china mieville essays

The Non-Human World of China Miéville

Sep 7, 2008

A lthough I do not particularly admire the criticism of Harold Bloom, his Freudian theory that ambitious authors want to “kill” their strong literary predecessors is getting a lot of empirical support these days from British fantasy writers, first from Phillip Pullman, who wrote his trilogy His Dark Materials as an atheist antidote to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia , and now from China Miéville, who describes his looming father figure, J.R.R. Tolkien, as “a wen on the arse of fantasy literature.” In style and substance, this almost tells as much about Miéville’s writing as anything I will say in this review, but one might as well look at the rest of the quotation:

His [Tolkien’s] oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can’t ignore it, so don’t even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there’s a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés—elves ’n’ dwarfs ’n’ magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was “consolation,” thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

I am not a fan. I dislike Miéville’s work. I don’t like the way he writes sentences, paragraphs, or collections of paragraphs. His first book, King Rat , was a badly written graphic novel without pictures. In his second book, Perdido , the writing improved dramatically, but not enough. His plots are thin and unoriginal, but Perdido and Scar run close to 600 pages each, which means they are stuffed with filler, usually of the atmospheric variety. His characters have no depth and neither does his fictional world, Bas-Lag, which he unreels like a vast expanse of post-modern wall paper. Over the length of his novels, certain verbal ticks become very annoying: the ubiquitous one-sentence paragraph (used, apparently, to ramp up the rhetoric by emphasizing sentences too tired to make an impression at the end of a paragraph), and repetition of words like “surreal” (in case you didn’t get the dream-like quality from the rest of the description) or the comic-bookish “puissant,” with which he truly falls in love in Scar . (I am reminded of the word “invulnerable,” which was drilled into my generation by Superman comics.) I have no idea whether Miéville is coming up with interesting ideas about quantum mechanics, urban life, or social engineering, as some blogs would indicate. He just can’t write compelling fiction.

Let’s start with setting, or more appropriately for fantasy, world-building. This is where Miéville gets his highest marks from his fans. In Miéville’s first book, King Rat , two tendencies occur that continue into his Bas-Lag series: fascination with part-human, part-animal characters and sewage. King Rat , which takes place mainly in the sewers of London, features two rat people, a birdman, and a spider man. Perdido , the first Bas-Lag book, gives us bug-people, cactus-people, more bird-people, a species something like the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz , and the Remade, people who are cobbled together with other animal parts or machine parts in punishment for various crimes. Bringing in the Remade allows Miéville to indulge his penchant without creating entire species; thus in Scar we get a one of a kind squid/amphibian/man by the name of Tanner Sack and a steam locomotive woman named Angevine, along with mosquito-people, crayfish-people, scab-people, and more traditional vampires and ghouls. Born in 1972, Miéville has a long career ahead of him, and there is no reason to believe he won’t get half the London Zoo into his oeuvre before he’s finished. There is nothing wrong with lots of aliens, but one would hope that the steady parade would have a point, that it would tell us something important, perhaps, about being human. It doesn’t.

Getting back to the sewage. Stephen King once said that as a horror writer he wasn’t proud. If he couldn’t make his reader’s skin crawl, he’d go for the gross-out. Fair enough—I’ve enjoyed some Stephen King. But the pervasive mise-en-scène in King Rat and Perdido make the pages of King or scenes from, say, Alien , look like a sterile operating theater. Take the following as an example from Perdido , think of it as a thin to thick film that covers the entire novel, and you’ll have the atmosphere of Miéville’s first two books:

Five feet below them, the trench was filled with a noisome gelatinous soup of [s**t] and pollutants and acid rain. The surface was broken with bubbles of fell gas and bloated animal corpses. Here and there bobbed rusting tins and knots of fleshy tissue like tumours or aborted foetuses. The liquid undulated rather than rippled, contained by a thick surface tension so oily and strong that it would not break . . .

This “crapuscular” thread in Miéville’s writing is continuous, and he cooks along when he is writing about this subject. While looking at the ugliness of the world is part of the writer’s duty, I have a sense that the sheer repetitious volume of it in Miéville’s books is a fetish. Beauty, while not excluded as an idea, is never evoked by fine writing and is seldom mentioned. Bas-Lag’s relentless orientation toward ugliness makes it a cliché, as if the ugly were always more real, more sophisticated, than the beautiful. Miéville’s world is utterly thin. Probably no one will ever duplicate the depth of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but later writers like Ursula LeGuin and Robert Holdstock have created very deep and convincing worlds. The back-story of Bas-Lag is perfunctory. For example, in Scar , Tanner Sack is telling a story to his young friend Shekel. Compare this to the scene in Lord of the Rings when Frodo hears Aragorn singing about Beren and Luthien, which we know is “real” and important, even though we only get a snatch of it:

All right then.” [Tanner Sack continued] “So Darioch calls Crawfoot to him and shows him the Batskins on their way, and he says to him, ‘This is your [f**k]-up, Crawfoot. You took their stuff. And it happens that Salter’s away at the edge of the world, so you’re going to have to do the fighting.’ And Crawfoot’s bitching and moaning and giving it all this . . .

The reader is blessedly saved from more of this baloney when Tanner Sack’s story is interrupted—and Miéville is blessedly saved from having to work too hard to create an illusion of historical depth. That there is no story of Crawfoot and the Batskins is painfully obvious. Miéville’s “creativity” does not go deeper than this. It is as if he has a bottomless and disorganized desk drawer out of which he dumps new material into Bas-Lag, but little of it is developed or connected. How do all of these semi-human species come to exist in the same world? How is it that a culture that knows about petroleum is limited to steam engines? Why has no political structure larger than the city-state ever developed? A world with genuine historical depth, rather than off-the-cuff references to by-gone ages, would suggest answers to these questions. Tolkien’s masterpiece suggested answers because Tolkien had the answers—Bas-Lag fails because it hasn’t been imagined. All its depth is on the surface.

Plot? Rebels versus Authoritarians, although you can’t care for the rebels much. Arguably the most admirable character in all the novels is renegade scientist Isaac Grimnebulin, who at the end of Perdido uses his utilitarian calculus to justify killing an innocent old man, using him as bait to lure in monsters that must be destroyed to save his city, New Crobuzon. (Well, the guy was old and not much use anyway.) Perdido is a “bug-hunt,” Aliens in a new locale. It throws in that sci-fi cliché, the computer that becomes sentient and dangerous. (This one, in a feat of Darwinian “punctuated equilibrium,” assembles itself from the contents of a junkyard—well, given enough time, anything can happen, right?) Scar presents pirate/mad scientist/totalitarians versus the even worse New Crobuzon totalitarians. The Iron Council presents socialist train-riding totalitarian rebels against moreNew Crobuzon totalitarians.

Characters? There are none, only markers that move on the page. One of the great pleasures of reading is encountering people we care about. They don’t have to be good people. James M. Cain produced some of worst monsters in American fiction, but you can’t fail to care about the homicidal pairs of The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity because we understand their longings and fears and regrets. The alchemy that makes this happen is not the result of conveying mere information about characters, but of using words to evoke an emotional response in readers that is synchronized with what the characters feel. Empathy is the fuel of great writing. Most novels, even bad ones, have some shred of this effect. I do not see this in Miéville. Never once am I led to care about the fate of one of his people. I am told in Perdido Street Station that Isaac loves his “xenian” mate Lin; I am even given some details in corroboration. But I’m never led to feel it—I’m told to take it as a premise.

The implied author? People love to read because they get interested in that shadowy character behind the narration, the mind telling the story. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are as much about Samuel Clemens’s voice as they are about the title characters. This is even true of modernist novels in which the storyteller works hard to remain anonymous—we get to know a version of Virginia Woolf when we read To the Lighthouse , and of Ernest Hemingway when we read even his most telegraphic short stories. Miéville’s authorial presence is as thin and machine-like as any character in his books.

This brings us back to Tolkien, who is far more complex than Miéville on any level, and at the same time, much clearer. The fundamental difference between these writers is moral, as Miéville clearly understands when he attacks Tolkien’s “absolute morality,” which “blurs moral and political complexity.” I believe it is more accurate to say that Miéville’s confusion about morality leads not to complexity but to triviality and muddle. Tolkien does believe in an absolute morality but his analysis of how people go wrong is anything but simplistic. We believe in Frodo and Sam and Galadriel, largely, because we believe in their shortcomings and see their potential for tragedy. We also have a moral scale, based on ultimate ends, on which their actions can be understood and evaluated. In contrast, it is hard to say that Miéville believes in much of anything, except frenetic and pointless creation, and so his characters remain psychological homunculi .

