He gives himself the leisure to elaborate the topography and politics of Armada, as well as the characters and activities of its citizens, to the extent that the reader is gradually won over in sheer astonishment. Once the novel settles down after its ill-judged beginning, Miéville begins to construct an intriguing plot of espionage and deceit. The citizens are a mixture of humans, "Remades" (criminals punished by the surgical grafting-on of new appendages or engines), cactacae (like humans, only vegetable: walking cacti), and even vampires. Its engineers have rudimentary computing, in the form of steam-powered analytical engines of the sort invented by Charles Babbage they also have magic, or "thaumaturgy". The ships of Armada are 18th- and 19th- century beasts that obey familiar ocean-going physics, although it is not explained until very late how such an enormous congregate of vessels lashed together, a mile square, would behave in a storm. Wittgenstein said: "It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something - a form - in common with it." Accordingly, Miéville's world is a cunning synthesis of historical Earth periods and technologies with made-up twists.
They have conceived a dangerous plan: to find a crack in the world, the Scar of the novel's title, which is supposedly a source of unimaginable power. It is governed by the Lovers, a couple who cut symmetrical patterns into each other's faces to show their devotion. Her ship is attacked by pirates and subsumed into a vast flotilla, a floating city named Armada. Its heroine is Bellis Coldwine, a woman who is fleeing New Crobuzon aboard a ship bound for a distant colony. The action of The Scar roams beyond New Crobuzon's confines, but exists in the same imaginary world. If everything is novel, there is nothing to care about.Ĭhina Miéville won high praise for his previous work, Perdido Street Station, a dark steampunk confection set in a city named New Crobuzon.
Miéville might be aiming for constructive alienation, but the effect threatens instead to become one of plain, fatiguing confusion. Portentous short paragraphs mingle with clumsily archaic constructions, unconvincingly ramped-up emotions (is there such a thing as "contemptuous pity"?), and the slightly nauseating poetry of invented place names ("Gnurr Kett and Khadoh and Shankell"). All through the first 40 pages or so you can hear the grunts of a writer straining too hard for effect.
The opening of The Scar is riddled with such preening.
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