Heroine as `hopeful monster' drives gripping eco-thriller
Jeff VanderMeer's latest, Hummingbird Salamander, more naturalistic, more like a traditional thriller than its predecessors, features hooks into the literary novel of paranoid conspiracy, a genre best exemplified by Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The book takes place in that familiar realm categorized as “ten seconds into the future.” Delivery drones are finally up and running, but not much else in the way of technology or politics is far advanced from 2021. What is different is that the slippery slope to total planetary disaster has been further greased and all of humanity's sins are coming home to roost.
Our narrator, with the concealing cognomen “Jane Smith,” is a security analyst, probing the defensive systems of corporate clients for weaknesses. She has a loving husband and a teen daughter. Yet there's a worm at the heart of this rosy life, and it rears its head in the form of a burdensome yet seductive obligation.
One day, at her local coffee shop, Jane is tendered an envelope with a note and a key. This leads her to a box inside a storage unit. In the box is a stuffed hummingbird — of a species that should not exist. Jane's sharp intellect and professional training take over. She learns that the hummingbird came from Silvina Vilcapampa, eco-terrorist, utopian, aspirant protector of the planet, scion of a sociopathic billionaire father. The bird's mate, an equally mysterious salamander, remains at large. Together, the two hold the key to some revolutionary technological breakthrough that might succour the ailing globe. Silvina has entrusted Jane with carrying forward her enigmatic legacy. (Why Jane? The answer is ultimately forthcoming and shocking.) Jane must abandon all security, safety and respectability, forsaking — even betraying — family, friends and co-workers, and plunging into a deadly competition between the elder Vilcapampa, his rival Langer and a free agent named Hellbender.
VanderMeer's tale succeeds marvellously on many levels. First is the creation of Jane and her narrative voice. Over six feet in height and commensurately bulky, a high school wrestling champ, Jane has always been a round peg in a square hole.
Her alienation and estrangement from society while tamped down for a long time, takes only the slightest jarring from Silvina to come to the fore and explode. Jane is a walking cataclysm.
Her perceptive observations and descriptions weave an atmosphere of unrelenting cold-blooded doom from the very first page. Ultimately she becomes the definition of a “hopeful monster,” a term derived fittingly from evolution sciences describing a bridge between stages of a species.
The action sequences and convoluted pursuit of various MacGuffins are masterfully done.