Unlike Tolkien, Miéville has no sense that human beings have an ultimate purpose, and, therefore, he cannot create characters who have an interesting trajectory. We just don’t care about them. They don’t care much about themselves. They fill up their time in “thaumaturgic” or scientific inquiry, or spewing out art, and so what? Like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, they are engaged in pastimes that have no meaning. The phenomenon of Miéville is finally more interesting than his writing. Do so many people read him with pleasure, not despite the lack of humanity in his books, but because of it? It’s a little like asking how so much tuneless elevator music has gotten into church hymnals. I’d like to know the answer to both questions.

Craig Bernthal is a professor of English at California State University, Fresno.

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‘Oh, London, You Drama Queen’

By China Miéville

• March 1, 2012

An invisible bridge spans the Thames at Blackfriars. Victorian pilings jut from the river, the railway they once supported long gone. Dangling above them on this cold day, helicopters surveilled thousands of strikers and supporters processing loudly through central London. It was Nov. 30, 2011, and two million public-sector workers were on strike.

Mary Ezekiel, staff nurse at University College London Hospital, itemized the baleful effects that pension cuts — the cause of the day’s action — will have. She flattened down her T-shirt. Many British tchotchkes are emblazoned with the cloying World War II propaganda slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.” “Get Angry,” Ezekiel’s shirt demanded instead, “and Fight Back.” “All the speakers have been amazing,” she said. “That’s what I feel positive about. I just hope that it reaches Mr. Cameron” — she said the prime minister’s name disdainfully — “in his mansion.”

Cameron first denounced the day’s action, then dismissed it. For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.

“The perils of marching!” a young woman said with a laugh, pushing banners out of her face. “Lashed by flags!” She was surrounded by bobbing cloth and cardboard. The logo of the Society of Radiographers wobbled near placards of the Worker-communist Party of Iran. Under a huge pink triangle, a young Ugandan man called Abbey said, “We are helping gay asylum seekers from over the world, especially Uganda, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal.” He was there to support the workers. It’s all linked, he explained. Cuts to social spending, soaring university tuition fees, scapegoating.

There’s strife beyond the public sector. Several days after the strike, electricians working for the construction company Balfour Beatty walked out in protest against aggressive new contracts. People are fighting to stand still, whatever line of work they’re in.

Stratford, East London , is being reconfigured on a biblical scale. It’s December, and from the acres of mud and blue wrapping of the Olympic Park juts the city’s new monument, the ArcelorMittal Orbit, by the artists Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, a vast sculpture of knotting girders like a snarled Gaian hernia. Its name is a corporate grandiosity on the part of its donor, Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Britain. Near it is the stadium, its post-Olympic future a question mark, with bickerings and legal shenanigans ongoing. There’s Zaha Hadid’s aquatic center, its celebrated lines ruined by temporary seating.

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China Miéville: critical essays

Edwards, Caroline and Venezia, T. , eds. (2015) China Miéville: critical essays. Canterbury, UK: Gylphi. ISBN 9781780240275.

Since the publication of his first novel in 1998, China Miéville has distinguished himself as one of the most exciting and inventive writers working in any genre in contemporary British fiction. The author of nine novels and two short story collections to date, as well as comics script-writing, numerous critical works on science fiction, and legal scholarship, Miéville is a critically acclaimed writer who has also achieved popular success. The chapters in this collection respond to the range of interests that have shaped Miéville's fiction from his influential role in contemporary genre debates, to his ability to pose serious philosophical questions about state control, revolutionary struggle, regimes of apartheid, and the function of international law in a globalized world. This collection demonstrates how Miéville's fictions offer a striking example of contemporary literature's ability to imagine alternatives to neoliberal capitalism at a time of crisis for leftist ideas within the political realm.

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We shall rise to the challenge of their appointment to life for that single moment – An Essay On China Miéville

by John Holbo on January 11, 2005

1 Three Things About Miéville

This post will be substantially pastiche of others I’ve written about China Miéville; remasticated bits encrusted around critical consideration of his new novel, Iron Council . No plots spoiled.

I’m going to pose a few questions for the author. I am not usually one for sniffing out intentionality behind the scenes, mind you. (Not that I think there is anything indecent about that angle.) But unusually, in this case, I find I am curious what the man can have been thinking. How admirably the world is arranged, since – oddly – he may answer.

Now a brief statement, not of my thesis, but of the obvious, to which my thesis hopes to bear a sturdy relationship.

1) Miéville is a superlative subcreator, to use Tolkien’s term of art for the art of fantastic world-building. 2) Miéville is a polemical critic of Tolkien – more so: of Tolkien’s generic legacy – on behalf of an allegedly more mature conception of fantasy as a genre. 3) Miéville himself tells stories which are substantially in line with generic fantasy conventions, in terms of overall form, also in terms of many types of detail.

So a critical question about Miéville is whether 1) suffices to back 2), with some to spare; for 3) has a notable tendency to corrode the credibility of 2).

One possibility also to be considered is that 2) is just snarky fun Miéville had, being a punk blowing steam on a webpage . Then 1) and 3) needn’t fight each other by proxy, knocking over and propping 2), but can simply be considered side by side.

2. The cluttered kipple of humanity shall never be swept neat

Ridley Scott said of Blade Runner that ‘film is a 700-layer cake’. This is a philosophy of production and composition, but it becomes a point about the content of a fictional world. Blade Runner was a revelation to SF fans not so much on account of its ideas or characters or story as on account of the stunning accretions of visual …(what shall we call it?) kipple , convincing us this world is thick, clotted; completely peopled (no pun on any screenwriter’s name intended.) SF, in its thought-experimental way, can often  be disappointing thin, like an abstract technical schematic. You want to see the clean, essential lines of the idea. But fictionally that can be a bad idea.

In Blade Runner , the kipple obscuring all clean, essential lines is largely chronological: 40 years in the future piled onto 40 years in the past, to paraphrase Scott; but it is also cultural, economic, scientific and social. Humanity turned kipple, our very memories just odds and ends swept into our heads, perhaps someone else’s after-thought. History as dustbin of history. Of course, Blade Runner ultimately affirms the individual human spirit against this. And, oddly, the story doesn’t really make a lot of sense. A lot of noir and tough cop clichés jumbled together, but the lavish production makes this overlookable. We’ll get back to this, implicitly if not explicitly.

What has Blade Runner to do with China Miéville or Iron Council ? I think Miéville wants to write fantasy’s Blade Runner . Make a world in which (as per Miéville’s manifesto) "things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life."  

Back to Blade Runner . Yes, yes, it would be wrong to say Blade Runner did anything first . Dark, brooding, gritty, tricky, messy, dystopian SF existed before. But the film did something new, largely visually. (I remember hearing William Gibson at a reading – or maybe I read it. He said he ran from the theater screaming. In 1982 he was in the process of writing Neuromancer ; and, lo and behold, this director has scooped his highly surface-oriented visual conception.) Blade Runner achieved a decisive gravitational shift in SF sensibility. If it didn’t cause the shift, it remains a highly visible marker for it. Yes, yes; by no means were we stuck before 1982 in some Hugo Gernsbackish rut. But – to get to the point – you might say fantasy hasn’t had its Blade Runner . Yet. No work that drops a world in amongst all the Tolkien knock-offs, setting those typing monkeys howling like they’ve seen a monolith. Miéville wants to do that .

Miéville, like Ridley Scott, composes in the medium of kipple: artful accretions of haphazard junk – animate, inanimate, abanimate – conveying the powerful illusion of depth and density in all dimensions; time and horizontal expanse, upbuilt habitation and promiscuous inhabitation. Miéville’s subcreative efforts succeed through sheer superfluity of … debris; detail , if you prefer the polite term.

This is important because fantasy, like SF, can often be unsatisfyingly thin, not like an SF thought-experiment but through weak dependence on cliché. Henry Farrell quoted a nice bit from Mike Harrison some time back:

Before the word “fantasy” came to describe a monoculture, it was an umbrella term for work actually fantastic in nature. Nobody “wrote fantasy”. They wrote personal, strongly-flavoured, individual stuff, and the term was applied at a later stage in the proceedings. Unpredictability, inventiveness, oddness, estrangement, wit, could all be found there, along with machinery for defamliarising the world and making it seem new. What we have now—or what we had at least until very recently—is long, evenly-planted fields of potatoes, harvested by machines in such a way as to make them acceptable to the corporate buyers from Sainsbury’s, McDonalds, & HarperCollins.

As I wrote at the time (I presume to quote myself since it will turn out I was literally right about the cart):

First, ‘dreary monoculture’ pegs it dead-on; that is the problem with genre fantasy, and Miéville deserves all credit for doing his part to muscle the cart out of horrid ruts. (If there’s a new Robert Jordan novel, it must be Saturday!) And, of course, Tolkien is sort of at fault for all of this, providing the blueprint for the factory farm. But, then again, he isn’t at fault. He did nothing of the sort.

