Never have I been quite so tempted to write a review in a pastiche of the subject book’s style than I have with Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch. Unabashedly paying homage to the classic hard-boiled detective novels, Finch—both the novel and its eponymous hero—speaks in clipped sentences through a clenched jaw. It’s a strong flavour, and VanderMeer hasn’t spared the sauce; as such, it can take the palate a while to become accustomed to its subtleties. Indeed, I only know the noir aesthetic at one remove, most notably from its repurposed redeployment by William Gibson and Richard Morgan. The difference in intensity is like that between a chow mein Pot Noodle and a box of fried beansprouts bought from a street vendor in Kowloon. Making it past the surface style was, I confess, a bit of a struggle at first—but the pay-off was more than worth it.
Finch is the third novel of Ambergris, VanderMeer’s signature fictional city, but like a gumshoe fresh to a tough case, that’s all I knew of it before walking its streets. With Finch as your guide, you needn’t worry about knowing little of what’s going on though: no one else in the novel knows the truth, either, and the more someone claims they know, the more they’re likely to be wrong. Dead wrong. Despite growing up in Ambergris under a different name, Finch has no solid idea how it got the way it is—torn apart by civil war in the wake of a territorial expansion, and then invaded by a grisly and inscrutable species of fungal life-form known simply as “the gray caps”.
Finch knows how he got where he is, though—investigating crimes at the gnomic behest of the gray caps, while partnering (and trying to protect) his former mentor Whyte, who is gradually succumbing to the symbiotic corruption that comes from close exposure to the gray caps and their saprophytic technologies. Thing is, Finch isn’t telling. He’s an uncoverer of secrets but he has plenty of his own, a cypher of a man caught between every faction in the game, beholden to all, protected by none. Unravelling the mystery presented to him at the novel’s beginning—two corpses in a grimy room, one of a human who appears to have fallen from a great height, one of a gray cap shorn cleanly in two by forces unexplained—will unravel the mystery of Ambergris and what the gray caps are doing there, as well as the mystery of Finch himself.
No text is more fecund than one with an unreliable narrator. It is plain from the outset that Finch is hiding things from us, but there’s no sense of VanderMeer cheating us with sleight-of-narrative; Finch dissembles to other characters as much as he does to us, and it’s this aspect of his character that justifies the hyperstylised prose. Finch has made himself anew, built himself from nothing after razing his past to the ground; those clipped sentences are the voice of a man ever wary of what he says, and to whom… to the point that he’s not even sure what he can say to himself any more. Indeed, one could read the entire novel as Finch’s fabrication, or perhaps just extrapolation; the day-length sections of the story are framed by brief excerpts of a torturer’s transcript, which could be taken to mean that everything we’re reading is actually a fevered blend of facts and falsehood concocted by a man who’ll say anything—no matter how incredible, no matter how mundane—to end the pain. Finch repeatedly confesses to us that he’s a fictional creation, written by himself; only he knows where the line between his truth and his fiction may lie.
These twin themes of torture and misinformation also intertwine with the novel’s subtext; whether he intended it or not, I found it difficult to read Finch as anything other than VanderMeer’s metaphor for the paranoia and division of post-9/11 America. The symbols are all there: twinned towers of unexplained but obvious and powerful significance; the ubiquitous spore-based surveillance network; the compromised, collaborating “Partials” becoming part fungus themselves; the waterboarding of a captured gray cap and the reliance by all factions on intelligence obtained by torture; packs of playing cards depicting the ruling regime’s most wanted; a state divided by political difference after a period of confident and grandiose empire-building, thrown into utter disarray by the appearance—as if from nowhere—of an enemy who not only has inscrutable motives, but whose very modes of thought are utterly alien.
The corruption of a fungal infestation mirrors the corruption of a state riddled with paranoia, and there’s an underlying terror and disgust at the irrational through-the-motions bureaucracy that coats the body politic like a white cloak of mycelia: old schisms are imperfectly patched over in the face of an inexplicable yet imminent threat, the external become suddenly and horrifyingly internal. The enemy of my enemy must be my friend… unless, of course, we are both unwittingly my enemy’s servants. In Ambergris, you can’t really trust anyone. Especially not Finch. Who can’t even trust himself.
Metaphor aside, what Finch is about is how hard it is to live a lie, even—or perhaps especially—in a world of lies: it’s about remaining loyal to your duty, even when the meaning of that duty has disappeared or inverted itself; it’s about learning to trust others, in the hope that you might be able to trust yourself again one day. It’s not an easy novel to start—not for this reader, at least—but it’s a very easy novel to finish once its momentum has hold of you. Don’t be afraid to enter Ambergris without knowing what to expect. But do be prepared to leave with more questions than you arrived with.