Customer Reviews

Finch

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My only exposure to Jeff Vandermeer prior to this, was reading Steampunk, which was this volume of works he edited with his wife. Ann. I really enjoyed that book. I thought the idea of Ambergris intriguing. I didn't know I was beginning at the end, which isn't the author's fault or mine. I dived into it, though, so I will read this first and then go back to the other books.

I was expecting a straight steampunk sort of novel with noir like detective elements, but this is much more than that. The fantasy elements, even the dark or grotesque ones, are beautiful. From page one, I was sucked in, a now fan of those books which are cut into "day" chapters. He has a very good use of vocabulary especially describing color and locations, it reminds me of Romantic Poets, yet this isn't a poem by far. The mixture is fantastic. It's gritty and violent, yet highly lovely in spirt, the only thing I could say even comes close to it that I have read, and I don't read a lot of fiction, is Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel. The two books are completely different in plot but share the same gorgeous intensity in their gothic imagery and dark joys. It's so rhythmic in nature, I can believe the music cited at the end inspired in and why he would want to make a soundtrack to go along with the book.

The story is a mix of so many things, horror, pulp detective stories, gothic literature, poetry, magic, who-done-its, I could list a bunch of movies and books I have read that would be the fingers and eyelashes of this work. It's good for the detective story read, good for the fantasy reader, hopefully good for the goths and steampunks too, though I am sure there might be debate over that. I am smitten by the lure of Ambergris, so I will be walking backwards and reading the rest. I would tell you my opinion of the plot, but the press that made the book, expresses their opinion that spoilers should be kept to the bare minimum, so I am respecting that. I can say that I don't read a lot of fiction because I rarely get sucked into a world, but this world of Ambergris is unique and gruesomely addictive.

Jeff Vandermeer's Finch is an interesting mixture of genres, encompassing noir, science fiction, and philosophy. The novel follows detective John Finch as he tries to solve a double murder- one human and one of the fungus-creature graycaps that rule the city of Ambergris are found dead in an otherwise empty apartment. With few resources, a partner who is quickly succumbing to a terrible disease, a lover who may or may not be his enemy, and a boss who is demanding answers immediately, Finch is forced to take actions that could prove deadly.

I didn't immediately like this book. I found the beginning somewhat muddled and had difficulty following what was going on. The author chose to place most of the description of his fantastical city of Ambergris and its history in the middle and end of the book. For me that meant it was a struggle to read the first quarter of the book or so, but after that things became increasingly clear, and I was able to focus more on the characters and their problems. I know that the author has written at least two other books in this world, but since they are supposed to be stand-alones, I thought I'd forge ahead without having read them. It's definitely possible that I would have had a more enjoyable reading experience had I done that.

Back to the timeless city of Ambergris, from VanderMeer's 'City Of Saints And Madmen' and 'Shriek: An Afterward'. Ambergris has changed a great deal over the last century. The once mysterious and quiet Gray Caps (Mushroom People) have risen from their Underground to take over the city, overpower the reigning corporate-based rulership, and now runs the city with the help of fungi based weapons, and towering purple mushrooms which disperse addictive drugs to the human population.

John Finch, not his real name, is a detective put on the case of two bodies lying dead in a tenement room. Both he and his partner Wyte, who is contaminated with fungal growth, are puzzled over the mysterious way the deaths occurred, and that one victim is human and the other a Gray Cap. They are watched over by the Partials, humans who have given themselves over to the Gray Caps and allowed fungal and other alterations to their bodies. Finch must eat the "memory bulbs" harvested from the dead, to discover the reason for their murder.

The Gray Caps, while ruling the city, are focused on building two towers, the function of which is unknown and mystifying. It seems the city falls deeper into decay the further along the towers rise. Finch finds himself deep in a complex web of fabrications and suspicion over the murder; a murder that ties in such anomalous characters as the Lady In Blue, Ethan Bliss, the dangerous Stark, Finch's neighbor Rathven, and his Gray Cap boss Heretic. Could there even be a tie to Ambergris historian Duncan Shriek, who disappeared a century ago?

Ambergris has a history: First, The Silence, discussed in VanderMeer's first Ambergris story 'City Of Saints And Madmen'; then The War Of The Houses, discussed in VanderMeer's second Ambergris novel 'Shriek: An Afterward'; and now in 'Finch' comes The Rising. Not only have the Gray Caps risen to take over the city, but the waters have risen too; where there was city and canals now lies a vast bay - Ambergris is shrinking.

There's a lot more, well, fungi, in this third trip through Ambergris. More spores, more infestation, more ruination, more rot, more types of fruiting bodies, and large tree-sized mushrooms that dispense purple spores that people wait for because the spores are the new drug of choice.

There's always been something attractive to me about fungi and fruiting bodies - they're peculiar and rather disgusting. They give me a creepy feeling, and when confronted with one in the wild I cannot stop myself from plucking it and handling it, turning it this way and that to study it, then scrubbing my hands as hard as I can to rid myself of the real (or imaginary)) slime and spores left behind.