Anyway, the strategy is to recover all those admirable literary qualities by planting weeds in all the even rows. This points the way to Miéville’s anti-Tolkien polemics. But let’s work up.

One of the choicest dramatic details in Iron Council is the scene in which The Flexible Puppet Theatre Troupe have their avant garde production of "The Sad and Instructional Tale of Jack Half A Prayer" disrupted by the New Crobuzon censors (for "Rudeness to New Crobuzon in the Second Degree"), then devolve into riot. ( Here’s a Miéville detractor, for example, who gives the Flexibles their grudging artistic due.) Little bits like this, multiplied a hundredfold, trick the reader’s eye into regarding the city – its society, culture, economy, history, people – as real . New Crobuzon, where all roads in Bas-Lag lead, is not some Potemkin Village against which paper cut-out elves and wizards stage clichéd clashes with standard issue ultimate Evil. On the other hand, just because the scenery is palpably real, doesn’t mean the performers aren’t generic cut-outs. We’re getting to that concern.

Now I’m going to do a stupid critic trick. China can say ‘no, you’re wrong;’ and I’ll probably take his word for it. Let me seize one detail and insist it is really a perfect lens through which all aspects of Miéville’s art can be apprehended.

Miéville seeks to do, for fantasy, what his puppeteers are doing for Jack. (If you want to know about Jack, read the book, or Henry’s post.) Consider the art of the Flexibles (their name is, I suppose, homage to martyred Ben Flex,right?) The fantasy cart of cliche, of which I spoke, shows up on schedule, in need of renovation and a load of fresh kipple:

There was the usual – the cart-sized puppet theatre with its little carved figures in garish clothes stock-still on their stage – but the miniature wings and proscenium had been torn off, and the puppeteers stood in plain view dressed too-nearly like militia officers in dark grey. And the stage was littered with other things, strange debris. A sheet was stretched and hammered taut and on it some magic lantern was projecting newspaper print … These Flexibles were consummate – arrogant pranksters yes but serious – and they played their audience with skill, so that after every such imposition [forbidden obscenities] was quick and funny dialogue, or jaunty music, and it was hard to sustain anger. But it was an extraordinary challenge or series of challenges and the crowd vacillated between bewilderment and discontent … No one was sure what they were seeing, this structureless thing of shouts and broken-up lines and noises, and cavalcades of intricate incomprehensible costumes. The puppets were elegantly manoeuvered, but they should have been – were designed to be – wooden players in traditional moral tales, not these little provocateurs whose puppeteers had them speak back tartly to the narrator, contradict him (always in the puppets’ traditional register, a cod-childish language of compound nouns and onomatopoeia), and dance to the noise and mum lewdness as far as their joints and strings would allow. Images, even animations – pictures in such quick cycles that they jumped and ran or fired their guns – came in stuttering succession onto the screen. The narrator harangued the audience and argued with the puppets and other actors, and over growing dissent from the stalls the story of Jack Half-a-Prayer emerged in chaotic form.

I connect this passage with Miéville’s anti-Tolkien screed :

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious – you can’t ignore it, so don’t even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there’s a lot to dislike – his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés – elves ‘n’ dwarfs ‘n’ magic rings – have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation’, thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps – via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabinski and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on – the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations. … Why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies?

Nothing fishy about it, exactly, but odd that cod would show up in both if there were no connection. (Cod-childish, cod-Wagnerian. Am I reaching?) What Miéville is urging is a critical mass of new fantasy, updating the New Wave of the 60’s; perhaps to be known as ‘the New Weird’. So: Tolkien’s arse wen is to Miéville’s ‘New Weird’ as traditional New Crobuzon puppet theater is to the Flexibles’ subversive art. (Am I right, China?)

3. Oh, sweet ursinality of lifelessness! Proceeding on this assumption, some thoughts about puppets, mannequins, golems. A tension. On the one hand, the idea might be that fantasy can become – well, more like Henry says Miéville’s fantasy already is (see also here ):

Mieville is a historical materialist, and pays a lot of attention to the economic fundamentals underlying his created societies. But he’s very nearly unique among fantasy authors in so doing; most of them prefer to sweep the dirty business of material accumulation underneath the prettily woven carpet of chivalry, noblesse oblige &c.

I say something similar, but tongue in cheek, here .

On the other hand, puppet theater – however socially aware and subversive – is never going to be about economic fundamentals, except in the most one-dimensional, expressionistic way. So when Miéville writes, in his manifesto, " Characters are more than cardboard cutouts," this is ambiguous. Is he going to make these traditionally one-dimensional beings three-dimensional, or is he going to deploy their one-dimensionality with a bit more puppeteer dexterity and brains? Two flavors of ‘more’, and not obviously flavors that go well together.

Let me quote again from one of my old posts, which seems to me prescient about this issue of puppet-mastery.

It took me a while to warm to Miéville. We had a moment of miscommunication, he and I. He comes wrapped up and recommended by reviewers as the rightful heir to the mantle of Mervyn Peake (to whom a very fine website has recently been dedicated. There are poems I had not read and pictures I had not seen and first edition covers and much wonderful stuff. May I recommend, in particular, this delightful envisioning of Carroll’s walrus and carpenter; and this rather fey Alice.) As I was saying, Miéville comes billed as the new Peake, and he acknowledges Peake as a main influence. And – well, yes, I can see it. And it isn’t fair to blame Miéville for departing from his model (a debt of gratitude is not an obligation to plagiarize, after all.) Nevertheless, what Miéville has gotten from Peake is not what I like best about him: the grotesque whimsy and compulsive, self-delightedly overblown verbal energy of the Gormenghast trilogy. Haven’t read it? Think Edward Gorey writes The Pickwick Papers . Better yet: read it. And by the by, here is a nice Edward Gorey cover gallery . As I was saying, every Peake character is a puppet, and Peake’s language dances these finely crafted artifacts about in the most astonishingly skillful – above all visual – manner. It would be very natural to stage Gormenghast as puppet theater, except it would be less impressive that way because, after all, one expects to see puppets at a puppet theater. To meet with them – to really see them leaping off the page – in a novel; that is a more unique aesthetic achievement.

In that post I quote some long bits to illustrate the difference, if you want to go read more.

And now it occurs to me to ask, although this may seem beside the present point, just what Peake is up to with his puppet Gormenghast characters? It seems to me the likely answer – sheer aesthetic self-delight in lavish, expert construction of sets and mannequins – is expressed well by another author Miéville praises in his polemic, about whom I have written quite a bit lately: Bruno Schulz.

Here is my post on golems and Schulz’ Cinammon Shops (a.k.a. The Street of Crocodiles ). It contains a link to this Schulz page , where you can read some new translations for free. The father character in Cinammon Shops is praised by the narrating son as a champion of escape … from boredom at reality’s drab dullness. I imagine this is what Mervyn Peake would have been like, if grossly underappreciated by his family:

The final and splendid countermarch of fantasy which that incorrigible improviser, that fencing master of the imagination led on the dugouts and trenches of the sterile and empty winter. Only today do I understand the lonely heroism with which he single-handedly gave battle against the boundless element of boredom numbing the town. Devoid of any support, without acknowledgement on our part, that astonishing man defended the lost cause of poetry. He was a wonderful mill into whose hoppers the bran of empty hours was poured, to burst into bloom in its mechanism with all the colours and aromas of oriental spices. But, grown accustomed to that metaphysical prestidigitator’s splendid jugglery, we were inclined to belittle the value of his sovereign magic which had delivered us from the lethargy of empty days and nights.

No language of social or political challenge here, I might note. Unapologetic escapism, which seems to me what Peake is all about (also, Schulz.) I don’t say Miéville denies it, but perhaps he is tempted to equate ‘undermining expectations’ with ‘challenging lies’, or tempted to equate escapism – i.e. a conscious refusal to face wintery reality – with mollycoddling readers in some warm, snug fashion. (Maybe Miéville isn’t really equating these things. Maybe I’m reading too much in.)

