The Scar

When I reviewed Perdido Street Station at the beginning of the year I was keen to get my hands on the sequels. It doesn't feel six months since I said it. It certainly didn't feel like I'd been out of Bas-Lag six months when I started reading The Scar.

It's a slow starter. China Miéville builds his world up again with great care and attention to detail. The journey away from New Crobuzon by one of the renegades connected with events in Perdido Street Station is initially to reintroduce the world and get a feel before the real action gets started. And that takes 200 pages. Not that it's a bad read at this stage. The conflicts Bellis Coldwine, the protagonist, feels draw you in to the character and introduce the mysteries of characters who will play a prominent part in future events.

And then we reach Armada.

Armada is a remarkable creation. I don't normally comment, simply because many steampunk locales have a vaguely similar feel even if they're portrayed differently. New Crobuzon itself is a remarkable achievement, being possessed of its own intrigues and a unique feel, but the floating city of Armada surpasses even that.

Armada is a city comprised of hundreds of vessels lashed together and built upon, turned into a floating city moving gradually around the open seas. Its people are pirates and pressganged, arranged into their districts. No one leaves; should you be unfortunate enough to find yourself kidnapped by the pirates who range on missions for Armada, then that's it. Your life will be spent in the city. Your loyalties will be dictated by your district. It's a city portrayed visually as something out of the ordinary, which Miéville's writing makes it easy to see in your mind's eye.

Then there's the people. There's a vast range of races, mostly humanoid, but some vastly different from the norm. Miéville makes up races for fun: there's the Cactacae, the Vodyanoi, the Khepri, Scabmettlers, Remade, Vampir... Each brings something new to the eclectic mix. And then there's the characters themselves. Mysterious, with hidden agendas aplenty. We only find out the truth of them late in proceedings.

Armada seems to lurch from place to place, guided by the schemes of its leaders. One thing leads seamlessly to the next. On the way through the 800-page novel there are dramatic uses of the sciento-magic thaumaturgy, quests, subterfuges, battles a plenty (both with and without hardy pirate cutlasses being involved). It's a book of great range, epic in its scope. At once it can be intensely personal and grandly epic in the same way as significant historical events. It has a life of its own.

So would I recommend The Scar? Heartily. It's something remarkable. It's not a book to read so much as you experience it. Miéville's writing means you can smell each and every moment as well as visualise it. It is immersive and once it's over you'll feel like you've lost a part of you. It's something to cherish.

Perdido Street Station

Some will remember my gushing praise of China Miéville in my review of The City And The City, the book that shared last year's Hugo award for best novel with Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. I think I said that I'd be revisiting his work sooner rather than later and that I was looking forward to the day I did.

With good reason, as it turns out. I received Perdido Street Station for Christmas and, after finishing a couple of (much) shorter books in the early days of the month I finally sat down to work my way through the 867 pages of it the other Sunday. From the off, I was captivated.

The writing is superb. Miéville paints his world with florid prose that flows with the smoothness of melted chocolate. The world revealed is a place of wonder, vivid and colourful and grotesque. And the fluency is what makes it stand out. It's so easy to read about, even though the language can be high-flown and perhaps beyond more than a few readers. But for yours truly, it was a joy to read writing bursting with originality, with a fluent, easy style. However, I can see an argument that some may make that it's overwritten and bloated by purple prose throughout - I just happen to disagree.

The story of Perdido Street Station focuses on a group of dilettantes, including an artist, a renegade underground journalist and a freelance scientist. From humble beginnings, where a garuda - a winged hunter of the lands away from New Crobuzon, the steampunk city where the book is set - approaches Isaac, the scientist, with a request, the plot picks up pace and scale with the introduction of the inhuman primary antagonists. The oppressive government and militia become involved, along with underworld gangsters and hyperintelligent giant steampunk constructs.

