he city named in the title of this first novel by a gifted young writer is pronounced Veniss: "like an adder's hiss, deadly and unpredictable." Or so says Nicholas Germane, a second-rate holo artist who is the first of the novel's three sequential point-of-view characters (his section is narrated in the first person), and he should know. Recently, Nick was beaten and his apartment robbed of all his holosculptures by two thieves. Now, dreaming of revenge, Nick seeks a meerkat.
Not an ordinary meerkat. The meerkats (Vandermeerkats?) of Veniss are genetically engineered servants with an intelligence at least equal to that of humans but a boundless enthusiasm to make themselves useful. At least, that's the claim of their creator, the mysterious Quin, who is the real power in Veniss. Nick figures that if he has a meerkat, he can use it against the thieves and to protect himself generally. But how to get one? The critters are expensive, and Nick isn't exactly flush with cash.
Turns out Nick's buddy Shadrach Begolem works for Quin, and because Shadrach was once the lover of Nick's twin sister, Nicola, and still carries a torch for her, Shadrach gives Nick an introduction to Quin ... along with instructions on how—and, more importantly, how not—to approach him. Which Nick, being Nick, blithely ignores.
Some time later, Nicola—the second point-of-view character (and, yes, her section is written in the second person)—becomes worried when Nick fails to show for a lunch date. A visit to his apartment reveals no sign of habitation; even the furniture gone, nothing left but a crumpled paper bearing a poem in Nicholas' handwriting: "Quin's Shanghai Circus" ... this being the name of Quin's place of business. Sickly certain that something dreadful has befallen her brother, Nicola seeks out Shadrach, who denies any knowledge of Nick's whereabouts.
Soon Nicola receives an unexpected gift from Quin himself: a meerkat. Bribe? Warning? Spy? Whatever it is, Nicola can only accept. The meerkat, which she names Salvador, is her only link, however tenuous, to Nick. Yet when she sneaks after Salvador one night through the alleys of Veniss, it's not Nick that she finds—it's a gathering of engineered creatures that makes her fearful not only for her brother, not only for herself, but for the future of the human race.
Shortly afterward, Shadrach—the third point-of-view character (third-person narration, natch)—learns that Nicola has vanished into the lawless subterranean levels of the city, which extend "through caverns measureless to man." Shadrach was born underground and escaped by luck to the surface, vowing never to return. Now, wracked with guilt and dread, determined to find and rescue Nicola, he sets out, accompanied (more or less ... well, less, actually) by Salvador, on a harrowing descent into the hellish spaces of underground Veniss, where Quin reigns supreme.
A dark and delightful metropolis
Veniss Underground is a neutron star of a novel: despite its slimness, it is more densely packed with allusions to other works of art than many books three or four times its size. Dante's Inferno, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Delany's Dhalgren, A Clockwork Orange, The Wizard of Oz, The Island of Dr. Moreau: the list of works to which VanderMeer tips his hat in sly homage or brazenly plunders for themes and characters and images goes on and on. Indeed, part of the fun of reading this postmodern Frankenstein's monster of a novel is identifying the bits and pieces out of which it has been cunningly, lovingly, crafted, and the unexpected ways they are fused together, sometimes with stunning beauty, sometimes with daunting horror ... like the strange creatures pieced together by the wizardly geneticists of the book, the so-called Living Artists, of whom Quin is the unrivaled master.
Novels steeped in self-consciousness are all too often either dauntingly erudite or tiresomely pretentious, sometimes both at once. Novels that play self-referential games with readers can come across as cold or cruel. But although Veniss Underground contains plenty of coldness and cruelty (and erudition, too), it is powerfully engaging. Harrowing, horrific, hallucinatory and haunting in its depiction of the polymorphously perverse fleshscapes born from the twisted mind of Quin, which seem to have infected reality itself, Veniss is astonishing, repellent, funny, exciting and ultimately moving.
The book is set in the far future, but it doesn't feel that way. Despite the advanced genetic engineering technology and references to a successful revolution against domineering AIs, there is a timeless, mythic quality to the setting, characters and action. The SF elements are integral, but not in a traditional way; VanderMeer makes no attempt to convince us of their plausibility. He doesn't explain how things work or came to be. No, he uses SF elements as a poet might use constellations of metaphors: for stylistic and thematic reasons. In this, Veniss is reminiscent of New Wave fictional strategies; it seems to look forward by looking back. Here, even with non-human characters like the charmingly vicious Salvador, VanderMeer isn't seriously concerned with speculating about the nature of post-human consciousness—it's enough for him to create human beings we can feel for and believe in, whose aspirations and fears and flaws and loves and small triumphs are recognizably our own. And not just individually our own: as we follow Shadrach underground, we are following Orpheus, following Marlowe, following Alice and Dorothy and Dante and all the others who have preceded him.
Somewhat less successful is VanderMeer's similar attempt to give his plot the structure and headlong impetus of a good mystery thriller. He touches the bases, but as events occur in the narrative, they often seem arbitrary, with little underlying logic beyond the external demands of his chosen literary model. Quin's gift of Salvador is a good example: His purpose for this gratuitously taunting act are never made clear. But the same is true of Nick's decision to seek out Quin in the first place, and Shadrach's to help him. It's as if Quin inhabits the center of the novel like a cloud of uncertainty, of disorder, of entropy. Reason, motivation, cause and effect, all the things that make readers believe in the actions of fictional characters, and in the reality of fictional worlds, break down where Quin is concerned, and Quin himself, or itself, is at once VanderMeer's grandest and most nebulous creation. Perhaps that is the point: the center does not hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ... or the book, anyway. Yet even if this is the author's purpose, the execution falls short of the high standard attained in the rest of the novel.
But this is a minor quibble. Veniss Underground is a bracingly strong first novel. Smart, ambitious, assured, it gives one hope for the future of the literature of the future.
