Authority (The Southern Reach Trilogy, Book 2): (10th Anniversary Edition): The bestselling second science fiction novel in the now-classic Southern Reach Series Paperback – Large Print, 30 July 2015

Loved this book. To be honest, for me it had more impact than the first - but I'm looking forward to the third volume...then reading the trilogy again.Excellent.

The second book in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy lifts us out of Area X and drops us into the offices of the Southern Reach - the government/military/scientific agency that's been charged for the last thirty years with investigating and containing whatever it is that's afoot inside Area X's invisible border.Our protagonist this time is Control, the agency's new director, and in his way he's as unreliable a witness as the Biologist was in book 1. Through his eyes, we see an agency on the brink of collapse. The offices are shabby, the staff are depressed, demoralised, or maybe even borderline psychotic, and collectively they are riven by internecine back-biting and petty turf wars. Control's brief is to get a grip on the Southern Reach and establish what it knows about Area X, and in particular the troubled twelfth expedition. He fails to do either. He is thwarted at every turn by his uncooperative assistant director, the incomprehensible reports of his senior scientists, the uncommunicativeness of the Biologist herself, whom he interviews repeatedly and unsuccessfully in her cell at the Southern Reach, the cryptic instructions he receives from his distant superiors, and his own inability to grasp what is happening around him. Permeating the whole narrative is an uneasy sense of non-quite-rightness, with the brooding presence of Area X somewhere just beyond our field of vision.Inevitably, Control's bafflement leaches through to the reader. The first two thirds of the book are a struggle - like Control, I as a reader floundered to find my bearings in this disorientating hall of mirrors, and like Control I resented the agency's dull and petty office politics. Yet the picture does gradually resolve and come into focus, not least as we come slowly to understand some of the hidden agendas behind the veil of confusion that covers the Southern Reach. The final third of the book, in which the Southern Reach faces an unprecedented crisis, and Area X decisively reasserts itself into the narrative, is an absolute blast, and retrospectively makes the trudge of the opening sections worthwhile.Two books in and I still can't quite make up my mind about the Southern Reach trilogy. Like `Annihilation', I found `Authority' frustrating at times, in asking more questions than it answers, and refusing to resolve its narrative into anything approaching a conventional sense of coherence. Yet there's something oddly addictive about the sense of existential horror that's conjured up by Area X. I find it hard to imagine anyone reading this far and not wanting to continue on into episode three.

In this second book of the trilogy about the elusive Area X, the attention turns from the 12th expedition that the first book covered, and focuses on its aftermath (or is it in its midst, because conventional time and space can no longer be held constant), as a secret operative, John Rodriguez or Control is sent in to replace the missing director, who is revealed the reader to have been one of the figures we met in Book 1 and at the same time investigate the Southern Reach Agency.The biologist, who was the first-person protagonist in the first book, has "returned", and Control tries to unravel the mystery surrounding the expedition and its other members through her, but she is uncooperative. Control is also met with resistance from the assistant director, Grace, who resents what she perceives as his usurpation of directorship. But even within the "normal" office environs where he appears to form alliances with other personnel like the nervy Whitby and jaded head scientist Cheney, and the politicking surrounding his status as new boss and upstart, nothing is as it seems, and the psychological warfare he faces from his ambivalent subordinates takes on the shifty, otherworldly tint of Area X itself.Compared (perhaps unfairly) to the first book, where the horrific events of the expedition had a certain immediacy, even though a lot of it was masterfully conveyed through implication, rather than merely explicated, VanderMeer does more of the same in a surehanded manner in Book 2, but the subject matter is less exciting, and there are less jump-out-of-your-skin moments.Having said that, VanderMeer's way of giving shape to the nebulous in his text is admirable, and his narrative style engaging enough for me to want to find out what happens in the end. For example, the concept of "terroir" to describe the natural environment in which wine is produced, when applied to Area X as "the sum of the effects of a localized environment, inasmuch as they impact the qualities of a particular product", helps the reader make sense of its permeable, undefinable borders, and the way anything that goes in or out of it, will invariably become steeped with the qualities of the place.Heavy-going. This second book undoubtedly felt like a heavy expository middle section that I had to wade through before the action resumes.

If you are at all familiar with the city of Ambergris on the river Moth you will of read at least one of Jeff Vandermeer's fabulous tales of the great city. Unique is an oft used word but the stories culminating in the masterpiece Finch are as good as any modern fantasy series. Here Vandermeer starts a new cycle The Southern Reach Trilogy, to be released over a span of a few months in 2014. An expedition is sent to an unsettling area, seemingly deserted and at once a sense of dread which is almost palpable descends on the group. A strange underground structure not marked on their maps is discovered and from then on a series of weird and not so wonderful discoveries follows. It would spoil the story to reveal more but the overpowering feeling of impending doom and the way this is skilfully woven into the story proves once more that this writer is one of the if not the leading light in dark fantasy writing. I look forward to the next instalment but be warned this is disturbing stuff.