Borne

If you've read a Jeff VanderMeer book before, you know what I mean when I say it's disorienting. VanderMeer's prose style is not so much dense as elliptical; oblique rather than straightforward, and you can't help but feel you've entered three chapters in and missed all the early exposition that sets up the story.

So it is with Borne, a novel set in an unspecified future post-apocalypse hellscape, one in which humans have messed about too adeptly with biotechnology and unleashed monsters. As with most stories of this ilk, humanity has been reduced to a paltry few, living as scavengers picking at the bones of civilization. They live in destroyed buildings, forests, valleys and wherever else they can make a meagre life, all the while dodging the monstrous bear, Mord and his proxy bears which seem to have no purpose other than rage-fuelled destruction. Did I mention that Mord, the bear, flies? And that his proxy bears are venomous?

So, yeah, it's strange, and it takes you on a complicated and weird journey through the remains of civilization with dark hints and glimpses at the causes of its collapse: the mysterious Company that seems to have been at the center of the aforementioned biotechnological meddling. The world, now filled with . . . creatures . . . is a land straight out of legend and myth.

In fact, I think that's what makes this book so interesting (and enjoyable). The legends and myths of our world have come down to us through hundreds of generations in a long, epoch-spanning game of broken telephone. We know that the stories of gods, demons, wondrous creatures, magic and all the other archetypal fantasy elements are the result of uncounted retellings around fires, at court, in villages, even in what we would now call nursery rhymes. What VanderMeer has done here is invert that model. In Borne the first-person narrator describes the mythic, fabulous events as she witnessed them. It's like we're at the birth of myth itself.

Which, come to think of it, is mirrored in the story of Borne, the creature cum Maguffin that begins as an unknown blob on the back of Mord and gradually evolves into . . . something. We witness its growth, see it acquire new powers that it brandishes like its many tentacles which, in case you missed the point, are like the many accretions of myths and legends that pile on over the generations, until the climactic, epic conclusion where Borne literally becomes . . . well, I'll leave it to you to see.

This, I think, is the value of the novel. The plot, such as it is, meanders (and owes a huge debt to Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy); the characters are barely fleshed out; the setting is straight out of the zombie movie playbook. What's left? What is the point? The birth, curation, and transmission of myth itself. We are meant to experience this story in the way those who came after its events would, hearing with wide-eyed wonder the story of monsters laying waste to the land (tip of the hat to the Welsh Arthurian legends of the great boar Trwyth), of magical beings (I mean, really, one character is called The Magician, for heaven's sake), of warriors and spirits and gods . . . it's Joseph Campbell and Jung and Eliot and Frye but rather than sitting in the lecture hall we're sitting around the fire ourselves.

So give it a read and think of it in terms of what it's trying to do rather than what is going on. VanderMeer writes strange, challenging books that raise a lot more questions than they resolve. That's good. He leaves space for his readers to suggest some of their own.