the novel did have a mesmerizing lyricism to it. In the Afterword for Veniss, VanderMeer remarks it took him almost a year to find the right voice for Nicola in this section as he discovered “the pleasures (and dangers) of second person”. I can’t imagine writing such a thing would result in anything less.
The narrative of Veniss Underground from there on our forms itself into the shape of a kind of mystery novel (which I would love to compare to VanderMeer’s 2021 Hummingbird Salamander, my current favorite of VanderMeer’s novels, because I think they share a lot of DNA; but that’s a task for a later Jake) before morphing again into a clear spin on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
I’m not remarkably well versed in ancient myths, but I’ll always recognize the imprint of Orpheus and Eurydice because in college I played Orpheus in a production of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses (based on David R. Slavitt’s translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid). For those unfamiliar, Orpheus and Eurydice were two young lovers, but a venomous snake bite kills Eurydice, driving Orpheus to descend into Hades to beg for her life so that she may return to the surface—not as a gift but as “a loan”, as Orpheus notes to the Lord of the Underworld that Eurydice “will soon enough be your citizen”; attempting to appeal to Hades’ better nature and allow Orpheus to have a few more years with Eurydice on Earth before they are both called back down to the Underworld in death. So too does Shadrach in the latter third of Veniss make a similar kind of descent into the earth.
Knowing this was one of VanderMeer’s earliest works, this third act descent triggered all sorts of analytical alarm bells in my mind—and not merely for its reflection of Ovid. Veniss Underground (2003), Annihilation (2014), and Hummingbird Salamander (2021) all contain key story beats in which a character descends into the earth (VanderMeer also notes in the Afterword for Veniss Underground that his Ambergris stories contain a similar subterranean world, though I have not yet read them to compare). Additionally, VanderMeer—again in the Afterword for Veniss—describes this specific descent as a “[need] to strip away the darkness of the subterranean land and show, unflinchingly, what hid in that darkness… fed by fragments the reader cannot see but can sense, by visions and transformations, by cross-pollination with other story cycles…”
This idea, of the discovery of the hidden world, or of a revelation contained just out of sight, plays a vital role in VanderMeer’s fiction. The first of VanderMeer’s novels I’d ever read—as I’m sure is the case with most people introduced to his work after 2014—was Annihilation. In that book, a biologist exploring the enigmatic Area X discovers a particular pit leading deep into the earth—a stony spiral staircase that she immediately perceives as a tower, though all her companions insist on calling it a tunnel. Descending into this tower/tunnel becomes a form of self-discovery, as is the descent into the earth of Jane Smith, the protagonist of Hummingbird Salamander. And so too do we see that same journey of self-discovery occur in Veniss Underground. We witness as the descent takes on the shape not just of Ovid’s telling of Orpherus and Eurydice but also of Dante’s journey through Hell in Inferno (another detail confirmed by VanderMeer in the Afterword). And it’s in this latter section of the novel that Veniss becomes its most VanderMeerian. It is dark and weird and gross and unsettling and nightmarish and frightening and rich and beautiful and hypnotic and lyrical and unbelievably captivating in that way that only Jeff VanderMeer novels are.
I finished reading this novel towards the tail end of my flight, at which point—as I closed it up and slid it into the little pocket on the back of the seat in front of me—the man sitting next to me asked, “Finished your book?” I answered in the affirmative, to which he asked a second question, a simple, “Good?” My response was immediately, “Yes!”, but then I thought of a thousand qualifiers I could tack onto that exclamation. I think everyone should read Jeff VanderMeer because his books are truly unlike anything else I’ve ever read; but sometimes it’s hard to recommend something like Veniss Underground to the stranger sitting on the plane next to you, because suddenly you remember this book has a scene where one character sifts through a pile of desiccated human legs to find someone possibly buried beneath them, or a character whose body is fused to a countertop in their shop (and whose finger each dangle purple spiders, their webs spliced into the flesh of his hands), or a scene where hundreds of genetically modified meerkats are watching disturbing recordings of… you know what, I’ll just stop there.
So now comes the task of reading the other loose VanderMeer texts I have on my shelf before Absolution spreads its roots into the seedbed of my mind. I’d heartily recommend Veniss Underground to any fan of VanderMeer’s other works, to any enthusiasts of what has come to be known in recent years as “Weird” fiction, or to cyberpunk fans looking for an unexpected spin on the genre. I’ve said it before in these reviews, but the best books—in my opinion—are the ones that stick with you long after you flip past the final page; and Veniss Underground is certainly such a book.
