Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 4/5 cats
We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.
oh, jeff vandermeer…. to my shame, i have yet to read the southern reach trilogy, although i own all three, and have owned them for a good long time now. and while we’re on the subject of my many personal failings, i actually own a TON of his books, including three copies of city of saints and madmen, in at least two different versions. many of these are in storage right now, after bedbug-overreaction 2015 sent so many books off into limboville, but they were here, accessible, for so many years without my getting around to reading them. he’s an author i knew i would love just based on his reputation, the reviews i’ve read both by and about him, his tasteful curation of anthologies and other books he’s championed.
all of that to say that i can’t really tell you how this compares to his other books, or if there is any connection between this one and the southern reach trilogy, but i do know that i liked this one a lot (as i knew i would), that it was more challenging a read than it appeared at first glance, and that it took me much longer to read than i’d expected.
it takes place in an unnamed city after an ecological catastrophe, where what remains of humanity struggles to stay alive in a ruined landscape revolving around the headquarters of a mysterious Company, through which their leftover biotech roams; either genetically altered animals, hybrids of creatures and tech, or creatures once human transformed into monsters – jury’s undecided. threats include a japanese movie monster-sized flying bear called mord, a woman with advanced tech known as the magician, and their acolytes – the magician’s band of feral children with genetically-modified inhuman accoutrements, and the mord proxies – normal-sized humanoid bears, as well as the unaffiliated clever foxen, poison rain and assorted scavengers trying to acclimate to inhospitable conditions, made dangerous through fear and the effects of alcohol minnows and mind-altering beetle-drugs. in short – many dangers.
the central (human) characters are a couple: the empathic rachel, our narrator, who remembers her life before in isolated fragments: a submerged island, a birthday party, her parents’ protection, but not what happened to them or how she got to the city. her companion is the dour and secretive wick, a former biotech engineer who worked for The Company who spends his days gloomily fiddling in a lab with a very icky pool, reduced to the status of drug dealer and keeping secrets about his health and past. the two of them have carved out a life for themselves in the relative safety of a crumbling apartment complex which the paranoid wick has safeguarded with baroque security measures, allowing them the freedom to live undetected but vulnerable in this ‘wealth’ should anyone ever discover them.
the writing is in many ways capricious, where so much of the big picture is left undefined – the name of the city, the nature of the disaster, the generically named Company – but those are just details – the heft of this story is attached to the human drama, or more to the point – the drama of the person.
and for all the unwritten details, there are so many beautifully lyrical passages that make you wanna stop and reread ‘em:
Most nights now there was some kind of cacophony and a rawness, and such a sense of covert movement. So much noise out there – and echoes of noise – and a keening or growling or the sound of something or someone being killed. That was the sound of a city that no longer believed in one ruler or one version of the future.
and as many instances where the lede is buried in passages that seem less important than they are at first glance.
the tone is also tricky to pin down but it’s admirably complex, made up of a number of moods that should be contradictory but somehow all work together without clashing: melancholy, hopeful, helpless, brooding, funny, sentimental.
the real story begins when rachel, on one of her scavenging missions, discovers something unusual stuck to the sleeping mord’s fur – something that appears plantlike and perhaps decorative, but turns out to be borne, whose presence in her life will change absolutely everything.
what is borne…? he’s… well… here is the author’s drawings of borne, if that helps:
and he is initially described (with one of those buried ledes) as:
…a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colors that strayed from purple toward deep blues and greens. Four vertical ridges slid up the sides of its warm and pulsating skin. The texture was as smooth as waterworn stone, if a bit rubbery. It smelled of beach reeds on lazy summer afternoons and, beneath the sea salt, of passionflowers. Much later, I realized it would have smelled different to someone else, might even have appeared in a different form.
but borne is… malleable – he changes size, form, shape, and rachel soon discovers that he has the capacity to learn, to move, to communicate, he’s appetite given form, but his origins are shrouded in mystery, along with his intentions, his purpose, his capabilities.
none of this prevents rachel from forming a bond with borne that’s somewhere in between maternal and whatever the adjective is that pertains to the relationship between a human and a pet (or, as rachel wonders – What was the word for raising an orphaned intelligent creature?), with that specific conditional pain of loving something you cannot fully understand/communicate with, but feel responsible for and love nonetheless.
…I realized right then in that moment that I’d begun to love him. Because he didn’t see the world like I saw the world. He didn’t see the traps. Because he made me rethink even simple words like disgusting or beautiful.
That was the moment I knew I’d decided to trade my safety for something else. That was the moment.
hers is a selfless, all-encompassing love, even when borne’s behavior is problematic:
”Those are three dead skeletons on the wall, Borne.”
“Yes, Rachel. I took them from the crossroads. I thought they would look nice in here.”
wick is suspicious of borne’s presence in their lives, which is warranted, but rachel gives herself over to his care, encouraging his education, attempting socialization, experiencing the full spectrum of motherhood in a highly-concentrated timeframe – proud when borne makes progress while feeling the pain his increasing independence from her leaves behind.
but as borne changes and experiences more of the world, their relationship also changes, becomes more guarded as rachel begins to love and fear borne in equal measure, wanting to protect borne from the world and protect the world from borne.
it may seem like i’m giving a lot away in this review, but this is barely scratching the surface. there’s so damn much that happens here, and it’s a deceptive creeper of a book that sneaks up on you unexpectedly.
there are some gorgeously gutting moments as the book skews darker – rachel’s most precious memory of a childhood birthday where her parents presented her with a cake around which adorable biotech creatures danced is tainted by her experiences in this world:
Nor could I stop thinking of the perfect little biotech slaves that had paraded themselves around my special cake in the fancy restaurant. In my mind, they kept spiraling that cake for years, as it decayed into black mold and then nothing, and they had to keep trudging around that cake, around and around, singing, until they died in mid-step and their flesh rotted and then faded away, revealing their sad, delicate skeletons.
Which kept dancing.
and the descriptions are quietly devastating. the detail of post-apocalyptic tales that has always affected me the most is the idea of … stoppage. that nothing else will ever be produced, everything that remains is a time capsule/amber relic of a past that many survivors never experienced. this description of scavenging is haunting:
Beyond the park, I came across the exposed ground level of a skating rink or storage hangar and watched from the threshold as five scavengers sorted through a rich mélange of probably worthless debris. They had a glowworm trapped in an hourglass to see by, and when the sand ran out I assumed they’d move on. Their quarry included filthy plastic bags filled with nothing, old barrels, boxes sagging from water damage and mold, and a few piles of upended garbage that had been there long enough to have already been gone through and to have stopped stinking. But each generation lowered its expectations.
and since i had the added benefit of vandermeer’s post-it notes (one of which i had to chase into the middle of the road when it blew away before i’d had a chance to read it), i might as well share a couple that made me smile:
according to many of the post-its, there is more to come from this world and its characters and situations, so be on the lookout for that – and maybe now that i’ve broken the seal, i’ll actually get around to reading them!
tl;dr with all apologies for the mess that is this review – i’m trying to get my reviewing legs back, but i’m all scattered in the brain. all you need to know is that this is a quietly brutal, but ultimately hopeful, story of love and survival and the shifting definition of humanity in the face of extraordinary times. also, giant flying bear.
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my THIRD literary subscription box from quarterly!!!! this one is the most exciting one yet!
maggie got very brad pitt about it, “what’s in the booooooxxxx??”
but she was pretty unenthusiastic once it was clearly not something delicious for cats.
me, on the other hand – i am VERY enthusiastic! best day ever! diving in…. NOW!
