The Scar | ||||||||
China Miéville | ||||||||
Del Ray, 638 pages | ||||||||
|
A review by Donna McMahon
As the novel opens, Bellis Coldwine is taking passage on a ship, fleeing persecution in her home city of New Crobuzon for an uncertain
future in distant Nova Esperium. An urban intellectual, Bellis loathes the prospect of years of exile in the colonies, but when her
ship is captured by pirates, she realizes she may never see her home again.
The pirates live on Armada, a secret floating city haphazardly lashed together from ships and debris.
"The city was loud. Tethered dogs, the shouts of costermongers, the drone of engines, hammers and lathes, and stones being
broken. Klaxons from workshops. Laughter and shouting, all in the variant of Salt, the mongrel sailors' tongue, that was the language
of Armada. And below those city sounds the throaty noise of boats. Complaining wood and the snaps of leather and rope, the percussion
of ship on ship."
"Sprawling" does not begin to describe the complexities of this wildly imaginative novel, populated by strange races and even stranger
magical technologies. The word "WOW" keeps coming to mind when trying to describe Miéville's sheer overwhelming flood of scenery,
characters, and ideas, all propelled by gorgeous prose. It's a hell of a ride.
Still, this wealth of detail, Miéville's multitude of viewpoints, and all the action tend to disguise some very basic structural
problems with The Scar. For example, Miéville opens with a prologue that introduces one plot thread. He then briefly revisits
this thread every few chapters, but nothing actually happens in it for five hundred pages! After a few episodes of this prolonged
rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick, I started skimming those passages, waiting for Miéville to get to the point.
A more serious problem for me as a character-driven reader, is that the people in The Scar range from unsympathetic to downright
nasty. Bellis is very credibly drawn as a self-involved, humorless misanthrope, so most of her interactions with others are understandably
brief and unpleasant. Silas, the other most prominent point of view, is even more unpalatable. Only a few minor characters (such as
prisoner Tanner Sack and his young friend, Shekel) have much in the way of redeeming qualities, and for me it wasn't enough to balance the
grim situation and escalating, graphic violence.
The epic scope of this drama also obscures the fact that the protagonists are not driving the story. For much of the book, Bellis is a
helpless observer, and neither she nor Silas have any immediate human dilemma to engage the reader's empathy. As the piles of corpses
mounted, Bellis sneered, and the subplot snoozed along, I found myself putting the book down more often.
Miéville's vivid world-building and his clever, coherent use of ancient technology from medieval alchemy to the age of steam give
this novel a distinct whiff of SF. But using my infallible genre-categorizing method ("if it looks like a duck and quacks like a
duck..."), I'd label it as Fantasy.
Nevertheless, I do recommend The Scar to both SF and Fantasy readers. Miéville's stunning vision is worth a look, even if
you're not up for the entire 640 pages.
Donna McMahon discovered science fiction in high school and fandom in 1977, and never recovered. Dance of Knives, her first novel, was published by Tor in May, 2001, and her book reviews won an Aurora Award the same month. She likes to review books first as a reader (Was this a Good Read? Did I get my money's worth?) and second as a writer (What makes this book succeed/fail as a genre novel?). You can visit her website at http://www.donna-mcmahon.com/. |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
If you find any errors, typos or anything else worth mentioning,
please send it to editor@sfsite.com.
Copyright © 1996-2014 SF Site All Rights Reserved Worldwide