I'm a little disappointed in The Rising depicted in 'Finch'. Part of what lured me to Ambergris was the mystery of the Gray Caps; now much of that mystery has been revealed, lessening the tension I felt reading the other Ambergris books. VanderMeer also changed his style a bit, using uncharacteristically short, stilted sentences rather than the flowing prose of the past two Ambergris novels. This works though, because 'Finch' is a rawer Ambergris, an Ambergris in more upset and peril than ever before. Can it be saved?

I highly recommend reading 'City Of Saints And Madmen' and 'Shriek: An Afterward' before 'Finch', even though 'Finch' can stand on it's own. Immerse yourself in the poetic history of Ambergris, and don't miss out on a moment of it. Enjoy!

Unlike many of the reviewers here, I am a newbie to the "steampunk" genre, whatever that may be . . . the oft-helpful Wikipedia provides that the subgenre features steampower technology and has Victorian England references. But I enjoy hard-boiled detective stories (James Ellroy rocks!), so upon the recommendation of a friend I grabbed a copy of "Finch," not really knowing what to expect.

Expectations would have served me little, as "Finch" is a completely original tale for me. Our anti-hero, Finch, plays detective in the fantastical city of Ambergris. Once torn apart by a human civil war, the city creaks along under the fungal Gestapo, the Gray Caps. These fungus-based creatures have murdered half the city and keep the survivors under a brutal thumb where even the most innocuous statement can be your last. The city rots under layers upon layers of fungus, and two terrifying fungal towers grow in the midst of the city but for an uncertain purpose.

All that is to the good, but "Finch" confuses as much as it entertains. Jeff Vandermeer is not a writer who holds your hand - he drops the reader pell-mell into the middle of a perplexing murder investigation as well as a deep, rich culture with its own history and legends. It's not until the middle third of the book that he bothers to explain half of what is going on. Perhaps I'm too conventional a reader, but I found the first batch of the book so wearying that I almost put it down three or four times. Eventually I got past the seemingly disjointed and the definitely unexplained to where the parts began to come together into a whole. Sometimes that happens and the result of all the threads coming together is absolute perfection (Robert Littell's "The Sisters," for example). With "Finch," despite some exhilirating revelations and unexpected twists, the perplexing journey undermined the enjoyment of the whole.

Sometimes we can revel in a despicable location - I would never want to live in Cormac McCarthy's bloodthirsty wild west, but I love visiting it in his books. Ambergris, a noble city, remains an abject horror of fungus, living transmission tubes, and mushrooms that dispense fungal crack. An unsettled and unsettling nightmare of a city, Ambergris steals the show from its human and fungal (and human/fungal) inhabitants.

One should probably read "Finch" after reading VanderMeer's other Ambergris novels - any hint as to what the heck is going on would have been helpful during those opening chapters.

Wow. This book was quite different from any other I've read. There are plenty of sci-fi or fantasy books in which the author leaves a frustrating majority of the backstory unexplained, where you're expected to just piece together an understanding of the author's world. Finch is ALMOST that, but not quite.

Your understanding grows as the story progresses, and this is what the author intends. 'Finch' is a sort of noir/mystery, only set in a fictional world, so the struggle to understand Finch's world contributes to the overall mood the author wants to convey.

Finch's world seems limited to the once-glorious city of Ambergris, which has now fallen into ruin under the rule of the mysterious 'gray caps' -- an inhuman fungus-based race with advanced technology and a disregard for human life. Confined to living underground & in relative obscurity for centuries, the gray caps apparently 'rose' in Ambergris' recent past, overthrowing an establishment already in shambles after decades of civil war and plunging its human denizens into squalor and forced labor.

Finch works as a detective for the gray caps, helping them piece together the various crimes -- both petty and heinous -- occuring in his area of Ambergris. He works, then, for the enemy... for the very race that's destroyed his city and way of life. Why? Finch's motivations, as well as his mysterious past, slowly come to light throughout the story.

The story itself begins with the discovery of two bodies, victims of a very unlikely and inexplicable 'murder' -- an unknown human and the top half of a gray cap. Finch's gray cap superiors seem strangely eager to solve the case, and Finch himself gets drawn deeper and deeper into Ambergris' underworld; spies from other cities/nations, the anti-gray cap 'rebellion', remnants of the warring houses of F&L and H&S who once battled for control of Ambergris and surrounding territory (but whose conflict has now been rendered moot in the wake of the gray cap takeover), Finch's own mysterious past.

All the while, a sense of quiet despair and entropy loom over the city and the people living there. Fungus and spores are constantly devouring the city's architectre, replacing familiar landmarks with horrifying alien structures. Giant mushroom trees disperse nourishment for poor citizens; the sustencance is also hallucinogenic, meaning much of the remaining populace wastes away in a drug-induced alternate reality.

Finch's own friend Whyte struggles with a hostile fungal invasion. His body changes from moment to moment as the infection works to transform him into something Other. Everywhere Finch goes there's evidence of the city's ruination and the claustrophobic sense that a way of life is disappearing and being replaced by something totally alien.

A little research revealed that this is actually the third stand-alone book in the Ambergris universe. From what I can gather, the stories span centuries of Ambergrisian history.

