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Veniss Underground
by Jeff VanderMeer
(US edition: Spectra, 288 pages, paperback, published September 2005;
ISBN 0553383566. UK edition: Tor UK, £10.99, 177 pages, paperback,
published 2003; ISBN 1405032685.)
Review by Stuart Carter
.jpg) For
such a very dark and, at times, frankly horrific book, Veniss Underground
seems in some ways imbued with a paradoxical sense of playfulness in
the warp and weft of its pages. Jeff VanderMeer's far-future vision
('vision' in a very Blake-ian sense) reveals an advanced but slowly,
imperceptibly retreating human civilisation living an isolated existence
within mighty walled cities protected from an irredeemably polluted
Earth. Despite the many sights and wonders of such a twilight existence,
this is the familiar old humanity, caught up in the day-to-day act of
living, rather than an epic struggle against decadence and decay. The
struggle to make art or just to put food on the table occupies a more
central position than civilisation's entropy. Imagine someone were narrating
your life today, in all its science fictional wonder, to a reader from
200 years ago. How amazed might they be, and how horrified, and yet
how blasé you are about it.
Three characters at various points look to find the mysterious Quin,
a Dr Moreau-style genius and vital producer of the city's enhanced animal
servants. Nicholas is a failing artist and slang-jockey (imagine a kind
of far future fashion victim). His twin sister Nicola is a successful
but unfulfilled programmer who once loved the book's third character,
Shadrach, a sometime employee of Quin's and former denizen of the city's
awful underworld.
Nicholas, destitute and desperate, visits Shadrach  for
help and advice in finding Quin, and gets it--along with a warning.
Visiting the underworld to find Quin he disappears. Nicola, wracked
with guilt, sets out in turn to find him, also visiting Shadrach for
help and advice. When she in turn disappears Shadrach returns to the
underworld he grew up in to try to rescue the woman he still tragically
loves.
Veniss Underground has echoes of Jack Vance, Hieronymous Bosch
and George A. Romero, and VanderMeer at his best can match China Miéville
for industrial-strength descriptions of awful strangeness any day. Where's
the fun in this? Well, for a start the highest intelligences in the
city may well be Quin's meerkats, engineered servants (or are they...?)
of rich humans.
I also liked the narration of the book's three sections (Nicholas's,
Nicola's and Shadrach's) in the first, second and third person, respectively.
Quite apart from neatness, these viewpoints also help to define the
characters: Nicholas's (first person) self-centredness, Nicola's (second
person) detachment and Shadrach's (third person) alienation. Shadrach's
adventures down below (one might almost say in the furnace...) are,
as I've said, really quite horrific; the city above, initially so real
and familiar to us through Nicholas and Nicola, who narrate the first
and second sections, comes to seem almost a layer of froth upon an ocean
of suffering. It's ironic that only with the third person do we become
aware of the reality beneath the world, metaphorically escaping from
the other's heads to see the outside.
Veniss Underground is frighteningly well written and carries
far more than would ever seem possible within just 177 pages.
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