It is not until the final act that you can call elements of the book true speculative fiction. Jane lives a normal life not dissimilar to our own, but there are hints of the rest of the world falling to pieces with crops failing and migration happening even within America. The oddity is compounded by the near future setting. This can make some of the book tricky to follow as the reader tries to piece together what is happening. You cannot really believe what is happening as no one is telling the truth, even the narrator. It has the offbeat feel of a Chinatown or the work of Chuck Palahniuk. Like the title of the book suggests Hummingbird is a surreal book. The instrument of her failure is her own actions. The choices that Jane makes through the book start off poorly and get worse. She is also a broken women. Unlike many fictional investigators, she is not addicted to drugs or alcohol, but to ruining her own life. The protagonist is untrustworthy and will not always tell the reader everything that is happening. Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff Vandermeer has many of the traits of classic crime noir. Jane must hunt down a stuffed Salamander if she is going to solve the mystery and save her way of life. When Jane picks up the bird her life changes forever, she is now a pawn in the game of a dead women. The only thing inside is a stuffed Hummingbird. She led a normal life as a security consultant until the day a key arrived that opened a storage space. Our protagonist is Jane Smith, not her real name as she is not keen in anyone finding her or any of the other people in the story. Setting a crime noir over the period a society begins to break down makes a twisted sense. A sense of darkness and inevitable violence. The idea of the oceans rising, smog filling the skies and animals dying out whilst the infrastructure of countries collapse, all have a bleak feeling to them. Similar to the feel of classic noir. Put aside any politics and there is enough going on environmentally to worry most people. Following the news, it feels like the world is going to hell in a handcart.
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