Friday, March 29, 2013

The Scar by China Miéville (3.5 stars)

Yep, more Miéville, but I'm reading something else after this one. The Scar is a return to the Bas-Lag world from Perdido Street Station: re-made, cactacae, vodyanoi etc. but set outside of New Crobuzon, mostly in a floating pirate city reminiscent of 'Waterworld' called Armada. Unfortunately it is nowhere near as good as PSS.

Armada annoyed me from the outset. How does a bunch of boats lashed together in the open ocean survive a big storm, let alone centuries worth of storms? Why don't they smash into each other and sink? Miéville tries to address this, but the explanation is lame:
Channeled into canals between the vessels, Armada's waters jerked and pitched violently but could not form waves.
The world-building is there, and there's at least one very well-played casual reveal, but compared to PSS or Embassytown, it's nothing, and relies heavily on explanations from PSS. You can read this novel independently, but if you did you would probably wonder why he doesn't describe the fascinating races in more detail, it's because he did it in PSS. I actually think avoiding recapping was the right call.

Miéville does introduce some new races, the most interesting of which is the mosquito men and women. The descriptions of the mosquito women were amazing:
Gazing hungrily, the mosquito-woman stretches her mouth open, spewing slaver, lips peeled back from toothless gums. She retches, and with a shocking motion a jag snaps from her mouth. A spit-wet proboscis, jutting a foot from her lips. It extrudes from her in an organic movement, something like vomiting, but unmistakably and unsettlingly sexual.
A book set in the time when the world was plagued by these mosquitos would have been an amazing read, as would one based on Silas Fennec's spying on the grindylow, or one about the zombie city of High Cromlech. Instead we got just a taste of all of these and followed an improbable floating city to the edge of the known world, just for it to turn around and come back. It feels like Miéville realised he'd already hit 800 pages and didn't have the stomach to write the actual climax so he just turned the city around. Or did he? Maybe that's just one possibility and there is a different one where it doesn't suck. That might be clever but ruining the story to make a point about possibility mining is a huge cop out.

I've noticed a pattern in the Miéville novels I've read so far: he doesn't seem to like filling out the characters of his narrators. In this novel it is Bellis Coldwine. With that name I can only assume Miéville was attempting to head off criticism of her blandness by pointing out: 'yes, she is deliberately cold and whiny'. She is important in the plot at one point as a translator, but after that just bumps along, being basically useless but inexplicably often at the centre of the action, which is of course convenient for narration.

My final complaint is that the grindylow were way too powerful. There's no way New Crobuzon could be a threat to them, which undermines a major plot point.

Not a terrible book, but he has written much better.

3.5 stars.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Embassytown by China Miéville (5 stars)

I doubled down on Miéville and was dropped into the now-familiar confusion at the start of a new Miéville novel: an explosion of new terminology, gradual reveals, and complex world building. Some readers seem annoyed by this initial feeling of disorientation, but I love it, and I'm now so impressed by Miéville's skill with this style that I'm perfectly content to sit back and let him do his work. Language is also as you would expect from Miéville: why use 'rare' when you could use 'recherché'?

And in fact language is a central theme of the book. The Areikei, dual-winged insect-like aliens on whose planet Embassytown exists, speak with two mouths simultaneously. A complex means of communications using a pair of cloned humans linked by technology to be able to synchronise their speech has been devised, and a class structure has evolved around these sort-of-human 'Ambassadors' who communicate with the Areikei 'Hosts'. The disastrous conflict of the novel arises purely due the speech of a new Ambassador.

Miéville spends much of the book describing the Hosts's native tongue 'Language', and creates some interesting constraints such as a physical inability to lie, and a requirement that all phrases be constructed with similes, saying something is 'like' something else. Part philosophical, and part linguistic fantasy, I imagine it would appeal to students of those disciplines (although I did read one resounding criticism of the notion that a language could exist without the concept of 'that', which is a key part of the plot). I mostly enjoyed the forays into linguistics but occasionally found them boring, especially the meetings of the similes club. On the plus side I learnt some terms like 'cognate' and 'kenning'.

This is definitely an ideas and plot book, more than a characters book. We don't really get to know anyone deeply, even Avice our narrator. And there are times when the single point-of-view is quite painful, such as shortly after the turmoil is created by the Ambassador. Avice is basically hanging out at home and talking to other people who don't know what is going on, which makes for fairly tedious reading, while others desperately try to save their society. A second PoV at this point would have been great: Ez, Ra, Scile, or MagDa maybe. Ehrsul's character is and central to the story early on, but is barely mentioned as soon as the conflict starts, which seemed very strange. Perhaps Ehrsul's story is fodder for a sequel.

Speaking of sequels, there's plenty more that this (third!) universe has to offer: there's a great immer-travel beyond-the-final-frontier space-cowboy hunted-by-bremen-establishment novel begging to written. The concept of light-houses placed in the immer by unknown technologically advanced aliens is great.

My favourite part of the book was the description of the Hosts and their infrastructure battling addiction - it was fantastically imagined and described. I'd love to see this as a movie one day and watch a building grow ears to satisfy a heroin-like junkie craving.

5 stars!

Sunday, March 3, 2013

The City & The City by China Miéville (4.5 stars)

If you haven't read The City & The City, just stop reading this and go read it. It is really hard to discuss the book without spoiling anything since even major concepts are only gradually revealed to the reader, so be warned I'm going to drop a bunch of spoilers.

