& a murderous, flying bear
A brief ode to Jeff Vandermeer's "Borne"
Writing is firstly about finding the right tack (think of a sail’s tack on the wind: you have to slice into it at the correct angle). The tack is the how of telling a story: the narrative entry point, the style, the tone, the voice, and lots more that we tend to fold into the term “POV.” Once you’ve got the tack, you’re coasting along, exploring the story and the world at a diagonal. But as a reader, I also love the moment in which a work of fiction breaks with the pattern. A new tack upon a fresh wind takes over, and the prose soars again.
Borne, by Jeff Vandermeer, is a post-apocalyptic novel set in the aftermath of a man-made climate catastrophe. It begins when a woman, Rachel, finds a strange, well, thing while scavenging a ruined city. She isn’t sure if it’s animal, plant, or object, but she takes care of it, and it grows. Borne, she names the thing. She keeps it against the advice of her lover, Wick. It learns to speak, and Rachel tries to parent it, to teach it what she knows. (Rachel’s POV, dislodged by this finding and providing for Borne, are the “tack” at the beginning of the story.) <!!BEWARE!! SPOILERS FOLLOW> Unfortunately, it becomes more and more clear that Borne is something of a monster. It’s voracious. It can eat anything. It also can’t seem to stop killing, and it is very good at it. Can Rachel teach Borne morality? The problem is that it doesn’t conceptualize of killing or existence or death like we do.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: there is also Mord, who is a murderous, giant, flying bear. Some people have begun to worship the bear like a local god.
There are many stories with a shard of the speculative. Disappointingly often it appears in a way that feels thin, a fiction merely 1:1 analogous for a piece of our own reality. SF films suffer even more in this regard—recently I watched a real himbo of a movie, The Creator, a beautiful, dumb vehicle—its received moral message that AI=humans just like us! leaving no room to wonder what might be different or interesting about synthetic life. You could swap out the cool-looking robots with normal people and nothing much would change. (For a weirder watch, in theaters I saw the steampunk dark comedy Poor Things, which I didn’t love, but I did enjoy.) Contrast The Creator with the ideas of AI in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice; Leckie foregrounds the ways AI is not human, and so opens up a frontier of new questions. For example, why would AI be limited to a single humanoid body?
A teacher once told me that if you look at anything long enough it becomes strange. Borne is a book saturated in strangeness. The mysterious, now-defunct Company has released its toxic and wondrous inventions all over this world, contaminated it from the smallest living things to the biggest. At every opportunity, the writing stops and smells the strange roses. We encounter a menagerie of weird, unexplained images and tangents that range out into other Vandermeer works, bids for the reader to follow off the page, or to linger, if you crave greater detail.
And of course there is Borne itself, a polymorphous creature that is able to take in not only calories from what it consumes, but the knowledge and personalities of its meal, too. Vandermeer avoids presuming such a being would think and feel remotely like a human does. Borne does not believe that it murders people, as the people seem—to Borne—to live on inside of Borne’s stomach and mind. This category-defying creature (force? tech?) has no obvious analog. It is not a human with an alien mask. It is itself. It is Borne. We as readers must make our understanding of it anew, in a true first contact. Although it’s also important that Rachel’s human POV grounds us in the story. Her love for Borne allows us to emotionally connect, not just intellectually admire the ideas.
A little over halfway into the book, the narrative arrives at a stress point. Borne can no longer deny its nature, and runs away to prey upon the denizens of the city. Rachel searches for Borne, venturing into the night alone—a reckless thing to do in such a dangerous landscape. It is against all of the survival instincts that have sustained her since her parents died. Rachel as a character is untrusting, and has difficulty with intimacy, a result of keeping her traumatic memories at arm’s length. Borne was the exception. Taking Borne in to her home was her character acting out of character, which can be a very helpful shorthand for finding the plot “tack” at the start of a book. This tack continues until it reaches a point of no return. The force at the beginning of the story (Borne is a monster; Rachel loves Borne) puts too much pressure on Rachel’s emotional distance. For a short passage, she fully dissociates: the POV switches to a third person. As she risks her life navigating the city looking for Borne, she thinks of herself as only “the ghost.” This POV shift is the start of a new tack, a new pattern, and a part two. Rachel now must let go of Borne, but she must also recover her buried self, and find a way to connect with her lover, Wick.
We as readers learn the patterns of the story, the language of fictional world—but those patterns must continue to evolve until eventually, they break. Change comes by necessity. The wind shifts.
I’m in the midst of this big redraft of my first novel, and seeing how much winnowing has happened between the many paths the book might’ve taken, the ghost versions of the book, and the version that it is. Those other versions obscured the best version, but I mourn them anyhow; they had so many weird tangents and explorations. It’s the process for this book because I was learning how to write a novel as I was writing it. It contains several proto-novels inside. But hey. There’s nothing like the start of a new year to think about fresh tacks on the wind.
-Amanda