The area outside the border is controlled by the Southern Reach, the government agency set up to monitor, investigate, and contain Area X. There was an Event, and after the Event, there was Area X. The truth is weirder (a word I will be resorting to often in this review) - the truth is, no one understands what happened. Still, I can describe the basic set-up.) The official explanation for the Event is ecological disaster, but this is a fiction. Area X is a beguiling creation, the riddle at the center of these marvelous books, and I will endeavor not to spill its secrets here. The biologist is several eventful days into an expedition exploring Area X, the mysterious, unpopulated stretch of southern coast where, thirty years ago, an Event occurred. I had the unsettling thought that the natural world around me had become a kind of camouflage." I stood there, watched those twinned lines disappear up the canal, back toward the deserted village. In an instant that glimpse was gone and they had submerged again, and I had no way to verify what I had seen. As they slid by, the nearest one rolled slightly to the side, and it stared at me with an eye that did not, in that brief flash, resemble a dolphin eye to me. But when the mind expects a certain range of possibilities, any explanation that falls outside of that expectation can surprise. "I knew that the dolphins here sometimes ventured in from the sea, had adapted to the freshwater. At a mid-point in the book, the narrator - she identifies herself only as “the biologist” - spots a pair of dolphins swimming in a canal. I thought of the Gowanus Canal dolphin while I was reading Annihilation, the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. A necropsy later revealed it to have been ill: riddled with tumors, malnourished, its kidneys failing. The dolphin bobbed in the grey-green water, inert, manifestly dead. A hush fell on the crowd even the cops looked stricken.
After several hours - people standing vigil, snapping pictures with their phones - the dolphin stopped moving. Signs of the dolphin’s distress were evident - a bloody dorsal fin, periods of what appeared to be torpor alternating with spells of agitation. There it was, unmistakably a dolphin, swimming slowly back and forth in one of the most phantasmagorically polluted waterways in the world. Living nearby at the time and alerted by a friend’s text, I went over to have a look. The NYPD showed up to monitor things a news helicopter hovered overhead. A crowd soon gathered by the Union and Carroll Street bridges and along the banks of the canal. ON A BITTERLY cold day in January 2013, a dolphin was discovered swimming in the famously noxious waters of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.
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