The_Scar_Mieville_cover“A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole” (Chapter 12, p. 171)

“Scars are memory.” (Coda, p. 635)

China Miéville’s fertile imagination soars in The Scar. Like his first Bas-Lag novel (Perdidio Street Station), it took me a while to settle into the narrative of The Scar; as the novel begins, the language is overwrought and manipulative, but I think this serves to draw the reader into a different experience, a world where possibilities are unlimited. After about three chapters the novel settles into a wonderful groove. It is the concept of ‘possibilities’ that may urge me to reread the novel in a few years, to see what I missed the first time around.

There are several significant characters in the book: the Lovers, an identically scarred man and woman (each referred to as the Lover); Johannes Tearfly (a scientist); Tanner Sack (a genetically remade criminal); Shekel (Tanner’s young friend); Silas Fennec (a spy); Brucolac, the ‘vampir’ (victim of a bacteriological disease, photophobic haemophagy); and others. However, I’d like to focus on two of the main characters: Bellis Coldwine, a linguist and the first-person narrator for parts of the story (and the main character in the novel), and Uther Doul, a scholar and master of martial techniques.

To me, Uther Doul is the most interesting character in the book. He is a master manipulator, a character who subtly nudges ‘possibilities’ to achieve his goals. By the end of the novel I was sure that Doul had manipulated many of the events that appeared to be mere chance at the time. But Miéville has also made Doul somewhat insipid: with his skill, and his ‘possible sword’, he is unbeatable (even against unbelievable odds); hence, he will always win a battle. He almost seems as if he is a character who belongs outside the tale, manipulating the plot, a scientist who studies his experiment through a microscope, but cannot help but prod the experiment to arrive at a desired result (metaphysically, the experimenter is always a part of the experiment). Is Uther Doul Miéville’s alter-ego? Doul certainly manipulates Bellis Coldwine…

It is through the narration of Bellis and her actions and reactions that the story of The Scar unfolds; particularly in her long letter to an unknown recipient, written throughout the course of the novel’s action: the document becomes a ‘Possible Letter’, with its possibilities dependent on who the letter is ultimately addressed to. Bellis is bitter and withdrawn due to her forced escape from New Crobuzon and subsequent kidnapping by the pirates of Armada, the floating city made up of thousands of ships (Armada is an astounding place, though not as Gothically stunning as New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station).

Scars are, of course, a recurring theme (a minor quibble: almost too many times the concept of scars came up, along with the word puissant), but The Scar of the title is the granddaddy scar of them all.

The Scar, like Perdido Street Station, is, in Miéville’s own words, weird fiction: a mixture of steam-punk science fiction, thaumaturgic-fantasy, Gothic-horror, and the kitchen sink: the reader encounters all kinds of beings on Miéville’s world, Bas Lag: humans, humanoid-animal mixtures (women with scarab-beetles for heads, men with crayfish bodies, mosquito-people, et cetera), alien beings (among others: cacti-beings, eel-beings that swim through the air, a monstrous fish from another dimension, porcupine-beings, and nightmarish creatures that cannot be looked at if you are to survive with your intellect intact), and all manner of creatures and possibilities that are explained (or not) in passing.

I’ve typed a lot, but explained little…

If you read and enjoyed Perdido Street Station, I’d highly recommend you read The Scar, which I found to have a more linear and robust plot, if not quite as much mind-numbing weirdness. Both novels are stand-alone creations, but in The Scar there are references to people and events from Perdido Street Station (a warning: both novels are well over six-hundred pages long).

If you didn’t particularly enjoy Perdido Street Station, or if the concept of weird fiction turns you off, but you’d like to sample China Miéville’s oeuvre, I’d recommend The City & The City, which is an urban science fiction/metaphysical police procedural (apparently Miéville wrote it as a gift for his terminally-ill mother who was a fan of the police procedural). The City & The City is, I think, Miéville’s most accomplished novel, but it is not as hyper-imaginative as his Bas-Lag creations, Perdido Street Station and The Scar.

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