Spoilers
I came to Hummingbird from VanderMeer's previous surreal scifi, having loved Borne, The Southern Reach trilogy, Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts. So when I read early reviews of Hummingbird suggesting it was a thriller, I confess I did not believe it. Surely there would be something different, something more -- a variation on a genre. And while there is indeed more, different, it is on top of an absolutely first-rate thriller every bit the match of the best of early Ludlum: an unlikely common-person hero who performs unexpected feats of survival and wit against shadowy foes, with world-scale stakes.
I don't want to make too much of this, but another review of Hummingbird that I read a while back stayed with me through my read, and that was by someone who downrated it because they didn't find Jane's journey -- ditching her job, family and suburban existence to follow a murky mystery presented by an absent stranger -- credible or well-explained. WHY?? they whined. And I've come to the conclusion that reader didn't actually read the same book, because the entire manuscript could be said to be a study in Jane asking "why am I doing this?" That reader seemed to think the author missed the boat or didn't recognize how outlandish Jane's actions are and needful of explanation, whereas I found quite the contrary: the author, through Jane, seemed to want to push and push through the veneer of "normal" life, to try to discover exactly what it takes to shift us out of conventional comforts. Because that's where we are being forced, by history and by nature.
So Jane is inventively and appealingly depicted as being the sort of person who might at least nominally be willing to contemplate throwing over the normal order. My nameless reviewer is so mystified at this that it's as if they can't contemplate any such person existing, let alone this particular one named Jane, which I think says more about them than about VanderMeer's story-writing.
One of Hummingbird's final messages seems to be "what you so cherish in the depths of your monkey brain and hold up as the 'normal order' is very rapidly going to complete shit, so at what point, really, does breaking from that stop being revolutionary but instead a necessity for survival?" It's a gritty, difficult, unpleasant message and Jane is one of my favorite heroes in recent fiction for her whole personhood. (A lit major would gleefully point out the unequivocal feminist symbolism of literally abandoning husband, home, and child.)
Silvina is the other hero, whom we never meet in life. And her heroism consists in taking the implicit riddle above -- how do you break the normal order, in a way that matters, and not lose either your soul or your life? -- and answering it to the hilt. When you take the path Silvina took, the world will make you out a nihilist pretty much regardless. So on the one hand you have Jane trying to peer behind that mask, always grasping to understand reality a little bit more clearly; and on the other, Silvina, whose reality has long since become so fractured, bifurcated.
And in the end, when Jane's own reality has fractured at least as much, what is her frame of mind as she confronts the mind-bogglingly Grand Gesture that Silvina has been engaged in all this time? In what position is she to judge Silvina's intentions, or to frame an "appropriate" response of her own? "Appropriate" has been left in the dust.
This riddle is largely left to the reader -- in the end, you know Jane's intentions, or think you do. But anything can happen, except the one thing we all want: for the world to be saved.
Hummingbird Salamander
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Sometimes VanderMeer’s flights of weird fantasy are what gives his immersive storytelling the power to connect with our real world. With Hummingbird Salamander he’s produced his most accessible and least “weird” work to date, but still displaying the dense, thoughtful, spiraling, imaginative world and character building that has organically built his following from cult to bestseller. It’s a thrill ride set basically from today to tomorrow. Ecological activists, the surveillance state, conspiracies, and, yes, a trail of bread crumbs well into the rabbit hole, beginning with a taxidermied hummingbird. Our protagonist is someone we’ve never — or rarely, at least — seen on the page. She’s got a past, she’s smart, she’s paranoid (but this is, of course, because there are powers out there who are very much out to get her). She's six foot and over 200 pounds of bench pressing, dead lifting power. She doesn’t take coworker nonsense. She’s immovable and yet on the move from clue to clue until we are as deeply behind the mirror as she is, ensnared, where the only way out (if there is a way out) is through. Our planet is in peril and we with it. I hope that the shocks along the thrill ride of this book cause an awakening, a deprogramming, an awareness of just how dire a threat we are facing, from our national parks to our backyards, from the oceans to our own watersheds. A fantastic book, timely, and a daring move for the “Weird Thoreau” which for me pays out perfectly.
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