lightreads | Embassytown by China Mieville

Embassytown by China Miéville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of those books whose wild inventiveness leaves it very difficult to describe. Let's go with scifi about an alien language spoken simultaneously through two mouths by one consciousness and thus inaccessible to humans and computers; a species incapable of lying or sustaining metaphors because it cannot lexically account for anything that isn't true; a human woman who is made part of that language by enacting a simile so that it is true and can be used; a society-wide catastrophe; a war; a bloody birthing into a new kind of consciousness through the transformation of language.

My problem with Mieville books is that I'm always left wondering what they're for, after they're done being absurdly clever and beautifully written. This one has a lot more going for it – it has that Mievillian chilliness when it comes to character, but there's a far greater emotional range. Maybe it's just that the territory he's exploring is so rich and interesting; the book had to grow a soul, the way bacteria has to grow under the right conditions. Who cares why if it was horrifying and sad and tense by turns in ways his previous books haven't been for me.

That said, and this genuinely is my favorite Mieville so far. That said. There is something . . . off about this book. It's the story of a tiny human foothold on an alien planet, a human-introduced catastrophe, the transformation of an entire species through the act of learning, from humans, to lie. Is it a love letter to language and the order it regulates over thought? Is it a frightening but ultimately satisfying cultural coming of age story for a technologically-advanced species? Is it, ironically, a metaphor – for human intellectual evolution, for the artistic journey, for flipping capitalism? Or is it, when all's said and done, just another celebration of the colonial destruction of a native species? It's all of that, rather messily and undecidedly. And uncomfortably, I have to say.

View all my reviews