The scope of this story is fairly limited, relatively speaking -- that is, the world in which Finch & Ambergris reside is LARGE. There's a whole world out there of nations all vying with one another for power. There are centuries of history.

Finch, though, is just a man. He's stuck in the hellish reality of present-day Ambergris and it's all he can do to survive and do his job. The events in which he becomes entangled really are larger than a single protagonist, and it's this conflict between Finch's limited narration and hints of something larger going on behind the scenes that really drives the story.

This books may not be for everyone -- it's got adult themes, a dark, grim, and gritty tone, etc. -- but it's definitely a supremely creative and well-conceived story, set in a world that, for all its alienness and horror, is vivid and fresh. I definitely recommend it.

Imagine a movie involving a screenplay by Jorge Luis Borges based on a Raymond Chandler novel. David Cronenberg is tapped to direct the unlikely project. Jeff Vendermeer provides the novelization. I can guarantee that both McDonalds and Burger King pass on the promos. There's absolutely nothing in this novel that you want to see in a Happy Meal but there's plenty of food for thought. Vandermeer's concepts made my head ache and the setting provided a touch of nausea. The elegant and nuanced writing, however, made the whole thing palatable. It gets five stars from me but individual mileage will vary.

Richard K. Morgan's blurb about Finch on the front cover is only partially true. "Fungal noir": truer words were never written. "Steampunk delirium": only half right. There is no anachronistic technology in a familiar but alternate timeline. The city of Ambergris is in a world of its own, a city of decay and violence 6 years after conquest by the gray caps, fungal humanoid aliens. John Finch is a detective investigating a double murder, one victim human, the other a gray cap whose lower half is missing. Finch has secrets of his own. This book is chocked full of imagery, chaotic, hallucinatory, sometimes frightening, sometimes violent, often disgusting. The violence escalates to an apocalyptic climax.

Actually it took me awhile to get into this book. In the beginning I wasn't even sure that I would finish it. However, up around page 75, the scene with the guy nailed to his apartment wall but still alive, something clicked in my brain and it was smooth sailing from there. Will you like this book? I'm not sure. Should you give it a try? You bet.

Simply put, this is a brilliant book, one I will not soon forget. I am haunted by it, really. I wanted to point out for readers unfamiliar with VanderMeer's work that this is a standalone novel. It is not a sequel, nor the end of a trilogy, nor part of a "cycle". That said, it does take place in a fictional world, called Ambergris, where the author has set other novels, novellas, short stories. Truly, it is not required at all that you have read any of these other works. Finch stands on its own 100%.

There *are* some references backwards to some of VanderMeer's other Ambergris fiction, such as the novel Shriek and the amazing novella The Transformation of Martin Lake (from City of Saints and Madmen), but these references are meant as treasures for Ambergris-lovers; they are not essential to the plot.

If you are thinking of checking out Finch, please don't worry about whether or not you have read any of the author's other fiction set in the same world--though I suspect you may want to after reading Finch.

Finally, if you are not normally a person who would read fiction set in a fantasy world, I would encourage you to try Finch anyway--particularly if you enjoy the crime/mystery genre. Finch is up there with the best crime fiction. I would put it up there with the best of Lawrence Block's Scudder novels and the best of Charles Willeford.

But wait a minute...? Is this a fantasy? Or is this a crime novel? Or is this some kind of "literary" novel? It is all of those things and more. You can't put this book in any kind of box! That's a good thing.

Ok...Sometimes the vine program leaves out the little details...such as this is the third book in a series.
Now I didn't let that stop me, but I will say straight up that I did not finish reading this book. And not at all for the usual reasons one stops reading a book.
I stopped a ways in because I didn't want to read anymore of the end. Instead I wanted to go read the first two books the way god and the author intended.
What I did read of this novel however I enjoyed and the city of Ambergris reminded me much of China Meivilles 'Perdido Street Station'. The darkness and oddities were strikingly similar in flavor if not in detail.
So only 4 stars for me right now as I have yet to finish the tale, but I think my actions speak far better than my words, I've put this title on hold for now to go back and read the first two first. That speaks volumes.

I enjoyed "City of Saints and Madmen" and "Shriek: An Afterword", but this journey back to Ambergris tops those. VanderMeer gives us a real story that gets under our skin (and may stay there).

A caution to those of you who have not read the first two Ambergris books: it's not necessary that you start with them, but is very, very helpful. If you don't you are pretty much on your own, because there is little 'fill-in' in Finch to bring you up to speed.

The Product Description above tells you all you need to know about the plot. The publisher has asked that reviews contain no spoilers - and there is little else to tell without giving up too much. (If you don't plan on reading the other two first, you should at least read their descriptions.)

Our hero, Finch, reminds us frequently that he is not a detective - but he is one physically if not mentally. VanderMeer's imagination is in full bloom with the characters, the city and the physical world he puts us in. Duplicitous relationships (are tri- or quad- plicitous words?), strange science, and visceral scenes confront us as we try to stay alive with Finch as Ambergris is threatened.

This is a page turner, so do not start this late in the evening if you plan on getting some sleep. If noir, fantasy, mystery and weird are your thing, then grab this one. (Do get the others, too.)