What strikes me even more about Schulz, in relation to Miéville is that Iron Council is not just about puppets, it’s about golems, also about a strange breed, the Remade. Schulz has a whole philosophy of mannequins – of golemetry ,to use Miéville’s term. I have quoted this stuff at length before but will do so now again because it is perfect for present purposes. (All the following comes from new translations of Schulz – see link above):

– DEMIURGOS – said my father – did not possess a monopoly on creation – creation is the privilege of all souls. Matter is prone to infinite fecundity, an inexhaustibly vital power and, at the same time, the beguiling strength of the temptation which entices us to fashioning. In the depth of matter indistict smiles are shaped and tensions are constrained – congealing attempts at figurations. All matter ripples out of infinite possibility, which passes through it in sickly shudders. Awaiting the invigorating breath of the soul, it overflows endlessly into itself, entices us with a thousand sweet encirclements and a softness which it dreams up out of itself in its blind reveries. Devoid of its own initiative, voluptuously pliant, malleable in the feminine fashion, and compliant in the face of all impulses it constitutes outlaw terrain – open to every kind of sharlatanism and dilettantism, the domain of all abuses and dubious demiurgic manipulations. Matter is the most passive and defenceless essence in the cosmos. All may knead and shape it; it is submissive to all. All arrangements of matter are impermanent and loose, liable to retardation and dissolution. There is nothing evil in the reduction of life to other and new forms. Murder is not a sin. Many a time it is a necessary infringement in the face of stubborn and ossified forms of being which have ceased to be remarkable. In the interests of an exciting and valuable experiment, it might even constitute a service. Here is a point of departure for a new apologia of sadism. My father was inexhaustible in his glorification of that astonishing element – such was matter. – There is no dead matter – he taught – lifelessness is merely a semblance behind which unknown forms of life are concealed. The range of those forms is infinite, their shades and nuances inexhaustible. Demiurgos was in possession of valuable and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to these, he called into being a multitude of genuses, renewing themselves with their own strength. It is not known whether these recipes will be reconstructed at any time. But it is unnecessary, for, even should those classical methods of creation prove to be inaccessible once and for all, certain illegal methods remain, a whole host of heretical and illicit methods.

We are not intent – he said – on long winded creations, on long-term beings. Our creatures will not be the heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be fleeting and concise, their characters without far-reaching plans. Often for a single gesture, for a single word, we shall rise to the challenge of their appointment to life for that single moment. We openly admit: we will not place any emphasis on either the permanence or solidity of the workmanship; our handiwork will be, as it were, provisional, made for a single occasion. If they are to be people, for example, then we shall give them only one side of a face, one hand and one leg – namely the one they shall require in their role. It would be pedantry to worry about their other leg, not coming into play. From the rear they might simply be patched with canvas, or whitewashed. We shall state our ambition by this proud motto: for every gesture another actor. In the service of every word, every action, we shall call into life another character. Such is our fancy that there will be a world in accordance with our taste. Demiurgos was extremely fond of refined, excellent and complicated materials; we give precedence to shoddiness. We are simply enraptured by it; cheapness transports us, the scrappiness and shoddiness of the material. Do you understand,’ my father asked, ‘the profound meaning of that weakness, that passion for tissue paper in bright colours, for papier mâché, for lacquered colour, for straw and sawdust? It is – he said with a woeful smile – our love for matter as such, for its downiness and porousness, for its singular, mystical consistency. Demiurgos, that great master and artist, will render it invisible, commanding it to vanish beneath the pretence of life. We, to the contrary, love its raspingness, its unruliness and its ragdoll ungainliness. We like to see beneath every gesture, beneath every movement, its ponderous exertion, its inertia, its sweet ursinality.

So we are back to human kipple – brief, entropic debris of demiurgic subcreation. I have quoted these passages before, as I said, but without noting the almost unbelievably harsh irony of the manner of Bruno Schulz’ own death: murdered callously by the Nazis, who didn’t regard it as a sin to terminate an inferior form. A point of departure for a new apologia for sadism, Schulz’ era proved to be, soon after he wrote this book. (I’ve posted a bit more about Schulz here and (only implicitly) here . His appropriation as an ideal romantic figure in David Grossman’s See Under: LOVE .)

I don’t mean Schulz is, in any sense, complicit in the manner of his own death, merely because he wrote a romantic phatasmagoria of an escapist work in which he riffed about murder being all right. I mean, rather, to give Miéville his due. He urges political seriousness and social responsibility, even on writers of fantasy, and no doubt he’s got a point. Puppeteer escapists aren’t necessarily right about everything. But I am saying (how to put it? I’m not quite sure) that Miéville hasn’t really worked out what he’s up to – whether his subcreations are going to be responsibly thick or brilliantly, expressionistically thin. Fantasy novels matured into economic and political treatises, or characters thinned into puppets whose strings are plucked more dexterously. I must say, there is always an artistic way, but here I’m not seeing a way to combine these two impulses perfectly happily. I think Miéville is somewhat held back from his full potential as an author by an inability to decide between modes, both of which clearly attracted him, either of which he might plausibly master.

4. Paper Cutouts, Feats of Clay Let me illustrate Miéville’s penchant for mixing political economy and puppetry – colorful grotesques that are theatrical with ones humanly horrible . In the following passage we hear about how New Crobuzon finds itself at war with Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. (Miéville never actually lets us see "its moats and glass cats, and the Catoblepas Plain and merchant trawlers and tramp diplomats and the Crying Prince.")

The arcane Tesh ships, the barquentines and dandy catboats [very Peakeish language] all raggedy with coloured cloth, whose crews wore henna and filed their teeth, had ceased to come to New Crobuzon’s docks. There was a rumour through long-disused channels, Tesh’s secret and hidden ambassador had told the Mayor that their two states were at war. Reports of Tesh depredations in the Firewater Straits became more common and higher-profile, in the papers and government newposters. the Mayor had promised reverge and counterattack. Recruitment to the New Crobuzon Navy was intensified, along, Ori, heard, with ‘booze recruitment’ – press gangs. It was still distant, abstract: battles at sea thousands of miles off. But it had escalated. It had featured more and more in the speeches of ministers. The city’s new mercantilism was unrewarded; markets did not open for its exports; the war blocked its sources of uncommon commodities. Ships went and did not come back. New Crobuzon’s boarded-up plants did not reopen, and others closed, and the signs on the doors grew mildew that mocked their proclamations of ‘temporary suspension of industry.’ The city was stagnant; it slumped and slummed. Survivors began to come home. Destroyed soldiers left to beg and preach their experiences to crowds in Dog Fenn and Riverskin. Scarred, their bones crushed, cut by the enemy or in frantic battlefield surgery, they also bore stranger wounds that only Tesh’s troops could have given them. Hundreds of the returned had been made mad, and in their mania they raved in unknown sibilant tongue, all of them across the city speaking the same words together, in time. There were men whose eyes were haemorrhaged blood-sacs but who still had sight, Ori heard, who cried without ceasing as they saw the death in everything. The crowds were afraid of the veterans, as if their own bad conscience. Once, many months ago, Ori had come past a man haranguing the horrified crowd and showing them his arms, which were bleached a dead grey. ‘You know what this is!’ he was shouting at them. ‘You know! I was at the edge of a blast, and you see? The sawbones tried to take my arms, told me they had to go, but they just didn’t want you to see …’ He waggled his ghastly limbs like paper cutouts, and the militia came and stifled him, took him away. But Ori had seen the onlooker’s terror. Had Tesh truly remembered the lost science of colourbombs?’

I say this is perfect pitch. Right on the line between grim realism and gleeful puppeteering. The colourbombed veteran could be an Otto Dix painting . But it seems to me, frankly, that the pitch can’t – anyway, isn’t – maintained.

But first, another good example. New Crobuzon employs thaumaturges in its Punishment Factories to remake criminals into grotesques. The philosophy of these remakings is, as it were, a sinister Foucaultian twist on Schulz’ father figure’s simple delight at demiurgic potentiality of dull matter. Poor criminals are Remade (then made to work to pay for their own remaking.) Their limbs replaced by animal parts or machine parts, to fit the crime or merely to mock and degrade their possessors. Very ghastly descriptions. A boy with insect legs growing all around his neck, like a ruff. Humans who die if their coke fires go out. Unsuitably Remade slaves forced to work, building the transcontinental railroad that is, in fact the focus of much of the novel. (See Henry’s post.)

– Fucking useless , one overseer screams and beats a fallen man who wears many delicate eyes on his hands. – What fucking point is there making more Remades if they’re peacocks like you ? I tell ’em every godsdamned week we need Remade built for industry, not for their sodding whims. Get up and fucking haul.

Ghastly nightmare image. As Schulz writes: "If they are to be people, for example, then we shall give them only one side of a face, one hand and one leg – namely the one they shall require in their role." Ugly industrial implications. (Which is worse, in human flesh: enforced whimsicality or machine efficiency?) But I fear that soon, as per Belle’s post, Miéville is no longer succeeding as an expressionist but perversely refusing to show us anything nice or pretty or pleasant, despite having promised to show us everything , politically and economically speaking. (Where are all the nice parts of town?)

On the other hand, golemetry is nice; a kind of Hegelian dream. In Iron Council Judah Lowe considers:

What is it I’ve done? … I made a golem from gas. Can I make a golem from even less solid things? Golemetry’s an argument, an intervention, so will I intervene and make a golem of darkness or in death, in electrycity, in sound, in friction, in ideas or hopes?

