Acceptance is the last stage in the Kubler-Ross model of grief, a calm retrospective internalization of impending mortality. And the final part of a trilogy should bring some kind of closure. Given what I thought of book 2, the only reason I read book 3 is that someone on the train was reading it, and he said it was good. Never take advice from people on public transit.

Of course, Acceptance resolutely refuses to do any of internalization of impending mortality. Area X is expanding, swallowing up Southern Reach and perhaps remaking the world in an alien image. And rather than reveal any of this straight on, VanderMeer splits his narrative into three chronologically distinct viewpoints, the director deciding to go on the fatal 12th expedition, Ghost Bird and Control seeking the end of Area X, and Saul, the light house keeper, decades ago when Area X was just the bayou coast, dealing with weirdos from the Science & Seance Brigade and making some kind of ordinary life, as a strange power grows within him.

This kind of fiction challenges us to image the Out of Context Event, to borrow a phrase from Iain M. Banks. What do people do when confronted with something that defies all expectations? How can an author describe something for which ordinary language lacks the words? This final book disappears in a puff of obscurity, leaving the most mundane explanation of all. Perhaps Area X is just a metaphor, for cancer, for environmental catastrophe, for the unexplained depths of the soul.