With a novel of this scale, with the grand ideas and spectacular set-pieces, it would be easy for Miéville to have lost sight of his characters on occasion, and it's not an unreasonable accusation to make on rare occasions. However, by and large, the characters remain human (ish), with real emotions and motivations. Isaac and Lin in particular, with their cross-species romance, are always characters I could connect with in their personal struggles. These struggles combined with the overall grand scheme of the plot make for compelling reading throughout

Perdido Street Station is surreal at all times. In the steampunk world, higher forces exist that help to make this more a fantasy novel than SF. The ideas combine with an unorthodox grace in the grotesque world of New Crobuzon. With a less skilled hand, the whole world could easily have collapsed under the weight of phantasmagorical ideas on the brassy frame of steampunk, but Miéville manages to balance it all out quite nicely.

One thing I will say is that at 867 pages this is not a light read. It takes some time and commitment, and as such isn't generally on the highly-recommended list for busy LLB Bar Exempting students. However, I still thoroughly enjoyed it cover to cover, and will be picking up the sequel, The Scar, in due course.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are tonight's entertainment!

It'll be nice to put my feet up this evening.

That is, it'll be nice to put my feet up even if it doesn't involve watching the football. Arsenal are playing L**ds for the right to play Town in the fourth round of the FA Cup, but, despite having a vested interest, I'm not watching. Partly because I can't be bothered, partly for other reasons.

So I'm spending a rare evening engrossed in ideas. I'll be reading a bit of Perdido Street Station, China Miéville's 2001 steampunk novel, a bit of my short story collection (not a collection of my short stories, I'll hasten to add - that was a clumsy turn of phrase), and for the rest of my time I'll be submersing myself in notes and mind maps, trying to coax a story into being.

I have a couple of ideas I could go back to, but I don't really feel like it. After writing most of those stories once, I really don't fancy writing them again right now. With the last few weeks being spent immersing myself in uninspiring coursework, getting a new idea to work on will hopefully ignite my imagination. From there, who knows: I might finally rewrite Descent (to which WriSoc will be 'treated' tomorrow), or carry on with Under The Railway Arches.

Who knows, I may even motivate myself to get the rewrites published so they won't just be meaningless words on a barely-read blog.

You may not be able to tell, but I'm excited.

The City & The City

China Miéville wasn't a writer I was particularly aware of until recently. Then I got a recommendation, which declared him the greatest thing since sliced bread. The City & The City is the first book of his I've read, and if that's typical of his works then the recommendation is bang on the money.

Let me start by saying not much I've read this year has left me feeling wowed. It may be that this is the first novel to have me reeling in thought, absolutely stunned by the way it's left me in that state. The City & The City is subtle and intelligent, multi-faceted, encompassing more than the typical SF detective novel.

Set in a fictional city on the edge of Europe with Balkan overtones, the novel focuses on Inspector Borlú, of the Extreme Crimes Squad in Besźel, as he investigates a murder. As is typical in SF detective novels, there's more to this than 'ooh, look, a trollop who's gone and got stabbed by her lover's jealous missus oh dear'. What we get here is a curious concept of two cities encompassing the same topographical location. The politics of these two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, as well as the way the two cities coexist, make up the bulk of the novel's intelligent commentary on what we see and don't see in our own society, as well as the alienation in the same.

The concept is original enough, but its execution is superb. What I just told you does not do it justice. That I told you it says it all; Miéville weaves exposition of the world into the plot with such subtlety that no single passage at any stage can be said to be explaining the world. The concept permeates your mind rather than being forced upon it by heavy-handed infodumps. I can imagine that each reader will see their own version of the city and the city, rather than everyone being straightjacketed into one distinct vision. This makes the underlying alienation all the more stark.

At the heart of the story is a relentless pace that grips the reader and leaves them breathless. It has all the ingredients of the whodunnit in the Morse sense (although Morse tended not to have investigations into more than just the case); the culprit's eventual identity doesn't come as a surprise so much, as the point of the novel isn't the murder itself but the surrounding circumstances, but it still holds the attention. For a casual reader of mysteries, uninterested in the philosophies underlying the plot, the case would hold water. But it really is those surrounding circumstances that make the book what it is: brilliantly intelligent, and almost insidiously subtle.

Will I be reading more of China Miéville's work? Undoubtedly, yes. This is a novel that had me captivated in its themes and world more than any other since Look To Windward. I'm hard pushed to find a genuine weakness in Miéville's work, and I can't imagine it'll be too long before I pick up a copy of one of his other works.