What is Hegel’s World-Spirit but a strangely animate, yet strictly unliving golem of an Idea?

As a counterpoint to that: if you pity humanity as so much entropic kipple, swept together and apart by the absent-minded broom of history, then golemetry can be a humanism. Pennyhaugh lecturing Judah on this science:

The living cannot be made a golem – because with the vitality of orgone, flesh and vegetable is matter interacting with its own mechanisms. The unalive, though, is inert because it happens to lie just so. We make it meaningful. We do not order it but point out the order that inheres unseen, always already there. This act of pointing is at least as much assertion and persuasion as observqation. We see structure, and in pointing it out we see mechanisms and grasp them, and we twist. Because patterns are asserted not in stasis but in change. Golemetry is an interruption. It is a subordinating of the statis IS to the active AM.

The difficulty is acknowledging, as the father says, "the profound meaning of that weakness, that passion for tissue paper in bright colours, for papier mâché, for lacquered colour, for straw and sawdust," while yet shoring up any mere brief interruptions against immanent destruction.

On that note I pass you over to Henry’s discussion of Walter Benjamin and the nunc stans of Iron Council, lest I spoil a plot.

5. Storytelling Let us now consider stories Miéville tells. The first thing I would like to say is that I greatly enjoy these stories. Hours of entertainment. The second is that I find that my fellow contributors have, by now, said most of what I was going to say in a negative vein. Belle makes the point that Miéville exhibits a peculiar obsession with whimsically grab-bag tactical situations. Matt Cheney says it bluntly:

The three books [Perdido, Scar, Council] are adventure novels, ones with similar plots overall: a mystery is raised and slowly solved, leading to unexpected outcomes, the main characters’ lives are imperiled, the setting threatened with total destruction, and then lots of people kill each other, with bittersweet results. The formula works well in Iron Council up until the last two hundred pages, partly because of the complex juxtapositions of chronology and events, but threatening New Crobuzon yet again with eldritch forces from beyond seemed unnecessary, and I could have lived with about half as many battles, because the book began to feel more like a scenario for a roleplaying game than a novel: one seemingly impossible battle ("Good dice roll!") leads to an even more seemingly impossible battle ("Your weapons aren’t effective against noncorporeal entities, but luckily coming down the hill…") leads to another and another and…. While I hope Mieville develops a new formula soon, I also understand that the one he keeps reverting to is inherent for the kind of story he wants to tell, and that it has been done much worse by other writers. Many readers won’t mind at all – will, in fact, find the innumerable battles to be the best moments of the books. Mieville has so much else to offer, though, that it seems a shame he always ties things up by having his characters spend most of their time killing each other.

Let me add one detail. Miéville has an odd (given his polemical stance) penchant for Hollywood-style special-effects extravaganzas just before credits roll. I am sure he is not in any conscious sense pitching for Hollywood. An unelective affinity, perhaps. It is also true of many small scenes that one thinks: better as CGI. For example, from the end of Part I, about 10 seconds of quality (but expensive) screen-time:

The golem was crude and instructed with murderous simplicity. Moving with assasin speed it reached arms that weighed many tons and held the handlingers [nasty beasties that possess animal hosts]. They tried to face it. It took only minute beats of time for the golem to drive stone into the animal and break its neck, crushing the handlinger, the hand-parasite squirming in the horse’s man. The man was quicker. He spat fire that billowed without effect over the golem’s face. With impossible strength the man wrenched at the arm of coagulated stone and dislocated it, so the golem moved clumsily. But its grip held. Even with its arm falling off in grots, the golem pulled the dangling man down, gripped his legs with one pebbled hand and his head with another and twisted him apart. As the host was killed, while the flung-apart corpse was still in the air, the golem ceased, its task done. Its rocks and dust fell. They cracked and rumbled in a bloodied pile, half buried the dead horse. The host’s ruined parts rolled into bracken and sent blood down the stones. Something was spasming beneath the suit. ‘Get away,’ Cutter said. ‘It wants another host.’ Drogon began to fire at it while the corpse still descended. The thing had just come to rest when something many-legged the purple of a bruise scuttled from its clothes. It came with an arachnid gait. They scattered. Pomeroy’s gun boomed but the thing did not let up [awkward term for not getting killed], and it was only feet from Elsie screaming when Drogon’s repeated shots stopped it. The whispersmith walked toward it firing as he went, three bullets sent precisely to the thing hidden in the grass. He kicked it, hauled it up ragged and bloody. It was a hand. A mottled right hand. From its wrist a short tail grew, it wung deadweight and dripping. ‘Dextrier,’ the whispersmith said to Cutter. ‘Warrior caste.’

Now frankly this is not what the novel is made for. You might try an apologetic line about orthodox Flexible Puppet Theater dramaturgy: "Images, even animations – pictures in such quick cycles that they jumped and ran or fired their guns – came in stuttering succession onto the screen." But even that admits it belongs properly on the screen . Blow-by-blow splatter can never be novelistically great , as opposed to sort of fun . Even so, I had fun. More than that, I admired Part I of the novel for the unbelievably fast pacing. As a little experiment, I counted the number of new and original settings and/or exciting battles from the first 40 pages of the book. (Obviously a somewhat subjective metric.) Iron Council clocked in at a respectable 25. Perhaps you won’t quite believe me that this is a good thing, but it truly does end up being far, far better than an advanced D&D module with a manticore in one room and, through the door, 30 orcs, and, in the corridor, a gelatinous cube, at the end of the corridor, a barrow wight and a chaotic evil cleric. Temporally, the speed is perfectly in order: "their roles will be fleeting and concise, their characters without far-reaching plans. Often for a single gesture, for a single word, we shall rise to the challenge of their appointment to life for that single moment." Geographically and socially, the effect is not like an ill-conceived dungeon graph-papered out by a 12 year old with no sense that he’s left nowhere for the orcs to get food or go to the bathroom. No, it’s like a Hieronymous Bosch painting. You admire this inventive cramming of grotesques onto one canvas. It’s better for being absurdly busy. You don’t ask: what do the bird-head guys eat? Who is paying that mason to build the wall? (Does he ever go on strike, and then who gets hired to scab? That guy with all the scabs?) Do they barter with those dead guys coming out of the eye of the demon? Etc.

Again we are back to the problem of political economy vs. puppeteering expressionism.

Miéville’s talent for generating an ungodsly superabundance of incidental Boschian detail was truly impressed on me when I read, recently, Steph Swainston’s The Year Of Our War . It has been heralded as proof there is such a thing as ‘The New Weird’. It’s not just China Miéville. (Although I fear the sub-genre will soon be afflicted with it’s own tag, the equivalent of ‘elves and dwarves’; ‘bugs and drugs’, maybe.) Swainston’s book sports an effusive Miéville blurb, but I felt it didn’t measure up, largely because the travels of its winged protagonist, Jant, across Swainston’s world didn’t leave me with such a rich sense of what that world contains. It didn’t feel like a 700-layer cake. Maybe 70-layers at most. I didn’t suffer the illusion that I was seeing every square inch of the mire even while being dragged through it at high speed, the way I feel with Miéville. Somehow this made it more apparent that, underneath the bugs and drugs, The Year of Our War is basically a stock ‘the dark forces are coming’ fantasy, plus soap opera costume-melodrama infighting among the stalwart defenders. It wants to be The Lion In Winter meets Aliens , with a touch of Naked Lunch . But I think the Lion In Winter bit didn’t quite come together, nor the Naked Lunch bit, leaving bug fights, which are really quite impressive. I quite enjoyed it. It just didn’t think it was great . It was entertaining escapism .

In Miéville’s case, rapid-fire grotesque inventiveness – puppet a page – serves to disguise the conventionality of much of the narrative (although, as per Henry’s post, a case can be made for Iron Council marking a sort of departure.) The disguise holds, largely, but it remains a disguise. And the only problem with our author being a conventional genre storyteller is – well, it just doesn’t fit with the polemic about this more mature, genre-busting sort of fantasy we are supposed to be getting. As Belle puts it in her post, if you are going to let a few absurdly overmatched heroes defeat the slakemoths, there is no obvious reasons why a preposterously successful revolution shouldn’t be staged. The mature sense of ‘history is painful that way’ just doesn’t resonate with the rigged, affirmative (sentimental, call it what you will) ‘Frodo and Sam can make it!’ conventions otherwise in effect. And there is a serious problem going for psychological realism while indulging these action-adventure genre expectations. No real person would be so heroic, so the sense of these characters as real people melts away like wax, when the action heats up, leaving us with … well, genre mannequins. (And after all that painstaking effort to get the wax to look right.)

