The Scar by China Mieville
Fantasy (2002 - 638 pp.)
In China Mieville's The Scar, the story picks up off where his 2000 novel Perdido Street Station ends, but with completely different characters and settings. Bellis Coldwine is an exile from the city of New Crobuzon, where she is on a ship containing Remade* cargo destined for slavery abroad. The ship is captured,** making Bellis, the Remade Tanner Sack, and a host of other passengers into unwilling inhabitants of the floating city Armada, which is on a mysterious mission across multiple seas. Along the way, they encounter strange species, are involved in multiple intrigues, and have to endure characters of unknown loyalty such as Silas Fennec (Simon Fench), the professor Johannes Tearfly, and the elite mercenary swordsman Uther Doul. Unlike Perdido Street Station, the urban setting takes a back seat, as do the Remade. The human characters' internal demons and the open seas are what move The Scar.
Being stuck inside during the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders made me more than ready to read a book that takes place on a floating city. The ship seems to lack any jurisdiction other than its own, going even farther than the walking cities in Mortal Engines, to the point that Armada is a piratical denizen of international waters more than it can be identified with any nationality. Fittingly, the ship is teeming with characters who may be working for the Lovers, who are Armada's mysterious captains, or for New Crobuzon, various other factions, or simply for themselves. Doul, my favourite character, is so cloaked that Bellis can never guess his intentions despite having multiple one-on-one meetings with him, discussing seemingly sensitive information she genuinely does not know why he is sharing with her. Then he uses his Possible Sword to hack and slash all the possible cuts into his enemies, though, so at least that part is clear. When Bellis first boards Armada, the woman of the Lovers explains to her, "In Armada you are not distinguished. Here you are free. And equal." (79) The characters' ragtag equalities reminds the reader of the Royal Navy or of conquistadors, adventuring without a care as to where they came from.
Mieville's interest in economic issues shows throughout The Scar, which, with my industrial relations background, is one of my favourite aspects of the book. During one of the Doul-Bellis discussions, Doul tells her that "You have no idea of the liberation of selling your services, of doing what your employer tells you. I am not a leader." (386) In a world in which characters often own their own ships (e.g.: the Lovers) or are slaves (e.g.: the destiny of the human cargo at the start of the book), Doul loves being an employee. Ironically, piracy lends itself more to boom-bust propositions than to a steady salary, but Doul never appears to struggle financially throughout The Scar. Armada is wealthy in general: "Poverty was less likely to kill. Fights were more likely to be fueled by booze than desperation. A roof was likely to be found, even if it drizzled plaster." (263) It is never made entirely clear who is poor on Armada, but the main characters all have money and freedom, which is all they ask for. Even Bellis and Tanner are constrained mainly by their inability to leave the floating city.
With the Armada drifting in all sorts of directions, fueled by a creature called an avanc that is never completely described but calls to mind a whale/giant sea slug hybrid, everyone is powerless, even the powerful. When Bellis and Silas engage in conduct detrimental to the ship (no spoilers), Doul invokes Hanlon's Razor in his remark to Bellis that "You weren't trying to destroy us; you were just stupid." (503) While Bellis comes off as highly intelligent, there is always a sense that there is more to the story that neither she nor the reader knows. This is not limited to the other characters' intentions; her own letters are to "Dear ____", with the blank never filled. While Doul points out that the unknown identity of the recipient robs her of using any inside jokes, she counters that she is more able to bear all her secrets. By the end of the book, inspired by Doul's adventures and reasoning, she writes that "I am very powerful right now. I am ready to mine all of the possibilities, make one of them fact." (637) I love this letter to no one concept, as it has all the personality of a diary but also the explicit intent to be displayed at some undisclosed future point.
Throughout The Scar, Mieville loads the reader with vivid descriptions. Characters' weapons include a statue that can turn its owner into a snakelike creature living outside the existence of time. Characters themselves can have anything from tentacles sprouting from their chest to a gigantic proboscis. The veining cracks spreading across a submarine's portholes create suspense in a way pure action can't. One particularly beautiful description is of the lightning elementals emerging from the storm over the sea, "metamorphosing in arcs of current, trailing a slew of ghost shapes formed in their discharge, mimicking the outlines of the city's buildings, mimicking fish and birds and faces." (409) Earlier on, when the reader is still getting used to the characters' disparate heroics, Tanner's escape from the bonefish reminded me of the giant Pacific octopus eyeball I saw at the New England Aquarium in 2009.*** On the flipside, the language is so dense at times it would be almost impossible for an ESL reader. I have no idea if a translation of The Scar is even possible. I usually give nods to when a book I read teaches me a new word, but The Scar contains so many obscure or fabricated words it's best to set aside the dictionary and read through for context.
There are two roadblocks for beginning readers looking to dive into The Scar. One is the sheer number of characters, species, ship names and place names. Imagine Game of Thrones but also having to remember which characters have wings, gills, more than four limbs, or some similarly crazy setup. A Dramatis Personae-style itemized list of characters could have arguably helped here. The other is the extremely slow start. Bellis is unmentioned until page 9, after a prologue that consists of nothing but description. Then when she does appear, it starts in the form of a letter containing contextless people and places. Although Bellis's letters make increasing sense as The Scar goes on, the first one is a difficult read. The Scar has the polar opposite of in medias res.
Like Perdido Street Station, The Scar is a long book, clocking in at 180,000 words. If you've read Mieville before, this is to be expected, so plan your locked-down evenings accordingly. If not, start at the beginning. The possibilities are many.
Ease of Reading: 3
Educational Content: 1
*Remade are explained in the linked November 2017 entry on Perdido Street Station. From that link, "Remade [are people] who have animal parts grafted onto them for various reasons". For example, someone might be remade with eagle wings to be able to fly, or gills to be able to breathe underwater.
**This piece of information spoils the first 50 or so pages, but is completely unavoidable, as most of the book's events make no sense without knowing that the entire book isn't spent on the Terpsichoria.
***The only pictures I could find of this ocular marvel have so much light shone on them that the effect is lost. Imagine a shimmering silver disc, the size of a dinner plate, the only thing visible against a field of blackness. That's what I saw.
