To celebrate the tenth birthday of The Scar by China Mieville, I'm re-reading it and posting about the experience. There will be spoilers!
Currently at: finished!
June is over, but I've got a few more things I'd like to say about The Scar. So I've put it to a vote, and The Scar month is being extended until I'm done. Today, I'd like to talk about the way the book ends. Because there are bits about it that I really like, bits I dislike, and bits that I find baffling. (Beware: lots of major plot spoilers in this post!)
First, the grindylow. China Mieville seems to enjoy subverting reader expectations, and I really loved the way the grindylow subplot played out. Throughout the novel they were hunting down Armada using prototypically monstrous methods: kidnap, torture, dark magic. Everything about them seemed supernaturally evil, and indeed that's how everyone in the book thought of them. So it seemed perfectly reasonable that they would go to all of that effort to find the floating city for primitive, idolatrous reasons.
That's why it was so great when it turned out that their motives were completely ordinary -- they were simply trying to protect their borders. The magical artefact that everyone assumed they were so desperately seeking was basically irrelevant. They were completely misunderstood, ascribed mystical motives, because the civilised people of Armada feared what they didn't understand.
That was one of the book's successes. The actual climax, in which the city made its final push towards The Scar, was... Well. I don't really know what it was. Reaching The Scar was the culmination of The Lovers' plan. Every action taken in the book was striving towards or against that goal. It was meticulously foreshadowed, the title of the whole novel, and I'm not convinced Mieville really knew what to do with it.
I think perhaps Mieville trapped himself. After all that effort, he had to take us to The Scar. But the thing that he conceived was so vast, so deadly, that there was no way that voyage could end in anything but total destruction.
So he cheated. He sent us a familiar character from some alternate dimension, some version of the world where Armada did reach The Scar, and was ruined. That way Mieville could fulfil his promise, and still save his characters. It all makes sense in the context of the novel. But it's not entirely satisfying.
In Perdido Street Station, the book that preceded The Scar, Mieville made a pretty impressive argument against the conventional, comfortable ending in epic fantasy. I wonder if he was again trying to write against reader expectations? The thing is, in The Scar my expectations were of disaster. Subverting the happily-ever-after was satisfying, whereas subverting the disaster feels more like failing to follow through.
Finally, we come to the question that I always have when I finish reading The Scar, and which I always forget before I pick it up again. In the epilogue, Bellis Coldwine discusses her perspective on what has happened. She has come to realise that she has been manipulated throughout by Uther Doul, but she can't decide whether he was following a grand plan, or acting opportunistically.
This always leaves me wondering if the book is actually about her, or if it is actually about Doul. I'm not entirely sure why it matters; surely the book can be about both of them? Perhaps after following Bellis for so long, I finally end up identifying with her feelings of manipulation. She claims to willingly renounce any possibility of ever really understanding, but I'm not sure that I can.
I think that says something about how thoroughly The Scar captures my imagination, that I keep wondering about this after it's done. It's probably also part of the reason I keep re-reading it.
To celebrate the tenth birthday of The Scar by China Mieville, I'm re-reading it and posting about the experience. There will be spoilers!
Currently at: chapter 43, page 676
Shortly after my previous post on the characters in The Scar I came across a paragraph that illustrates what I was getting at. It's on page 589 of my edition, just at the start of chapter 37. In the immediately aftermath of the war with the New Crobuzon fleet, Bellis is wandering the streets of Armada, trying to process what has happened:
It was quite unfair, Bellis thought nervously, that so few of her own haunts had been harmed. By what right was that? She, after all, did not even care.
Mieville is writing in the tight third person here, and no doubt Bellis thinks she doesn't care. But it's not true. She does care, and I know she cares, even though she hasn't figured it out yet. (Actually, I think she knows, but she's not ready to accept it.) If the characters didn't have depth, then I wouldn't be able to draw that conclusion from the words Mieville has written.
Honestly, I think that's missing a bit from some of Mieville's later novels. I don't feel like he spends enough time developing his characters' internal lives for me to be able to pick up on contradictions like that. His focus, I suppose, is elsewhere.
To celebrate the tenth birthday of The Scar by China Mieville, I'm re-reading it and posting about the experience. There will be spoilers!
Currently at: chapter 32
One of the more common criticisms of China Mieville's novels is that the characters are a bit weak. I think there's something to this. I can't, for example, remember the names of the main characters in Embassytown, Kraken, or The City & The City*, although I hasten to add that it didn't really affect my enjoyment of those novels. There's more than enough going on to keep me thoroughly engaged.
It is therefore interesting to me that I think one of the real strengths of The Scar is Bellis Coldwine, the lead character. I find her compelling, for a whole bunch of reasons. For a start, she's not your typical epic fantasy heroine**: she's a linguist, an adult (and, I suppose you could add, a woman). She's closed off and private, tightly controlled, independent and intelligent. And, frankly, not particularly likeable.
It's quite possible that choosing Bellis as the main point of view character contributes to the feeling of strangeness that I find so appealing about The Scar. It's also an excellent demonstration of the fact that you don't need to like a character to want to keep reading about her. The key there, I think, is that she is competent, clever and strong -- I may not like her, but I can certainly admire her. And understand her.
