Review -- Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

It's been a while since I've written a review, but here's an older one from 2009. I read Jeff VanderMeer's Finch, the conclusion to his Ambergris series that began with City of Saints and Madmen. Read on to find out how well Finch fits in with the rest of the series.

Let me start off by saying that I enjoyed Finch, and that there were a few nights where I stayed up later than I'd planned because I couldn't put the book down. Finch is a good book. That being said, it's not the best entry in the series. In fact, I'm going to say that out of the three novels in the Ambergris trilogy, Finch is the weakest.

In the "About the Book" section at the end of the novel, VanderMeer explains how Finch came to be. He also talks about some of the approaches he used when writing the other two novels: "The first Ambergris novel, City of Saints and Madmen, was a mosaic novel composed of multiple narratives that played with postmodern techniques, mixing formal experimentation with the tropes of weird, uncanny fiction [...] and was dedicated to the idea of book-as-artifact" (338).

The explanation continues, talking about Shriek: An Afterword: "The second novel [...] presented a sixty-year family chronicle through the eyes of dysfunctional brother and sister, whose dueling voices formed the heart of the book [...] Shriek lay in the realm of works by Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust -- dreamlike yet precise, chronicling the unhappy, the strange, the quirky" (339).

While there was no single overarching narrative in City, it still had stylistic similarities with Shriek. To me, it seems like Finch completely rejects those stylistic trappings that have become (at least in my opinion) so intertwined with the idea and texture of Ambergris. Finch is combines elements of noir fiction with the spy-thriller genre -- and while it made for a fast-paced, hard-boiled read, it didn't quite mesh with the fungal flavor of the other two novels.

But enough about style because everybody's opinions are going to be different and this could just be a case of me whining about an author experimenting. City introduces the reader to Ambergris and the mysterious gray caps. Through the various tiles of the mosaic we get glimpses of how their presence completely infiltrates the psyche of the city. Terrible, chilling events like the Silence occur. Shriek takes this one step further. The two main characters stumble upon hints of an unfathomable plot by the gray caps, but their warnings go unheeded. The reader is left with a sense of impending doom, that something is going to happen.

In Finch, that something already happened. The gray caps rose (with the actual uprising not chronicled in any of the books). All of the tension created by the previous two books is gone. Now that isn't to say that occupied, infested Ambergris is tension-free. This setting is just as dangerous as any of the city's other iterations, but it would have been nice to actually experience the event that the previous two hinted at so strongly.

As a character, the titular Finch is interesting to say the least. Finch is a pseudonym because he has enemies left over from the time before the gray cap insurrection that would love to settle old scores. So much emphasis is placed on how he has to forget who he was in the past, that the "Finch" persona is his past, present and future. But when we finally learn Finch's real name it comes as a let down. I felt confused more than anything. Was his real name supposed to spark some memory from the previous novels? Or was it supposed to be important in the self-contained world of this one? I didn't know, and it just felt underwhelming.

The plot is well-paced and filled with plenty of action and violence. The reader really gets to see occupied Ambergris from the ground up. But while it is paced well, there were parts that didn't hold up as strongly as others, especially near the end. The ending actually left me with more questions than when I started, but not the good kind of questions. The parts of the book that featured the character named Bliss are confusing and felt out of place. It's as if VanderMeer wants to leave room for more stories, or possibly even a direct sequel, but it came across as heavy-handed.

Despite these faults, Finch is still a tight, thrilling, entertaining, and most of all weird novel by one of the masters of the new weird. If you are a fan of the previous two novels I highly recommend this book. Just don't go in expecting to find the Ambergris you remember from Shriek or the one featured in stories like "The Transformation of Martin Lake."