A Not-A-Review of Borne, by Jeff Vandermeer

Posted by: Redhead on: March 26, 2018

• In: Jeff Vandermeer
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Borne, by Jeff Vandermeer

published in 2017

where I got it: purchased new

 

 

 

I finally read Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne.  This book was on everyone’s Best of the Year list last year, so why did it take me so long to read it?  Uhm… i dunno. Took me a while to get out of The Southern Reach, I guess. Guess I needed the closure that was the incredible oversensoryoverload scene at the end of Annihilation more than I thought.  Anyway.

 

One of the nice things about read a book that had a lot of hype, a year after it came out, is that I can skip all the obligatory “what this book is about” crap, and get to the meat of what I wanna talk about in this not-a-review.

 

Seeing the Annihilation movie reminded me of how much I loved all the flashback scenes in the novel. I got to know the biologist through her flashbacks. Her character wasn’t only who she is right this second, while she is walking through Area X, but it’s all the things she did in her life that got her to be this particular person – the overgrown swimming pool, the tidepools, the isolated introvert-heaven projects, how she felt about herself and the world when she was outside. The biologist became who she is now, because of who she was then.

 

And that’s how I felt about Rachel.  The short flashbacks of her youth, of being a refugee, of how she wished her parents didn’t feel like they had to put on a happy face for her all the time, that is how I knew who she was. By who she was then, I had a better feeling for the depths of who she is now.  A well written flashback is a gem in a geode.

 

I’m a super tactile person.   I hate wearing shoes and i joke that when I walk around barefoot that I’m seeing the room with my feet. It’s only half a joke, because in a sense that isn’t seeing, I really am experiencing the texture of the floor through my feet, and that is being transmitting to my brain as a way of “seeing” the floor.   It’s a throwaway comment when Rachel mentions that she usually sleeps with her shoes on, that she hates taking her shoes off, something about an experience she had while she was a refugee.  When I read that, my gut reaction was “how sad, for her to be blind in that way”. I felt bad for her, that she wouldn’t be able to see a room through her feet.

 

Among other things that he might be, Borne is one gigantic sensory organ.  Once he starts talking and walking, and touching and tasting and “seeing the room through his feet”, he can’t stop. Well, he can’t stop doing those things just like he can’t stop doing some other things that he doesn’t like talking about.  Just like you can’t say to yourself “hmm, i’d like to shut off my sense of sight, or my sense of smell today”. You can’t stop either. But for you, not being able to flip a switch to stop seeing, or smelling, or tasting, is normal. So why would someone expect someone else to just be able to stop seeing the room through their feet?    Because we all want our kid to be fucking normal, that’s why.

When Borne gets his own room, and invites Rachel in, she is shocked by the plain-ness of the room. Hardly any decoration, hardly any knick-nacks, nothing the way a human would decorate a room. Ok, well, there is a decoration, but it isn’t anything a normal person would use to decorate a room (lol, define “normal”). She wonders how much sensory overload Borne experienced while he lived in her room. I read that scene on a day that was particularly sensory overload for me. I’d spent most of the day on the razor edge of “This isn’t that bad, I can handle this!” and “can the world please stop screaming for five minutes”.  it was an exhausting day, and Borne’s room felt like a perfect retreat.

 

It was strange, to relate more to Borne, to the alien creature, than to Rachel.  But I don’t want Rachel to feel bad. She was a good mom to Borne, she needs to stop beating herself up that she wasn’t attuned to what he was and what the world was to him.

 

Is any parent fully attuned to what their child needs? I mean, isn’t a toddler the most alien thing? You know what your child needs, you’re pretty sure you know what your child wants, but how many kids are good at articulating what they want or need? Shit, how many adults are any good at that?

 

Reading, I had no idea how the book was going to end.  I’ve read enough Vandermeer to know this wasn’t going to have a happy ending, or even perhaps anything in the sense of “end”.  I was sort of right. I was pleasantly surprised by how structured the ending was, that there was actually some sort of closure.  Wick’s letter just about killed me. I wonder how many times Rachel read the letter. Everything about Wick just about killed me. He does a such a sneaky good job of staying in the shadows, of making sure no one gets to know him. It’s like he’s not staying in the cliffs for protection, it’s like he’s staying there so that he can avoid other people as much as possible, and not for the antisocial reasons you’d think. And Rachel didn’t know him before, so she’s safe, right? (see? Wick is just as crappy as I am at articulating what he needs and or wants)

 

I hope Rachel can walk around barefoot one day. I hope she can find some enjoyment in walking around barefoot, that it doesn’t traumatize her, doesn’t turn into some “this is what Borne did” kind of moment.

 

So anyway,  read Borne. If you’ve read early Vandermeer, Borne is much more accessible, a more mainstream prose style. Lots of dialog.  Language that communicates the beauty of nature reclaiming a city, parallelled with characters knowing they are slowly dying of radiation poisoning or cancer.  And if you’ve never read Vandermeer? This is a great place to start. I promise this book isn’t as weird as I’ve made it sound. Well, it is weird, but an accessible, post apocalyptic, readable, oddly mainstream kind of weird.

 

I’ll probably read Borne again in a year or so.  I expect it to be a completely different book, now that I know the ending. I’m interested to see how Rachel and Wick will have changed, now that i know (or think I know) who they actually are.

Tags: Alien, future, parenting, post apocalyptic, science fiction, tactile