(This is the part where I point out that I've been trying to find time to write this post since about chapter ten, some three hundred pages ago. Since then, Bellis has become no less compelling, although I'm beginning to wonder at her interactions with the men in the novel. She's not a passive character, but it is beginning to seem like a lot of the doing is being done by the men around her. Tanner Sack delivering the message to the Dreer Samheri when Bellis couldn't find a way to do it herself, Silas Fennec preparing that message, Uther Doul feeding Bellis information for reasons that are so far unclear.
Perhaps it is relevant that Bellis is a translator. She's the conduit through which so much of the plot flows. In that sense, maybe it's appropriate that the people around her are the main actors. Being trapped by implacable forces is a bit of a theme not just for The Scar, but all of the Bas-Lag novels. Still, I'm beginning to be a little troubled by Bellis' lack of agency. Fortunately, I don't actually recall exactly how the book ends, so she may have her moment yet.)
I wonder if the reason that Mieville's earlier novels do better with characterisation is that they're so much longer. There's plenty of room for character development, whereas in his shorter subsequent novels the riot of ideas and plot pushes out the characters.
Or maybe -- and I'm really just guessing here -- it's that The Scar has a small ensemble of point of view characters: the Remade engineer Tanner Sack, and the young tough Shekel. I haven't mentioned them much because they play a smaller role than Bellis, but one of the things they do is illuminate Bellis' character through contrast. Shekel, so eager to learn to read, softens her. And Tanner Sack's love for the city that freed him throws Bellis' desperate need to be away from it into relief.
If you're reading along with me, I'm interested to hear what you think about Bellis and the other main characters in the book. Are you finding them as compelling as I am?
* Although Sham ap Soorap in Mieville's newest, Railsea, is pretty memorable.
** I feel I should add here that I am not hugely well read in the epic fantasy (sub-)genre. I might be missing all sorts of great stuff, in which case I welcome recommendations!
To celebrate the tenth birthday of The Scar by China Mieville, I'm re-reading it and posting about the experience. There will be spoilers!
Currently at: chapter 8
Alright, I confess: The Scar's tenth birthday is just an excuse. I'm actually re-reading it because I love it. And I'm re-reading it now because I'm trying to think critically about the books and authors that I love. What are they doing that makes me love them so much?
I was a little worried that re-reading The Scar with this sort of thing in mind might damage my enjoyment of it. But I can see now that isn't going to be the problem. The problem is that I'm not sure I can read it critically at all. I was barely a tenth of the way in when I first noticed that I'd stopped thinking about what I was reading, and I was just -- happily, enthusiastically -- enjoying it.
There's probably an observation to be made about how I only fully engaged when Mieville stopped chopping and changing his tenses and narrative modes. I also suspect that my engagement has a lot to do with the way he handles mysteries and puzzles. They come at a faster pace than I'm used to in epic fantasy, and their pattern of resolution seems unusual. Apparently large mysteries are solved quickly, whereas smaller ones tantalisingly linger.
Whatever it is, I've been thoroughly swept up. There's every chance that all I'll be able to do for the rest of the novel is gush uncritically. I think I'm okay with that, but you have been warned!
Are you reading along too? Has it grabbed you already?
To celebrate the 10th birthday of The Scar by China Mieville, I'm re-reading it and posting about the experience. There will be spoilers!
Currently at: chapter 2.
The Scar month started a little slowly for me. Partly that's because life got in the way, but it's also because I forgot about the effort I need to put in to getting started on door-stop fantasy novels. The Scar starts with the traditional descriptions of scenery and setting, and I've never found that hugely engaging. Early on, those details tend to slide straight out of my memory, and my focus wanders.
It's also a somewhat disorienting beginning, with a prelude in third-person present tense, then a third-person past tense opening chapter introducing the main character, broken up with a letter she's writing, and concluding with a first-person present tense narrative from a different, unnamed character. It feels a little rough, and the prose perhaps a bit forced.
Having said all that, I'm already seeing the thing that hooked me the first time around. The tone that Mieville sets in the opening chapters is dirty and industrial and chaotic. The structure may remind me of epic fantasies, but the mood is different, more like a horror novel. I think that's what grabbed me: the sense that something familiar had suddenly been made strange.
I also think it was a good choice to begin with a voyage away from New Crobuzon. That city was at the heart of the previous book in the series, Perdido Street Station, and by breaking with it so explicitly Mieville makes it very clear that The Scar is something completely new.
If you're reading along too, or have read it in the past, what are (or were) your opening impressions?
The Scar by China Mieville was first published ten years ago next month. I'm intending to celebrate its anniversary by re-reading it, and posting about the experience here. If you fancy reading along with me, I'd love to have you on board. I'll be starting on June 1st, and reading until I'm done, so you've got a week from today to find yourself a copy!
(I was going to post the blurb, but I've just re-read it. It's pretty terrible. Don't let it put you off!)
Despite some pretty fierce competition the past few years, I think The Scar is still my favourite fantasy novel. It's one of a very few books that I've re-read; next month will be my fifth time. I'm particularly keen to give it another go now because I haven't read it since I started trying to think critically about the genre. Will it stand up? Will it excite me the same way it did a decade ago? Let's find out!
