lightreads

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

The City & The City by China Miéville


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
What a beautiful book! Shame it has no soul.

Half fantasy, half detective. This is a book about two cities that exist in the same place, and not in some half-assed multi-dimensional way. These are two cities, two cultures, two languages, two histories, two architectures and popular trends and traffic laws smooshed together in one piece of land. If you live in one city, you must “unsee” the other, even as you step over its blown garbage. And if you don’t, well then, Breach will come for you and you will disappear.

The whole thing is brilliant. The details about how tourism works, about getting from one city to another, the vocabulary (unvisible, grosstopic), the mass psychology of it. There was something so granular and textured – so real, is the word I’m pussy-footing around. And one of the most successful things about it is how the predicate of the two cities metaphor never really solidifies; it is the pedestrian and the fantastic, the true and the false, the modern and the archaic, but none of these things with any insistence, because that’s not the point.

It’s just a shame that such a wonderful mechanism has nothing to operate on. Really, this book is all world building. There’s a murder mystery, sure, whatever, but it’s completely beside the point. It took me 80% of this book to consistently remember our narrator’s name, one of those

But man. You do not see world building like that every day.

View all my reviews >>