Hummingbird salamander7/4/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() uses spy fiction to show how spy fiction can’t help us when the sky falls in. One could imagine Lars von Trier filming Jane’s Dantean descent and conflicted redemption, giving us a 21st-first century odyssey into the guttering soul of the planet. Lastly, the book digs deeply into themes of individual moral culpability for communal sins. And VanderMeer does not neglect the symbolical aspects of events. The action sequences and convoluted pursuit of various MacGuffins - waystations toward the ultimate MacGuffin - are masterfully done, with cinematic set pieces, noirish interludes and horrifying bad guys. Yet her emotions are also given fair shrift, and ultimately she becomes the definition of a 'hopeful monster,' a term derived fittingly from evolution sciences describing a bridge between stages of a species. ![]() First is the creation of Jane and her narrative voice.Her perceptive observations and descriptions weave an atmosphere of unrelenting coldblooded doom from the very first page. VanderMeer’s tale succeeds marvelously on many levels. In fact, our doughty and frankly terrifying heroine, 'Jane Smith,' might be the Oedipa Maas the 21st century needs. Now from this daring and ever-shifting author comes Hummingbird Salamander, a volume more naturalistic, more like a traditional thriller than its predecessors, but one that also features hooks into the literary novel of paranoid conspiracy, a genre best exemplified by Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. ![]()
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