In short, just because Miéville’s stories are "gritty and tricky, just as in real life" doesn’t mean they are gritty and tricky in the same way life is. Life doesn’t usually go in for conventional Freytag’s triangle-style structures. (At this point I despair of ever finding a half-remembered quote from John Barth about Freytag’s triangle and funhouses, only to find – to my amazement – that google knows all, sees all.) As I was saying, certainly life doesn’t go in for ‘the bomb is going to go off and everyone will die if we can’t stop it!’ Hollywood-style rollercoaster ride of thrills, spills, chills n’ kills. Life itself goes in more for the Jim Woodring , "Dear Supreme Altruist, Thanks very much for placing within me the bomb that never stops exploding,"-style story. And, in a way, that’s what Miéville is going for with the train story. Fair enough. But the bomb story-line is straight outa Hollywood; all the grit and trick can’t change that.   

To conclude on a positive note, when I think back on the scenes I have liked most in all these novels … well, first come the sheer accumulations of kipple, considered in its own right. That comes in first, second and third. Next come the scenes – as per above – in which for a brief moment political economy and puppetry seem balanced, but those moments can’t last. For the rest, I like the moments when one or the other mood (political economic or puppet) is clearly ascendent. In Perdido Street Station , when Rudgutter and co. are negotiating with the devils for help against the slakemoths, then they realize the devils are afraid so they have to turn (shudder) to the Weaver. That scene is such giddy puppetry of power politics and ‘fixers’ who have to be called in when things get ugly. In the same vein, the overall ‘hunting of the Snark’ arc of The Scar is nice (thanks for pointing that out, Henry; I gather China himself clued you in to the puns on names. I didn’t get them on my own.) For someone so influenced by Peake, Miéville really doesn’t do comic. Which seems to me regrettable. He ought to try to write more comic stuff.

Moving to the political economic pole, we have the rough labor politics of the vodyanoi dock strike. (I’ve posted about that here .) Very nice. Also, the secret agent spinning yarns about a grindylow invasion in The Scar . In Iron Council the best parts, I think, present us with the character of Weather Wrightby (whether right be?), captain of industry behind the transcontinental railroad; plus Judah’s stint working for Wrightby as a scout-turned-anthropologist among the doomed stiltspear. There is a kind of low-key novelty to this wryly insistent insertion of social types and troubles from our world. Herein is supposed to lie the maturity, I suppose. It would be easy for these bits to devolve into parody, or plain hokiness, but they don’t. (Not that parody is bad . It can be quite good. I’m thinking of stories like Andy Duncan’s "Senator Bilbo" (in here ) in which race relations in the Shire after the fall of Sauron are envisioned. Orc immigrants, but old Bilbo can’t stomach ’em. Nice pun on Senator Bilbo . Miéville does things like what Tolkien parodists do, but without it turning into parody.) 

Anyway, I think Weather Wrightby, who is oddly sympathetic in his monomaniac avuncularity, comes closest to meeting the high standards Miéville sets himself: not to portray good and evil simplistically. Wish there were more of him in the novel. That character had potential.

6. Tolkien I meant for a bunch of thoughts about Tolkien to get worked in somewhere above, but now I’m not sure where to insert the shoehorn and start pushing. Surely I have said enough. Here goes. First, it seems unfair to swipe at Tolkien for " boys-own-adventure glorying in war". A man who fought at the Battle of the Somme – who saw friends die horribly in the mud, who was friends with C.S. Lewis, left for dead on the battlefield – may be guilty of glorying in war. But he cannot plausibly be accused of doing so in a boyish ‘you only think it’s fun because you haven’t seen the mud and blood’ way. If Tolkien is morally disordered, the disorder is of a different order. (Am I remembering the inklings’ war records right?) I recall a bit from the audio commentary to The Two Towers , from Tom Shippey . I’ll just fire up that DVD and transcribe roughly:

So all these writers [Lewis, Tolkien, other inklings] – traumatized authors … they have to write their own explanation [of W.W. I]. And strangely, but pretty consistently, they can’t do it by writing realistic fiction. They have to write something which is in some way or other fantastic. So, after W.W. I, medieval literature seemed to be entirely relevant again. It was actually addressing issues which people had forgotten about, or thought were outdated. Well, they were wrong about that. They’d come back in.

The fact that they were veterans doesn’t make them right, but it does complicate the interpretation of their response to their experiences. Also, it might be countered that there is a great deal of ‘boyishness’ in Miéville’s own battle scenes. At their best they are like Bosch canvases, or inspired puppet theater. But the narrative thrill of Judah Lowe’s golemetry powers – honed in games played in New Crobuzon, then taken into the field – is much the same as that of the protagonist’s victories in Ender’s Game . Instead of video game kid makes good, we have wargamer champ makes good. (That’s a bit too harsh.) 

Regarding narrative structure: one of the striking things about Tolkien is how badly he writes. Or rather, how he does things no self-respecting commercial author would try, apparently because he was writing to please himself and didn’t know what the ‘right’ way to do it was. He composes text like masonry, as I’ve said before; which is just how he conceived of his beloved Beowulf , as per his essay "The Monster and the Critics". This is what gives Tolkien his monumental dignity. It’s not like monoculture farming. It’s gothic architecture; admittedly, clumsy stuff. This is what makes his hoards of imitators think they can be just plain clumsy and get away with it, commercially. Which they can. But that is not Tolkien’s fault.

Here again there is some interesting information on the Two Towers commentary, so I’ll keep roughly transcribing.

Tolkien started writing, ran into trouble. Instead of cutting and pasting and blocking, he went back and started writing it all over again. Got into trouble. Started all over. Got a little further. Got into trouble. Went back to the beginning. Like the waves coming up the beach, each wave got a bit further, but each one retreated back to the starting point, as the voice on the commentary approves. But it’s worth adding that when a person behaves like that we thinks it’s a bit obsessive-compulsive. (This fits well with my somewhat strained characterization of Tolkien as an untutored outsider artist . Yes, yes, I know. He wasn’t exactly isolated. He had C.S. Lewis and other inklings to critique his work in progress.)

LOTR is not structured like a proper novel, important characters not developed, too repetitive, opening too slow, ending too short, great deal of talk, long stretches of no action, Council of Elrond is 15,000 words of a badly chaired committee meeting, including much talk from characters who haven’t been properly introduced to the reader. What courage to expect that the reader will put up with this nonsense! What brilliant naivete not even to realize it was courage to try!

Now more from Fran Walsh (half of the adapting team for the book-to-film) and (I think it’s Shippey again?) on the oddity of the narrative structure of The Two Towers . As a narrative it’s two books, almost artificially made one. The storyline through Rohan. And the Frodo-Sam-Golem story. Not really significantly intercut. You lose whole character groups for 150-200 pages at a go. Could have been a dangerous sacrifice of momentum. A sense of (wait for it) realism comes from a sense of not knowing what’s going on, and what is going to happen next. Because the structure of the story gives you rather few genre cues, so oddly is it constructed. You can’t deduce what’s going to happen by surveying the angle of the plain on which you stand and deducing where you are on Freytag’s triangle, in other words. A lot of the tension is the reader just burning up to know what’s going on in the other narrative thread and having to defer gratification, rather than being treated to lots of comforting, fast Hollywood intercutting.

Anyway, the present point is that there is a sense in which – in constructing the story – Tolkien let his tutored competencies as philologist, historian, pedant and obsessive-compulsive hobbyist run away with his untutored incompetencies as commercial fiction writer. To glorious effect. What has happened since then, in the fantasy genre factory, is that Tolkien’s highly personal idiosyncracies have ossified into cliches. Personal limitations that were authentic in him are not authentically transferable to just anyone else who wants to mimic them.

Miéville, despite the tell-it-backwards inventiveness of the anamnesis section of Iron Council (see Matt Cheney’s post ), is in some sense a more conventional fantasy novelost than Tolkien. This is not to say that Miéville is actually part of the monoculture culture, after all, but it could be argued that in certain respects he is closer to it than Tolkien himself. Although Tolkien is the source of it.

And so: Tolkien, like Miéville, is suspended between thick and thin. Thick world-making. Oddly thin characters. In Tolkien the characters range from the just plain wooden to beautiful, architectonic figures. In Miéville they range from animated fantasy genre clichés, just muddied up a bit, to well-danced flexible puppets. It is precisely the oddity of lavish world creation plus paper-thin or wooden characterization that has so vexed many of Tolkien’s detractors (Edmund Wilson, for example.) Miéville may be in the same boat with his critics (as I argue in Oo, that wicked watercraeft .) So perhaps what Miéville should do is try to get even further off the factory farm not by trying to get away from Tolkien but by following him in this respect: writing less clearly commercial fiction and trusting his audience will understand what private preoccupations made him do it that way.