Miéville's cities of Beszél (which incidentally means 'to speak' in Hungarian) and UI Quoma are fantastically created. They are reminiscent of East and West Berlin, but instead of a high concrete walls and guard towers, the walls between Miéville's two city-countries are seemingly purely psychological, built on a deep and pervasive fear of 'Breach'. Citizens of both cities learn to 'unsee', 'unsmell', and 'unhear' everything about the other city: it's traffic, people, buildings, and more.

The idea of two countries being in the same place but separated in the minds of their citizens is a barrier for the reader's suspension of disbelief, but it's a problem that is skillfully attacked by Miéville. He describes a number of challenges the two cities need to deal with such as 'foreign' traffic and emergency vehicles, traffic accidents involving 'foreign' vehicles, children who are inexperienced at 'unseeing', tourists, immigration, trade, and differing economic status of the two countries. His description of UI Qomatown in Beszél is a good example of how much thought he has put into this world:
The scents of Beszél UI Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries as disrespectful as rain ("Rain and woodsmoke live in both cities," the proverb has it.)...Very occasionally a young UI Qoman who does not know the area of their city that UI Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically UI Qoman Beszél-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected - there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm - and Breach are normally merciful.
To explore the interactions between the two co-located countries, Miéville uses a murder investigation that necessitates international cooperation between Beszél's Inspector Tyador Borlú and UI Qoma's Senior Detective Quissim Dhatt. We only really get to know the main protagonist Borlú, other characters remain quite undeveloped, and the dialogue is fairly sparse and intense.

As noir crime fiction I felt it was fairly weak, and the very neat resolution to the whodunnit has prompted criticism from some readers, but they miss the point. The crime and its investigation was really an excuse to have some, otherwise very rare, international collaboration between the two cities. I was interested in the murder but I was fascinated by the larger questions it inspired: Who/what/where is 'Breach'? Was 'The Cleavage', when the two cities were created, a joining or a splitting (cleave can imply either)? Is the mental barrier between the cities purely psychological, or is there an element of magic/fantasy/sci-fi i.e. is there a biological or technological reason why the citizens of the cities can 'unsee' their foreign counterparts? Is Orciny real, a synonym for Breach, or something else entirely?

Of these questions we only really get some resolution about Breach and Orciny. Breach is invisible, pervasive, extremely secretive and seems to possess limitless power when there is a 'breach': a failure to observe the city boundaries, which could be as simple as looking directly at a building in the other country.
I had seen Breach before, in a brief moment. Who hadn't? I had seen it take control. The great majority of breaches are acute and immediate. Breach intervenes...Trust to Breach, we grow up hearing, unsee and don't mention the UI Qoman pickpockets or muggers at work even if you notice, which you shouldn't, from where you stand in Beszél, because breach is a worse transgression than theirs.
After all of his experiences of travelling to UI Qoma and entering Breach I expected Borlú to question whether keeping the split between the cities was actually a good idea, whether Breach was morally in the right or just a brutal enforcement of a ridiculous and pointless segregation, or even just to voice some self doubt about becoming part of that enforcement. But he never does. I'm still not sure how I feel about that: to some extent it seems in keeping with his character, he shows no sympathy for the unificationists, and perhaps there is even some fantasy/sci-fi explanation (government brain modifications?) for this deficiency, but it is at odds with his willingness to break the rules to protect Yolanda Rodriguez.

Nonetheless, an intriguing concept well executed.

4.5 stars.

Friday, March 1, 2013

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (3.5 stars)

Zafón certainly has some talent, and this is an impressive debut. I have a soft spot for books that love books:
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
The Shadow of the Wind is a complex gothic love story that tended a little more towards soap opera than I would have liked. The improbable coincidences are, for the most part, carried by Zafón's strong writing. He creates some downright creepy scenes in the abandoned Aldaya mansion, and I loved his descriptions of Barcelona (you can see all the places he mentions on a Google map compiled by a fan).

I found it impossible not to love Fermin's character, the cheeky old soul, but like many other improbable things in the novel, the way Daniel decides to risk his father's business by offering him a job based on one encounter when Fermin was a drunk homeless person seems silly.

Early in the novel I was also annoyed by what seemed to be lackadaisical intimidation by the mysterious man with the scarred face - does he care about destroying these books or doesn't he? He appears to have years to spend just hanging outside the bookshop, and creating an occasional creepy encounter. This actually gets explained reasonably well at the end of the novel, so I relinquish the objection :)

But the biggest weakness of the book is the large amounts of exposition that are unceremoniously dumped into the flow of the story. These sections felt like very lazy background filling. On a number of occasions Zafón essentially writes a biography of the character and delivers it on thin pretext in a large chunk, instead of letting us learn about the character through experience, or meting out the necessary history more naturally. The meeting with Father Fernando Ramos was a particularly jarring example where Ramos exposes Daniel and Fermin as frauds pretending to be related to Carax, but then proceeds to tell them his entire life history and very personal details over dozens of pages anyway.

Despite these problems I did enjoy the novel, and was surprised by most of the (many) twists, but I would have loved it with less exposition and a darker, less Bold and the Beautiful, ending.

3.5 stars.