My favorite fiction fires my imagination—the very spark the great Jacob Bronowski identified as lying at the core of humankind’s ascent through the centuries. I lived, heart and mind, in the worlds of Christopher Priest’s Dream Archipelago, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, Brian Aldiss’s Heliconia, Zoran Živković's Papyrus Trilogy, Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy, and Jeff Noon’s Nyquist novels. I pictured vividly all the colorful, breathtaking details as I turned the pages. The same holds true for Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris—most especially for the novel under review, Finch.
I love to share my enthusiasm for novels like these when I compose my reviews. For me, the process is a fusion—an ignition of imaginative fire with the beauty and power of language—most appropriate in a review of Finch, since connecting linguistic beauty to imaginative vitality aligns with Jeff VanderMeer’s aesthetic. His sentences grow like fungal organisms—text as living matter.
One can read Finch as a stand-alone novel; however, I would strongly recommend reading City of Saints and Madmen before launching into this gripping thriller, which features John Finch working as a detective in a bleak Ambergris ruled by the mushroom dwellers, known better as gray caps, for the past six years.
Ah, those mushroom dwellers. The size of a small, squat child, with long necks and large hands, these beings—also called “grey caps” for their ashen hue—are neither quite human nor fully other. Gnome-like, the nocturnal, fungus-harvesting mushroom dwellers live in tunnels and subterranean caves, embodying a city with a deeply disturbed ecology. They are the one fantastical element in VanderMeer’s creation that otherwise mostly follows the laws of nature.
The novel opens with Finch looking down at two dead bodies lying on the floor of a fifth-floor apartment—one human, one gray cap. He’s joined by his boss, a gray cap named Heretic, and by a “Patrial”—that is, someone who has imbibed enough gray cap spores to become half human, half gray cap, the perfect tool to police Ambergris for its fungal overlords.
How will Finch act now that he’s been assigned the case? That is for each reader to discover. Since so much of the novel’s uniqueness lies in the oozing, mushroom-infected Ambergris, I will spotlight several aspects that humans must confront in their day-to-day struggle for survival.
Suppression of Art & Imagination
Finch works out of a ramshackle office with six other detectives. One of them, Dapple, was once an artist—a landscape painter popular with tourists. But none of that now: “No landscapes to speak of that you could spend hours painting without taking a bullet for your troubles.” Dapple’s history as a painter offers a tragic lens—the erasure of artistic expression parallels the collapse of the human spirit during these years of gray cap domination. One is reminded of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who viewed beauty and creativity as threats to power.
Mushroom Control
On many street corners, Red Tree mushrooms with huge caps and strong, thick trunks grow up to eighty feet high. These giants regularly expel smaller purple mushrooms that, when eaten, produce euphoria and render people passive—willing subjects of the prevailing gray cap power. As might be expected, the gray cap rulers encourage their human subjects to imbibe as much as possible. Jeff VanderMeer expands this fungal ecology into a political metaphor: power maintains itself not through enforced ideology but through chemistry. The resemblance to our own world is unnerving — deceiving the public through the wholesale distribution of opiates for corporate profit and, indirectly, government control. For a literary counterpart, see Jeff Noon’s Falling Out of Cars, in which the government distributes the drug “Lucy” to keep the population in a numbed, zoned-out stupor.
Work Camps
We might ask: Why do Finch and the other detectives perform investigative work for the gray caps? The answer is clear: as bad as things are for the humans remaining in Ambergris—forced to follow their particular assignments, such as working as detectives—something far worse looms: being sent to the work camps. There, humans are treated no better than prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.
However, Finch knows of one bright, glowing spot: his friend Rebecca Rathven. Once imprisoned in a work camp for three years, she now lives in the basement of the hotel he calls home. There she has amassed a secret library containing many volumes—journals, poetry, novels, and histories—all detailing life in Ambergris for hundreds of years before the current gray cap horror. Her library represents an act of intellectual defiance, the preservation of culture through reading and inquiry. Personally, I felt a special joy coming upon those sections of the novel in which Rebecca appears.
Memory Bulbs
In the world of Ambergris, when either a human or a gray cap dies, a memory bulb the size of a golf ball grows from the top of their skull. If eaten, it takes the consumer on a hallucinatory journey in which the memories of the dead come alive. As a means of cracking the case, Heretic orders Finch to eat the memory bulb of the dead man found in the apartment. The result is devastating: when Finch wakes from the trip, he cries blood. There is no doubt—Finch has become infected, his body literally leaking the burden of memory, as if the past itself were hemorrhaging through him.
That memory bulbs play such a prominent part in this decaying world suggests that human cognition itself has become unstable and non-linear, leaving Finch to reconstruct reality from the fragments of a dying mindscape.
Beyond Ambergris
In this stinking, sickening world, there exists a distant ray of hope. Finch hears rumors of strange happenings beyond the city’s borders. He also experiences a vision of the Lady in Blue. Deep within the novel we read: “The Lady in Blue stood beside him. Wearing the plain uniform of a private or Irregular, all in muted green. Short-sleeved shirt. Tapered pants. Holding a lantern, staring across an underground sea. It stretched out into a horizon of swirling black shadows and glints like newborn stars.” Finch wonders whether this vision is real or merely another drug trip or hallucination. And what, he asks himself, does any of this—dream or real—have to do with the two colossal towers the gray caps are constructing out in the bay? Mystery upon mystery upon mystery. Finch comes to understand that the case he must solve transcends the murder of a man in an apartment building; the city of Ambergris itself, in its present state, constitutes the true crime. With this realization, Finch knows he must make life-and-death decisions to ensure a future Ambergris of beauty and culture—a city where humans can once again live freely and flourish.