In other respects, of course, Miéville is free to go on being annoyed by elves and dwarves and Sam’s dog-like devotion to Frodo. (But remember! Homosociality does not equal homosexuality! How often must we Tolkien defenders make this defensive point?) I have saved a snippet of choice Chuniania from the abyss of the man’s disappeared blog.   

Tolkien is the "wen on the arse" of Mieville’s brand of fantasy. He has some cute descriptions of the Master: "cod-Wagnerian pomposity," "small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quo," and "belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity." I suppose one of the first questions that arises when evaluating this claim is to what extent these qualities are present in Tolkien’s source material. Beowulf, to take one obvious example, does not have the "cod-Wagnerian pomposity," if I understand what Mieville means by this delicious phrase correctly, but it most certainly reflects a belief in "absolute morality" and a fondness for "hierarchical status-quo." Indeed it would be surprising if it didn’t, considering its origin.

I said at the beginning it is quite possible Mieville really didn’t mean all that stuff he says against Tolkien on that old page; that he just put it out there to get a rise. Which would be quite alright. It would mean I’ve rested a little too much critical weight on it here, and in my posts over the last year and a half. But it does seem to me that Miéville could probably clarify to himself what he is up to, in a salutary way, by trying to say exactly what it is that he objects to. Strip back the polemic and see what sober core of dispute remains. Since, after all, he and Tolkien have so much in common. As Shippey says, there is a brand of writer who can’t respond to reality realistically. This lot have to write fantasy. Tolkien is one such. Miéville another.

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{ 18 comments }

lth 01.11.05 at 4:18 pm

Am I the only person who was bored by Perdido Street Station? How can you say he is a superlative creator, when he lacks the creative energy to eg. call his rivers something better than ‘Grime’ and ‘Slime’ or whatever they were. I read the first 100 pages of it and put it down in disgust at its cliched genre fantasy.

Nick 01.11.05 at 5:16 pm

About naming the rivers Grime and Slime — what would be better? It seems to me that fantasy authors are usually stuck between a rock and a hard place with their naming conventions. To name the rivers Grime and Slime might seem unsatisfactory, but, on the other hand, creating more fantastic names that would traffic in lots of apostrophes and dipthongs with potentially unpronounceable juxtapositions of consonants could be just as bad. To be honest, I’d rather have a name that I could pronounce and forget about, allowing me to focus on the rest of the book and what it’s working at.

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.11.05 at 6:04 pm

And there’s a lot to dislike – his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés – elves ‘n’ dwarfs ‘n’ magic rings – have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation’, thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

Assuming Miéville was serious, he seriously misunderstands the word ‘consolation’ in Tolkien

The entire text of the speech which Miéville is referring to can be found here . The part which he finds objectionable is probably this:

And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies. Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness. But our stories cannot be expected always to rise above our common level. They often do. Few lessons are taught more clearly in them than the burden of that kind of immortality, or rather endless serial living, to which the “fugitive” would fly. For the fairy-story is specially apt to teach such things, of old and still today. Death is the theme that most inspired George MacDonald. But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

First of all this is a comment on fairy-tales not modern fantasy as it came to be known after Tolkien. Second, trying to sum that up as mollycoddling misses the point entirely. Tolkien is deeply influenced by the Norse myths, which celebrate the necessity of the good fight even though you are going to lose. At the end of the LOTR the world is saved, and the elves still leave the world with much of their magic. Frodo got the ring to the fiery pit, and was not strong enough to cast it in. He succeeded in his mission and was so damaged that he could not ultimately stay in the world he wanted to save. “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

LOTR is not structured like a proper novel, important characters not developed, too repetitive, opening too slow, ending too short, great deal of talk, long stretches of no action, Council of Elrond is 15,000 words of a badly chaired committee meeting, including much talk from characters who haven’t been properly introduced to the reader.

The idea that Tolkien was not writing a novel is completely correct. But that is not because he was a poor writer. He was writing a fictional history in the form of historical narratives. An old tradition, much like the oral tradition of hero stories told by bards to use up the long winter nights in unending winter months. Not a novel indeed. But there you are. The badly chaired committee comment is especially silly. Ever read the wills in 18th and 19th century novels? Why are they there?

Now more from Fran Walsh (half of the adapting team for the book-to-film) and (I think it’s Shippey again?) on the oddity of the narrative structure of The Two Towers. As a narrative it’s two books, almost artificially made one.

This almost made me laugh. You know that it really was two book artificially made one by the publishers…right? Or to be completely correct it was six books meant to be considered one codex which was artificially divided into three books by the publisher.

But I got caught up in the Tolkien side of things.

Miéville is a fun writer. His Remade are fascinating. I really enjoyed Perdido St. Station and Scar. But I’m not sure he has broken very far from the fantasy structures he claims to dislike. His changes are more in setting than anything else. He uses eucatastrophe even more clearly than Tolkien.

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.11.05 at 9:37 pm

Miéville is a fun writer. His Remade are fascinating. I really enjoyed Perdido St. Station and Scar. But I’m not sure he has broken very far from the fantasy structures he claims to dislike. His changes are more in setting than anything else.

eric 01.11.05 at 10:07 pm

Just a quick note as I scan through this post at work. Shippey has a whole lot of interesting things to say about Tolkien’s mindset and about the members of the TCBS who were killed during the war (couple of them at Somme) in The Road to Middle-Earth .

In the same work, Shippey debunks a boatload of anti-Tolkien criticism with a detailed reading of the text.. see the sections on entrelacement and narrative structure.

None of this, of course, really excuses the fact that Tolkien wrote in a way that no self-respecting commercial author would try. Shippey just points out some of the underpinnings… LoTR is a bit more intricate than some realize.

That plus Shippey’s description of Tolkien’s mode of work (which is mentioned above), combined with his OCD tendencies (yes, I agree that Tolkien was a little crazy. How else can you explain the countless revisions… I keep thinking that it would be nice to see his papers at Bodleian library, and then think I would be horrified at the sheer bulk of them.) and we end up with LoTR in all its odd brilliance.

Anyway. Check out the book.

derek 01.12.05 at 12:19 am

fantastic names that would traffic in lots of apostrophes and dipthongs with potentially unpronounceable juxtapositions of consonants

Speaking of the last, it’s di-phthong, not dip-thong :-)

jholbo 01.12.05 at 1:30 am

Yes, of course I know, Sebastian (how could I not?) I admit that there is something clunky about saying ‘it’s almost artificial to regard Two Towers as a novel’ because it wasn’t even supposed to be one. So it’s not just almost but ACTUALLY artificial. (Fair enough.) And of course it’s SUPPOSED to be like a history, as you say. But that hardly automatically gets him off the hook of being a poor writer. The question is whether writing a novel with this sort of history-like structure is a good idea. Of course I love the novels – excuse me, the one codex – so I think it proved to be a good idea. But it was touch-and-go. Ending all those chapters by bonking hobbits on the head, while pretending to be writing epic history. Very questionable technique.

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.12.05 at 2:06 am

You are judging the technique from the point of view of the modern 20th century novel, which is not what Tolkien was writing or attempting to write. Most people would think that telling a story entirely through ‘reproducing’ letters–many repetitive–is a questionable technique, but Clarissa is still very good for what it is and what it was trying to be. You wouldn’t slam a musical for the fact that it has that silly convention of having people unrealisitically sing instead of talk.

LOTR is called a novel only because we don’t read the type of thing that it really is anymore and because it is kind of similar to a novel. The fact that it does not follow all of the conventions of a novel has more to do with the fact that we are mislabeling it than that Tolkien was a poor writer. It shares many forms which you can see in earlier English pre-novels including most specifically what you think is tedium in the Rivendell scene. Another ‘problem’ many people complain about is that he doesn’t get in the heads of the characters like we see in many modern novels. But that isn’t a complaint for a fictional history. They recount actions and words, they don’t pretend to be able to see into the characters’ heads. If you have a taste for the modern novel, you will think that Tolkien doesn’t write one very well. And you will be correct. But you are correct because it wasn’t written as a novel.

jholbo 01.12.05 at 2:38 am

No, Sebastian, I’m really NOT judging the novel from a provincially 20th Century perspective (well, no doubt I am; but no doubt you are too to some degree.) I’m trying to judge it from the perspective of whether it works from any perspective. I’m certainly not insisting it pander to my taste in 20th Century novels, merely that – whatever it does – it has to work. If I am staging a gritty naturalistic drama and I decide to have all the characters suddenly burst into song, it is no sufficient defense of this that ‘you wouldn’t complain if it were a musical’. Not every plan works, so it is simply not sufficient to say that he planned it this way.

And of course we aren’t arguing about much because I think it works, but it creaks at the joints. That is part of what makes it work in the end.

