The Scar

This is a book that was recommended to me by a friend. I can understand why they suggested it to me, it's in line with a few things that I'd probably enjoy. Unfortunately I couldn't really enjoy this one. It's been a while but I'm new here so if I get a few things wrong it's not intentional.

Anyway.

I like the premise of this book. I like the world that was created. I like a lot of the characters. There's a "Dark Tower" ness to it in the sense that the world has "moved on". Know what I mean? The world feels rough. Ugly. Ruined in some way. Not in a Mad Max kind of way but in a "we sucked all the life out of it" kind of way. In my mind everything, even the water, is gray. Ya follow?

There's pirates, a floating city, a government run agency looking for people, scientists, religion, different races, steam punk cyborgs, a very odd sword that could have come from a Frank Herbert book, a race of people with sphincters for mouths, vampires... Sounds pretty good right? And it really is.

However...

The writing is good but I feel like it's overly showy. I understand that China is a linguist and it felt to me like that was the whole reason for the books existence. To flex the linguist muscle. Imagine a book written by a race car driver. When it comes to talking about the racing it's gonna be great. Everything else... well... not so much. That's how I felt about this book.

I'm not going to spoil anything specific here but for the most part the book trudges along just fine but when there's a change it's very jarring. Some 75% through the book we suddenly shift perspectives completely with no explanation or reason given. It lasts about a page. It doesn't do it ever before that, or again after.

For me the writing felt like it was trying to gatekeep the story from me by giving so little of it so often. There's a few moments in the book where we get a decent plot dump and some character development and then there's a lot of drudgery in between.

I liked it. Not enough to read anything else. I didn't hate it, but it was bad enough for me to not really want to search out more.

I read Perdido Street Station several years ago and loved the worldbuilding and the frantic, multithreaded plotting. The Scar continues to explore the diverse and fascinating world of Bas-Lag, but Miéville's plotting and pacing don't really work as well for me.

The worldbuilding, plot, characterisation, and descriptions feel very out of sync. Main protagonist Bellis Coldwine, passenger on a ship that gets commandeered by pirates from the floating city of Armada, but she spends a great deal of time doing very little aside from absorbing the world around her. It takes the book hundreds of pages to really pick up the main thread that carries through to the end. Along the way, Bellis and another protagonist named Tanner Sack occasionally experience bursts of agency, but are otherwise mostly blown around by decisions that happen off-screen. If they're lucky, some other character will arrive to lecture them about the (genuinely fascinating!) world.

In a way it's nice to have a story that's about small people who aren't in control, because we ourselves are mostly small in the grand scheme of things. But between that and the author's elaborate descriptiveness (which he's very good at, but it does go on), the first half of the book proceeds at a glacial pace. It does pick up, and there are some genuinely stunning passages and enthralling ideas in the closing act, but I couldn't help but feel that some of the most interesting things were happening off-screen, being portrayed at arm's length, or being drip-fed to the reader.

Still, worth reading for more of Bas-Lag's mad inventiveness, and I quite liked Bellis even as I felt bad for her disempowering situation.

Books like The Scar are examples of why people have to read over sitting passively in front of a TV or movie screen. There's no way that this kind of book could be turned into moving pictures without reducing it to cheap tricks that attempt to make the imagery that Mieville brings forth acceptable to a wider audience.

Thankfully, this is not the kind of book that a "wider audience" would enjoy. Mieville is very much a pro at world-building. One of the hallmarks of this high-style of "urban fantasy" is to make sure the reader recognizes the environment both as geography AND as a character in the story. The book isn't overdone with flowery description in the Anne Rice vein, thankfully. It's both the description that we DO have, combined with the cadence of the writing, that sets each scene. These descriptions and the writing style felt very much like the SCORE of the book.