Worth repeating: I highly recommend reading City of Saints and Madmen (and, if you are feeling ambitious, Shriek: An Afterword) before moving on to Finch. Doing so will give you a richer sense of context and deepen your appreciation for its many unfolding mysteries. But by all means, read Finch—an extraordinary novel that expands the boundaries of imagination.
American author Jeff VanderMeer, born 1968
The novel opens with Finch looking down at two dead bodies lying on the floor of a fifth-floor apartment—one human, one gray cap. He’s joined by his boss, a gray cap named Heretic, and by a “Patrial”—that is, someone who has imbibed enough gray cap spores to become half human, half gray cap, the perfect tool to police Ambergris for its fungal overlords.
How will Finch act now that he’s been assigned the case? That is for each reader to discover. Since so much of the novel’s uniqueness lies in the oozing, mushroom-infected Ambergris, I will spotlight several aspects that humans must confront in their day-to-day struggle for survival.
Suppression of Art & Imagination
Finch works out of a ramshackle office with six other detectives. One of them, Dapple, was once an artist—a landscape painter popular with tourists. But none of that now: “No landscapes to speak of that you could spend hours painting without taking a bullet for your troubles.” Dapple’s history as a painter offers a tragic lens—the erasure of artistic expression parallels the collapse of the human spirit during these years of gray cap domination. One is reminded of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who viewed beauty and creativity as threats to power.
Mushroom Control
On many street corners, Red Tree mushrooms with huge caps and strong, thick trunks grow up to eighty feet high. These giants regularly expel smaller purple mushrooms that, when eaten, produce euphoria and render people passive—willing subjects of the prevailing gray cap power. As might be expected, the gray cap rulers encourage their human subjects to imbibe as much as possible. Jeff VanderMeer expands this fungal ecology into a political metaphor: power maintains itself not through enforced ideology but through chemistry. The resemblance to our own world is unnerving — deceiving the public through the wholesale distribution of opiates for corporate profit and, indirectly, government control. For a literary counterpart, see Jeff Noon’s Falling Out of Cars, in which the government distributes the drug “Lucy” to keep the population in a numbed, zoned-out stupor.
Work Camps
We might ask: Why do Finch and the other detectives perform investigative work for the gray caps? The answer is clear: as bad as things are for the humans remaining in Ambergris—forced to follow their particular assignments, such as working as detectives—something far worse looms: being sent to the work camps. There, humans are treated no better than prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.
However, Finch knows of one bright, glowing spot: his friend Rebecca Rathven. Once imprisoned in a work camp for three years, she now lives in the basement of the hotel he calls home. There she has amassed a secret library containing many volumes—journals, poetry, novels, and histories—all detailing life in Ambergris for hundreds of years before the current gray cap horror. Her library represents an act of intellectual defiance, the preservation of culture through reading and inquiry. Personally, I felt a special joy coming upon those sections of the novel in which Rebecca appears.
Memory Bulbs
In the world of Ambergris, when either a human or a gray cap dies, a memory bulb the size of a golf ball grows from the top of their skull. If eaten, it takes the consumer on a hallucinatory journey in which the memories of the dead come alive. As a means of cracking the case, Heretic orders Finch to eat the memory bulb of the dead man found in the apartment. The result is devastating: when Finch wakes from the trip, he cries blood. There is no doubt—Finch has become infected, his body literally leaking the burden of memory, as if the past itself were hemorrhaging through him.
That memory bulbs play such a prominent part in this decaying world suggests that human cognition itself has become unstable and non-linear, leaving Finch to reconstruct reality from the fragments of a dying mindscape.
Beyond Ambergris
In this stinking, sickening world, there exists a distant ray of hope. Finch hears rumors of strange happenings beyond the city’s borders. He also experiences a vision of the Lady in Blue. Deep within the novel we read: “The Lady in Blue stood beside him. Wearing the plain uniform of a private or Irregular, all in muted green. Short-sleeved shirt. Tapered pants. Holding a lantern, staring across an underground sea. It stretched out into a horizon of swirling black shadows and glints like newborn stars.” Finch wonders whether this vision is real or merely another drug trip or hallucination. And what, he asks himself, does any of this—dream or real—have to do with the two colossal towers the gray caps are constructing out in the bay? Mystery upon mystery upon mystery. Finch comes to understand that the case he must solve transcends the murder of a man in an apartment building; the city of Ambergris itself, in its present state, constitutes the true crime. With this realization, Finch knows he must make life-and-death decisions to ensure a future Ambergris of beauty and culture—a city where humans can once again live freely and flourish.
Worth repeating: I highly recommend reading City of Saints and Madmen (and, if you are feeling ambitious, Shriek: An Afterword) before moving on to Finch. Doing so will give you a richer sense of context and deepen your appreciation for its many unfolding mysteries. But by all means, read Finch—an extraordinary novel that expands the boundaries of imagination.
American author Jeff VanderMeer, born 1968
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