Finch by Jeff VanderMeer
Page 34
“I woke up one night from a vivid dream and the city was there in my head,” Jeff VanderMeer says. “I immediately ran to the computer and typed the first several pages of the first story set in Ambergris. From there, I soon had this entire fantastical city opening up in my mind. It took fifteen years to finish all three novels. I never realized that that one moment of inspiration would lead to becoming a fulltime fiction writer, or that it would consume so much of my life.”
While remaining true to an overarching narrative about the history of Ambergris, each book has used the approach and style best suited to its characters and stories. The first Ambergris novel, City of Saints & Madmen, was a mosaic novel composed of multiple narratives that played with postmodern techniques, mixing formal experimentation with the tropes of weird, uncanny fiction. That first book used a stylized, baroque approach to language and was dedicated to the idea of book-as-artifact.
The second novel, Shriek: An Afterword, presented a sixty-year family chronicle through the eyes of a dysfunctional brother and sister, whose dueling voices formed the heart of the book. Although steeped in war, intrigue, and bizarre events, Shriek lay more in the realm of works by Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust-dreamlike yet precise, chronicling the unhappy, the strange, the quirky.
Finch, by contrast, combines elements of noir, the thriller, spy stories, and fantasy, and in so doing gets to the true nitty-gritty of Ambergris. It's the first time readers have had a chance to explore the city-albeit during a time of occupation, crisis, and change-almost as if seeing what the main character sees by way of handheld camera.
Ambergris has become an iconic fantasy setting, with City of Saints & Madmen and Shriek: An Afterword translated into fifteen languages, making dozens of year's-best lists, and winning various awards, including the World Fantasy Award (for a novella from City of Saints) and awards in Finland and France. The books have resulted in musical and film collaborations with, among others, The Church and Murder by Death. Along with novels like Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, VanderMeer's Ambergris Cycle has redefined the possibilities of fantastical literature.
Finch by Jeff VanderMeer
MURDER BY DEATH'S FINCH SOUNDTRACK
In a unique cross-pollination of media, the band Murder by Death has recorded a CD of music inspired by the novel Finch. This CD, which takes several scenes from Finch as the spark for extended songs, can be purchased via the band's website at www.murderbydeath.com and is also available with Underland's limited edition of the novel. VanderMeer listened to the entire Murder by Death back catalog while writing Finch, and it was a substantial influence on the novel's mood and tone.