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I very nearly did not ‘eat the whole thing’ when I picked up
The Scar and started consuming. I can’t
speak highly enough of Miéville’s other work, particularly The
City & The City and Embassytown,
and I can’t imagine the effort that must go into fully realising an entire alternative
fantasy/steampunk world, but the opening pages of this, the second instalment following
on from Perdido
Street Station, creak under the strain of someone trying to sail an
unseaworthy artistic vision. It’s something that gently abraded my enjoyment of
the first novel, but ultimately, as with PSS,
Miéville manages somehow to effect his vision in spite of all the “ancient
darkness and trembling aether, squids and waffle”.
This time at the centre of the action, it’s the epic loxodromic travails of an ancient seaborne city and the human flotsam which wash there upon. Happily (although not usefully until later on), one of these characters is a linguist. The others include an orphan, a remade convict en route to a life of servitude, and a scientist who specialises in marine megafauna, which is handy as it turns out. The city, called Armada, is a vast collection of pirated sea vessels lashed together to form a fragile and, conversely, rarely encountered haven for vagrants, thieves and lost souls, and is divided into neighbourhoods ruled over by local warlords, (one is a vampire, of course), under the watchful eyes of the Lovers, a pseudo regal couple held together with bonds of sadomasochism, and their ‘faithful’ guard dog, the brutal and unflinching Uther Doul. Doul, not to spoil things too much, is a right piece of work, and enjoys the use of a mysterious weapon which operates in quantum space. One to watch!
Other characters include the aforementioned vampire leader
and councillor, the Brucolac, who foments a civil war when the Lovers’ plans to
raise a formerly only mythical leviathan from the depths of the ocean to
harness its mass and propulsion for the city’s use becomes public, and the rather
dimensionless spy Silas Fennac who uses a pretty grim thaumaturgic artefact to
sneak around the place being naughty and upsetting the angry fishmen, the
Grindylow, into launching an attack on New Crobuzon. Shekel, the orphan cabin
boy falls for a remade woman who is mostly a boiler (literally, not
figuratively), the remade convict Tanner Sack goes full native and gets his
upgrades upgraded so he can breathe underwater, and the linguist, Bellis Coldwine,
gets her knickers in a twist around Silas Fennac and discovers in the library where
she is put to work the long lost instructions for raising the monster, so of
course being a treacherous sort she destroys the appendix before handing it over
to Doul, who takes a particular interest in her for some clandestine reason.
And it only gets more complex.
Hats off to Miéville for his perspicacity and indefatigability,
his planning and delivery, if not for his (LOL) overly effortful wordsmithery. This,
and the rather depressive Iron
Council which follows, must have made his life hell for years, because
it’s massive in lots of senses. Not as big as Stephen Donaldson’s decology of the
Thomas
Covenant Chronicles, admittedly, but then Miéville doesn’t steal wholesale
from established works of fantasy (ahem). He does borrow from canonical horror and
fantasy but he makes Bas-Lag his own unique universe. It’s meticulous,
intricate, and quite, quite brilliant. Glutton that I am, I went back for more.
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