Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

We have built so many mirrors,
there are no windows to shatter.

Having recently experienced a kind of bereavement (if the death of one’s love life could be considered thus), whilst, for some only peripherally understood reason, listening to the justifiably underappreciated album Racially Yours, and feeling like bombing the internet or some such futile act, I find I’m writing from a nagging sense of unfinished business, the blaring klaxon call of duty still audible in the distance behind the weirdly sexual and racist lyrics of The Frogs, rather than for the love of writing and of sharing my own strong feelings towards Jeff VanderMeer. In fact, I could just wipe this blog clean and fuck off to live in Eswatini where according to David from Eswatini beers are £1.50 quid a pint and steaks a mere £2.50 quid.

But as someone, who was until recently in my life, once told me, I’m a responsible man who wouldn’t fuck off and leave his kids behind, whether literal or figurative. I paraphrase but that’s the gist, and perhaps the zenith of any character analysis.

Talk about damning with faint praise.

So, here I go trudging on with high praise (which lacks enthusiasm) for one of the New Weird’s most ardent environmentalists, in what is a quite stunning thriller and which starts, as all good mysteries do, with a mysterious note, a key and, er, a stuffed hummingbird…

Our narrator, unlikable, unusual and unknowable Jane Smith, is a tech security specialist who, on her morning coffee run, is handed an envelope by the barista which sets her off on an improbable quest to find meaning in the aforementioned taxidermy. This simple yet hackneyed device, in which it might be easy for a casual reader to find offence, opens up a world of bio- and/or eco-terrorism into which Jane is drawn in search of the mysterious heiress-cum-ecowarrior Sylvina Villa… Vilcam…. Vil… Silvina. Worlds within worlds again, a motif VanderMeer explores with some frequency in his work and which are usually failing/failed to add to the tension and horror of the fictive situations.

And this does get tense and horrific.

In fact, although I don’t want to go into plot spoilers here as there is much joy to be had in ignorance, the threat of climate collapse is very real in Jane Smith’s world, with species extinction in advance of our own and, as the novel progresses, other climate catastrophes taking place. It inhabits but also undermines the spy/detective thriller genre, but in the end what do we learn? I’ll leave you to find out, but be warned, it’s not very satisfying. And why would it be when the same is true of our own climate crises? How else could VanderMeer make his point so powerfully?

It is a departure from the Borne universe of giant bears and dead astronauts, being easier to follow thanks to his use of genre fiction tropes, but it is classic VanderMeer for it’s worrying augury of the extinction of humankind and the shrugging indifference of those of us for whom news of environmental disaster is so much media spam.

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