The Scar by China Mieville

The Scar by China Mieville (ISBN 978-0345460011) is the sequel to Perdido Street Station, and --as its page count of 608pp (795 in the UK edition) would testify-- is a huge book, chock-full of ideas and a plot so labyrinthine that Mieville justifiably feels the need to summarize it several times as the story progresses.

Bellis Coldwine

In contrast to its precursor, the Scar opens with a journey away from --rather than toward -- the city of New Crobuzon.

Bellis Coldwine is a passenger on a tramp-steamer bound for one of New Crobuzon’s colonies where she is to work as a translator. But although Bellis is also a fugitive, fleeing one of the city’s periodic crackdowns on dissidents, her feelings for her homeland strengthen the further away she sails.

However, the mission abruptly changes at short notice and the ship abruptly returns to New Crobuzon. Before it can reach its destination, the vessel is hi-jacked by the pirate city of Armada, a vast floating fleet of ships lashed together, as if Venice or Amsterdam were built entirely on ships rather than buildings, and set free to roam the seas. Once conscripts are taken to Armada there is no return. As Bellis learns, those who cannot assimilate are imprisoned for life or even executed. She has little choice but to hide her feelings and try to come to terms with her new life.

Silas Fennec

Bellis' homesickness doesn’t fade however, and when in the course of hunting the information to harness the avanc, a gigantic semi-mythical beast, Bellis learns of a plot from the spy Silas Fennec to invade and annihilate New Crobuzon, she must act, even though it means probably forgoing any chance to return home.

For The Lovers --Armada’s rulers-- have a plan for the avanc. Catching it, and all the necessary steps even up to summoning it, are simply a prequel; they intend to use it to tow them into the heart of The Scar, a vast fracturing of reality, in which almost all things are possible.

But in the course of trying to warn New Crobuzon Bellis betrays Armada; her betrayal has terrible consequences, for Bellis herself, but also for thousands of people. Again and again, Bellis learns that she has been manipulated by others into doing their bidding.

The Scars

Scars abound; there is not just the gash in reality that is the ostensible scar of the title; there are the obsessed lovers, dragging their city to its doom or its glory, whatever version one believes, flensing each other’s faces with matching scores, perpetual tattoos; there are the scars on Bellis’s back from her punishment (and is Mieville insinuating that whenever mercy is shown us, it leaves us emotionally scarred?); there are the scars each of the combatants bears; and there is the great scar in one of the protagonist’s memories, a scar that he admits he does not want to heal.

And in the novel’s coda, Mieville delights in playing with the various possible outcomes and alternate histories, even within the microcosm of his world that is each protagonist. The Scar is a vast, labyrinthine book, but Mieville also makes it work on an individual level. Bellis and the other characters are as complex as any literary novel, but to the complexities of people, he adds not just a huge plot, but a whole world full of wonders.

This is a far better and more original novel than Perdido Street Station.

Cover for the UK Edition of The Scar

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