Hummingbird Salamander (2021)

What would you ruin your life for? 

That’s more or less what I think about when I think about Hummingbird Salamander. The protagonist ruins her life for a taxidermy hummingbird, but really, she ruins her life for a quest. 

There’s a point when she is about to get tortured and possibly killed, and so she hurls herself out of a window to escape, nursing the resulting injury for the remainder of the book. That’s the point where I took a breather from considering the larger mystery of the plot and thought, wow, her life is really in shambles.

The reason it took me this long to actually focus on the disintegration of her life is that the protagonist, Jane Smith, seems generally ambivalent about her life to begin with. I’m not sure if Jeff VanderMeer is terrible at writing multi-dimensional characters who reflect the experience of being human - and even worse at writing women - or if Jane’s emotional flatness is an intentional decision (I mean, her name is Jane Smith) to encourage the reader to focus on the larger metaphor: The world is ending. 

We meet Jane as she is discovering the taxidermy hummingbird, which was sent to her by a radical pro-ecological terrorist who is already dead by the time we arrive. It doesn’t take much time to realize that possessing this hummingbird is dangerous. There is a mystery afoot (Why was this hummingbird sent to this person?) and holding on to the hummingbird in order to get to the bottom of the mystery only implicates her to something that bad people have no qualms killing over. 

As she and we get deeper into the mystery, her life crumbles more and more. She basically accepts the sacrifice of everything that was previously a part of her and becomes more and more attached to the hummingbird and whatever it represents. Every so often, we’re (quickly) asked to look up from what’s right in front of Jane to see that climate change is making the world more uninhabitable. Fires and general world destruction are happening at a rate more clearly pronounced than in “real” life, but it’s a sort of background simmer, like CNN on in a waiting room. An alarmed optimist might read this and think This is how it would really seem if climate change accelerated: Scary but still background noise. An alarmed pessimist might think: This is happening right now! Climate change is literally and factually accelerating, and it’s barely even background news!

A novel is a great setting to wrestle with the topic of nature because they are both huge, messy, difficult to work out in a single lifetime, and can be viewed from multiple perspectives. I wouldn’t call Hummingbird Salamander the best version of this type of novel - I find The Overstory to be a masterpiece on a tier I’d put very few books - but it is one that understands the core tone it wants to utilize: urgency. Jane is being chased, and if you’re turning pages fast enough, you might start looking over your own shoulder. 

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Ruining your life is a matter of perspective.

Life is being ruined around us. The people willing to destroy have done more than destroy. They have created structures that only allow us to walk around quietly accepting. To counter them with any volume means to tear down the worlds we have built for ourselves; the things that give us comfort within a dying planet. 

There’s possibly no working that out. You live with the guilt, and you hope it motivates you to sacrifice something but not enough to sacrifice so much your life is ruined. You monitor your urgency, and you tweak here and there, and you try not to think about how it doesn’t even come close to making a difference. You substitute that feeling for the thought ‘if everyone just did what I did, that would help, right?’

What does that look to you and how much comfort does it actually give you?

Amazon Prime overnight delivery?

Spotify?

Disposable diapers for your baby?

Plastic Ziploc bags?

Each one of those things either brings real material damage to the planet or rips away labor rights away from workers. Judging someone for using any one of them is legitimately fair when you break down their ramifications, but stripping away all of them from a single person would start to ruin what is reasonably a comfortable life.

To some degree, the answer here is that nihilism shouldn’t trump anyone’s ability to try. To do something on any given day. To try to do less bad. To understand that there are forces trying to get you to accept doing more harm to the planet, to your fellow human, next year than you accepted this year, and to say I see you, and no, I will not.

I won’t tell you how Hummingbird Salamander ends. If you read VanderMeer’s other works, specifically Annihilation (or seen the movie), you probably can assume the ending is not Normal or Chill. But it does get to the idea of someone ruining their life for something like nature. We often assume that’s that. They are simply a martyr, to be remembered for their cause and not necessarily their individual contribution. 

But what if there was something on the other side of that choice? What if it wasn’t just about sacrificing and shedding more and more comforts until there’s nothing left? What if you found something there?

This book doesn’t answer that question. It shows you what asking it really looks like.

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3 More Things You Can Read:

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You should listen to this podcast episode:

I really loved this episode on The Quiet Storm radio station. I’ve always loved the music. Who can’t listen to Anita Baker all day? But learning more about it was great.

‘til next time buckaroos…