Book Review: The Scar by China Miéville

China Miéville is one of those authors I had heard discussed in various quarters in glowing but controversial terms for years before finally taking the plunge with Embassytown, his only strictly sci-fi novel — although certainly not hard sci-fi, it’s more in the vein of fantasy in space with aliens. I’ve since read most of his oeuvre and enjoyed all of it, but Perdido Street Station is, in my mind at least, unquestionably the crown jewel. So it was with great excitement that I discovered that I had somehow missed that Perdido was the first in a trilogy.

The Scar is a solid but ultimately disappointing sequel to Miéville’s elyctric Perdido Street Station. That book, along with The Scar and The Iron Council, comprise the New Crobuzon trilogy.

All three books are set in the same fantastical world of Bas Lag, of which New Crobuzon is the largest city and major power. All the action of Perdido Street Station takes place in the city, while the two sequels both range farther afield into the fantasy world. In a nut shell, the world of Bas Lag is sort of an alternate-history steampunk Victorian fantasy. The year as reported in the book is the early 1800s, and the vibe and aesthetics certainly date from that period in our own world in terms of the technology and general culture, lots of steam engines and clipper ships and that sort of thing. But on top of this alt-Victorian setting, Miéville layers a variety of fantasy races as well as various flavors of magic.

The ethnography is where Bas Lag parts ways with the modern canon of epic fantasy. Rather than each race inhabiting a homeland apart from and periodically at war with the others, Miéville has them all living in Victorian Fantasy Brooklyn cheek to jowl and respecting each other’s civil rights. It works well enough as long as you don’t question it — you get the sense that New Crobuzon is the ultimate palimpsest of a city, built on top of layers of ruins stretching back to prehistory, certainly beyond the memory and in some cases the understanding of the current residents. So presumably there was a previous Ellis Island period of transcontinental migration of all these colorful fantasy races into New Crobuzon, where the humans are currently the dominant race, to live alongside them, but it happened a long time ago and everyone has gotten over it, so that’s left to the reader’s imagination.

I amuse myself by assigning them all late 19th century New York ethnicities:

• The humans are Anglos, obviously enough. Miéville doesn’t ever mention human ethnicity so I’ll just assume they’re all actually Anglos.

• The cactus people are black. They’re the powerful but kind of seedy and dangerous manual labor race. They’re literally covered in spines, you don’t mess with them.

• The frog-like Vodyanoi are Slavs. They have natural water magic and have to stay wet all the time.

• The hedgehog-man Hotchi are Spaniards. They’re pretty marginal in the narrative, they don’t really do much but provide background color.

• The beetle-headed Khepri are Jews. They’re intellectually and artistically inclined. Along with the cactacae, the Khepri steal the show and take the foreground of the narrative. The women are lithe and fully human except they have a giant scarab beetle where their head should be. And the males are just mindless beetles. Miéville doesn’t provide any lore on how any of the races came to be but you really have to wonder about this one.

• The parrot-man Garudo are Italians. They have a strict moral code that outsiders find hard to understand and don’t mix well with the other races.

Despite New Crobuzon being a remarkably violent place with a sprawling criminal element and a pseudo-fascist government, the violence is all very colorblind and impersonal. The humans never decide to gang up and run the disgusting literal frog-people out of town, they’re just happy to let them take care of all the sewer repair. The human main character of Perdido Street Station is fucking a Khepri woman when we first meet him, which is considered a little outré but not like bestiality or anything. The broad tolerance is never acknowledged as such, it’s just kind of a background assumption baked into the world.

What I especially love about these books is well illustrated by the bestiary above but not at all limited to it. There are countless additional flourishes like the Remade, criminals punished by being turned into steampunk cyborgs or combined with animal parts using various magical procedures. Miéville crams an astounding amount of imagination into his world building at every turn, with a level of detail and audacity that puts most epic fantasy authors to absolute shame. There’s simply more novelty and variety and sheer ideas packed into the pages of Perdido than I can recall encountering anywhere else, with the possible exception of some of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series.

As for The Scar, it carries on the tradition set out by Perdido, foregrounding the Remade and introducing a few new races. There are a race of crayfish-men who live underwater and don’t figure much in the story. There’s the mysterious and unsettling Grindylow, also aquatic but more magical and more like salamanders. And then a race of mosquito-people. I know I claimed above that the Khepri were the Jews of New Crobuzon, but the mosquito people are high-IQ weaklings confined to an island ghetto and used for their prowess with math, reasoning, and research by other races who come to visit (and to keep them imprisoned on their island). The men are harmless nebbish types with mouths like anuses who drain the essence from flowers, while their women fly around ravenous with hunger and suck the blood and lifeforce out of anything they smell (what did Miéville mean by this).

The plot visits the mosquito people to abduct one of them Project Paperclip-style for an outlandish scientific engineering project taking place on the floating city where most of the plot occurs. Instead of the endless variety and ancient mystery of New Crobuzon, the setting of the floating city of Armada, comprising a few thousand ships lashed together, feels claustrophobic in comparison. But it too has plenty of color, including a vampire who governs one of its districts and some interesting underwater sequences.

The real issue with The Scar when comparing it to the first book is the lack of a compelling plot hook. Perdido has its protagonists saving the city from nightmarish monster moths that eat people’s minds and are laying eggs to devour the entire city. Scar by comparison spends the first third of its considerable length setting up the plot, then eventually reveals the main thrust of this will be to catch a very large marine creature. This is exciting enough, but it lacks the verve and intensity, the urgency of the quest to destroy the slake moths that made Perdido such a page turner. Instead we’re left with a book where interesting things are certainly happening, and very imaginative settings are being introduced, but the stakes rarely feel high enough to keep reading long into the night.

Worse, the book ends with an absolute wet fizzle of a conclusion, one of the most unsatisfying anticlimaxes I’ve read in quite some time.

Despite these relative weaknesses, I still recommend The Scar to anyone who enjoys speculative or fantastical fiction. It’s well worth your time, especially if you already read and enjoyed Perdido Street Station, which I recommend you read before this one.

Overall rating: Recommend.