Looking back at my review of Finch, I realize that I left out a lot of my actual feelings on VanderMeer’s work building the world of post-war Ambergris, and building Finch’s story. Here’s what I didn’t say.

Finch is sometimes hard to read if only because it is so unflinching in its depiction of a battered and oppressed city. If only because it is sometimes so grim in its dread for the future and regret for the past. VanderMeer treats Finch, the main character, terribly, hurting or humiliating him at almost every opportunity.

We go with Finch through the city of Ambergris in search of information, and VanderMeer measures out our servings with an incredible control — we so often get morsels when we want to feast. I was hungry to know more about the city, more about Finch, about the past and the future and the day-to-day lives of Finch’s cohorts and contacts, and VanderMeer offers enough to keep the pages turning and the story moving. Sometimes we’re right at the dangerous edges of reader knowledge. Too far this way and we feel stymied, too far that way and we get ahead of the detective. Either way makes us impatient.

VanderMeer steps on the borderline a few times, but he’s always in control when he does it, I think. He’s daring us to get ahead of Finch sometimes, and wonder what might be real in this new era of Ambergris. Some of us have read more fantasy fiction than Finch is forced to live in, so we make jumps and accept facts that Finch wrestles with.

I was so sure I had the case figured out, except that I didn’t trust Ambergris — VanderMeer’s city is a cruel and many-faced thing. I wasn’t sure if the mystery would be more literary or more fantasy, and I knew that solving the mystery wouldn’t end the story. But I had no idea how big the book would end up making the truth. Finch is no detective yarn, no episode in an imagined police series. It’s a big story seen from over the shoulder of a man living as a detective, a man who reminds us as he reminds himself, I am not a detective.

I doubled back through the book again and again, looking at it as a pivotal piece in the history of a fantastical city, looking at it as a commentary on foreign policy and tribal relationships, looking at it as a character study, and it works as all those things.

But it’s worth noting that I was able to escape the book to do that backtracking, that I was looking to take the pressure of life in Ambergris off of myself, that I didn’t always want to move forward with the story as much as I wanted to move laterally through Ambergris, to explore. Following Finch, the man, was sometimes sweet agony.

When reading Finch, look at how often things are described as being two things at once, as smelling sweet and foul, as being both red and blue, as being both present and absent. Things aren’t easy to reconcile in Ambergris.

VanderMeer knows that when we visit Ambergris with him, we can see only what he shows us, and he’s often offering us agonizing glimpses of more. It’s not meant to be an easy tale. But it’s a good one.