Goodreads Challenge Book #21: “Borne” By Jeff Vandermeer
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Three Stars: Did not Grab me
This is the first book I’ve read since a death in the family that knocked us for a loop for most of June.
I love Jeff VanderMeer’s “Book Life” and “Wonderbook”, have seen “The big Book of Science Fiction” and want to read the Southern Reach trilogy.
However, “Borne” just didn’t excite me.
Rachel is a younger Survivor in a post-apocalyptic city destroyed by a bioengineered disaster. She lives in a fortified shelter with Wick, an older survivor who might be one of the engineers who created the disaster. Rachel scavenges the city, looking for bits and pieces of biotech to bring to Wick, who then turns these into drugs and weapons to trade for food. She has to be wary: there are many other survivors, and none are friendly, including a rival gang of drug dealers led by the mysterious Magician, and the book’s big bad: Mord. Mord is a giant, sentient, floating bear that roams the city from its base in the old Company building.
Early in the novel, Rachel finds Borne, a shapeshifting, plant or squid-like creature that soon starts talking to her, protecting her from the various meanies as it grows from a toddler to an adult. Wick is suspicious of Borne. He saw the apocalypse first hand and knows better than to trust Biotech, especially when left to its own devices. But Wick has secrets of his own.
This novel is slow and meditative. Things happen, but the characters also do a lot of talking and figuring out why things are happening. Or, alternatively, they talk about how they don’t understand what is happening. It tilts into bizarro fiction once on a while, with the image of the huge, floating bear hovering over the city, or the mutated minions of the magician. But it never quite goes full bore into surrealism. This is still recognizably our world: a twisted, blasted vision, but people end up still being people, and making the same emotional choices they make in our world.
I was in the mood for a more contemplative book but just felt that this fell flat. it was neither as surrealistic as I expected, nor did it hit deep. I figured out most of the climax and central mystery long before the end, which leaves us with quite a few questions concerning the nature of Borne.
Do I sound Conflicted? Yes. I recognize that this is a “Good” book, and maybe on a second reading would appreciate it more, but it just fell flat right now.
Originally published at Byzantine Roads.
