Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

The LA Times review of Finch spoiled the hell out of the book. I’m not going to do that. I’m not a big believer in writing reviews that summarize. That said, this review summarizes the setup of the novel and, I hope, gives a sense of how much I enjoyed poring over the choices the author made with the language in the book. Writing spare, fractured prose isn’t as easy as Finch makes it look.

I should also let you know that I was gifted a copy of this book by the author.

I read the first third of this book three times. Just to study the language. Just to get my hands on the machinery of Jeff VanderMeer’s world-building approach and puzzle out how it worked. VanderMeer’s uncharacteristically spare language summons up a rich vision of a city past the brink — Ambergris — and explores a handful of characters razed and remade by the city’s bloody history. He uses simple prose to create rich, textured visuals and nuanced, emotional characters with just a few deft encounters. It’s good.

This third (and final?) outing to Ambergris casts the city as a post-war wreck reminiscent of The Third Man’s Vienna, full of shadows and lies, or modern Baghdad, layered with centuries of conflicts political, ethnic, existential.

It’s all seen through the lens of detective John Finch, who insists he’s not a detective. Finch works for alien and mysterious fungus-people called the gray caps, which have control of the city via a brutal and Byzantine architecture of occupation. Finch travels through Ambergris, tangling with spies and nefarious thugs, not because he’s a brilliant detective (he isn’t), but because the gray caps will snuff him out if he doesn’t make daily progress on his investigation.

The case? A human and a gray cap are found dead inside a city apartment, bent and broken as if they’d fallen from a great height.

From that beginning, with a literal handful of clues, Finch follows arcane sigils, secret passwords, and fungal technology from one harrowing encounter to another. At every step, as Finch wises up, he gets more and more beaten down. His tale is sometimes nasty, sometimes beautiful, and always right on the edge between the mundane and the insane. It’s a great and surreal odyssey through a fantastic world.

This is my new favorite VanderMeer book, I think.

Don’t fret the earlier books in the Ambergris cycle if you haven’t read them yet, though — this story plays fine on its own. Think of the previous two books — City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword — as historical fiction set in the same city, if you want. Finch is a fine place to start.