It seems to me you are on the verge of denying that LOTR is a novel, because it wasn’t written as one, and because that would cut the legs from under my critique quite handily. It seems to me that it’s a novel – or three, as you like it – even if it was written with certain other models in mind. I take it you aren’t going to argue that it is a pure return to earlier forms. It’s a hybrid, so the question is whether it’s a successful hybrid.

Nick 01.12.05 at 6:47 am

Speaking of the last, it’s di-phthong, not dip-thong :-)

Oops. Of course it is. Thanks for that. : )

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.12.05 at 7:13 am

Umm, ok. It is a tremendously successful hybrid of 19th century novel and historical fiction in the Norse oral tradition that you find annoying in some parts then. :)

I guess my problem is that the issues you have explicitly raised seem to me to be non-appreciation of the form rather than poor expression of the form. The Elrond council is absolutely demonstrative of that. The complaint about the repetitive nature seems to be a failure to understand the nature of the bardic tradition of storytelling. The complaint about the suspension of the narrative thread is similar. You complain about missing genre cues, but it follows the Roman military story and the style of stories which it later influenced quite noticeably. There is a riff on the Return of the King myth that should be familiar to practically anyone versed in English or German literature. There is chivalry in both its good and bad aspects. There is the monster story repeated in at least four instances. There are the interesting blends of Christian and pagan relgions. Which of your complaints about repetitiveness or ‘boring’ parts couldn’t be used to damn Clarissa or any of the major epistolary novels of the 1700s? Have you read Robinson Crusoe? Many of the boring parts are quite obviously in the vein of the travel narrative, which meshes easily with Tolkien’s view of his story as a real history of a fictional world. I presume are a fan of biographies?

I guess ultimately I feel that you are confusing what fantasy became with what Tolkien was doing. I won’t say that he did it perfectly, but the specifics of your complaints suggest a lack of resonance to your modern style more than anything else. And so your description of annoyances will be useful to those who aren’t interested in older forms. There isn’t anything wrong with a lack of interest in older forms. But that doesn’t make them bad or poorly crafted. A lot of people don’t like Kunst der Fugue but that doesn’t mean that Bach didn’t know how to craft counterpoint.

david g 01.12.05 at 11:04 am

“The Council of Elrond” was always one of my favorite chapters (38 years now since I first read it). But that’s probably because I’m (1) a historian, not a literary critic, (2) love invented history and (3) am therefore one of those people whom Tolkien himself said “found this sort of thing [invented history, invented languages] only too fatally attractive.” He was himself split between the urge to follow his own made-up words and legends into mythological and etymological labyrinths and his desire to tell a story people would want to read and which would (I quote again from memory, bard-style), “deeply move them”. For me and millions he succeeded.

As for the silly and typically late-twentieth-century immature argument that he glorified war, Shippey pointed out the truth about that. I recall that C. S. Lewis in his religious autobiography “Surprised by Joy” talks about what he felt and realized when he first got to the front in 1916. He said it suddenly came to him that “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about”. I loved that, not just because I also love Homer (all of which Lewis had read in Greek under a tough tutor in Belfast), but because Lewis meant that whatever the Great War was, it was also neither more nor less than “war”, and so, as Lewis and Tolkien would put it, a tragic feature and consequence of our fallen condition.

John is of course right that Tolkien is unique, I think for more reasons than he adduces, and that the imitators are almost all hopeless. They imitate the form without the religious and philological ballast that T. had. Of course they fail.

jholbo 01.12.05 at 11:19 am

I should mention that my crack about the ‘badly chaired committee meeting’ is in fact not my crack but someone else’s from the TT commentary. I don’t think it was Shippey or Walsh. I can’t remember who it was. But I thought it was funny. (In writing my post I probably should have made clearer the scope of my DVD commentary paraphrasis.)

Robert McDougall 01.12.05 at 9:32 pm

“Novelost” is a fine new word, now it just needs a suitable job to do.

Like David G I loved the “Council of Elrond” way back. The “badly chaired committee meeting” complaint I don’t understand. The chapter gets in lots of back story and side story just when the reader’s ready for it; it makes an effective transition from the “four little hobbits on an adventure” part of the book to the “mission of world-historical importance” part; the committee meeting machinery marshalls the flashbacks fluently without getting in the way, till in the end the committee does get down to work to some dramatic purpose. One might even admire the skill with which Tolkien shifts from using the council as a narrative device to making it a substantive part of the narrative. To critique the meeting’s chairmanship seems like faulting Pamela for her unduly copious correspondence. [I agree though that is a funny quote.]

jholbo 01.13.05 at 5:03 am

I’ll just make another response to Sebastian, who writes: “The complaint about the repetitive nature seems to be a failure to understand the nature of the bardic tradition of storytelling.” I am sure there are many things about the nature of the bardic tradition of storytelling I don’t know, but there are more than a few I do know. I really don’t think my problem is that I don’t see what Tolkien is imitating. I think I see it well enough. It may help matters if I mention that I’ve read the bloody thing a dozen times since I was twelve, I love the council scene. (Not that it honestly matters what I think, but if it helps people to understand what I have written to know that I love Tolkien – well, it’s true. I do.) I just think the way to analyze Tolkien’s achievement is to start by frankly cataloguing all the reasons why it would seem that these antique grafts shouldn’t, by all rights, take.

It does occur to me that one thing that may be setting Sebastian off is my ‘outsider artist’ point. Outsider art would seem to be proverbially untutored and naive – a kind of primitivism. It may seem that I am conflating appreciative antiquarianism and scholarship, the careful and preservation-minded rescusitation of old forms, with primitivism. I agree there is a bit of a problem here. But there is still something self-taught and naive and private and mildly obsessive-compulsive about Tolkien. This is, quite frankly, the root of the authenticity of his literary voice, just as the scholarship is the source of its intelligence. What I am indicating by ‘outsider artist’ is that rather indefinite personal stamp that preserves LOTR from being an unfortunate exercise in twee pedantry.

So you find Tolkien’s strengths by taking a poke at the things that should, by rights, be his weaknesses.

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.13.05 at 4:44 pm

“It may seem that I am conflating appreciative antiquarianism and scholarship, the careful and preservation-minded rescusitation of old forms, with primitivism. I agree there is a bit of a problem here. But there is still something self-taught and naive and private and mildly obsessive-compulsive about Tolkien.”

Now I’ll definitely give you the obsessive-compulsive part. :)

People pretty much don’t do fugues anymore. Personally I would love to hear some new ones even if that made the artist antiquarian.

I think I understand what you are saying, and I think it is correct in some parts–but not correct as a more general critique of the work as a whole.

Hmm, is this thread proof that if you want to talk about anything else you shouldn’t bring up Tolkien? It is like trying to have a passing reference to Michael Moore–impossible.

Donald Johnson 01.13.05 at 7:27 pm

You should do more threads on Tolkien, just to give me the experience of agreeing with Sebastian more often. Well, I guess this wasn’t about Tolkien, but as he said, there are some names that automatically hijack threads when they are mentioned.

Glenn Bridgman 01.14.05 at 1:51 am

I suppose I should preface my comment by noting that I am one of those odious folk known as libertarians, so my capacity for trafficking in the language of socialist allusion is somewhat limited. Nonetheless, I’ll try to comment without making a total idiot out of myself.

I took PSS out of the library when the first of these posts was published and absolutely devoured it–it was an amazing book. These are my initial, unfermented thoughts:

Mr. Mieville, it seems to me that in your attempt to escape the limitations of genre, you manage to trap yourself just as thoroughly as if you were writing genre-fiction. At the risk of being too self-referential, are you not simply writing for the “gritty genre-rejection” genre? By self-consciously rejecting simple classification, you introduce the same comfortable familiarities as, say, traditional sci-fi—the reader learns to expect the unexpected. Wouldn’t it be better to just write and if you fall into the trappings of genre honestly, so be it?

The strangest part of the novel for me was that you were constantly poised on the edge of making a truly socialist point, but you manage to never quite fall from that tension into political hackery. To my shame, I have to admit that my “crazy socialist” alarm was running for portions of your book, but again, you never actually sparked that reflexive rejection. Despite the presence of many conferrable tropes of the socialist worldview—the bourgeoisie overclass quite literally dealing with the devil was a stroke of genius—the presence of small-scale capitalism seemed to reject a stodgy socialist orthodoxy. Isaac’s offer to buy winged things is met with such success that one could be fooled into thinking you were writing a Hayekian wetdream.

Lastly, I think you miss the point with regards to Lin. By having the slake-moth devour her mind, you are, in a way, forcing her back up onto Holden’s cliff. Rather than rejecting the beautiful, Tragic with a capital T, simplicity of Ophelia, you give that to Lin in perpetuity. At least with the consumptive beauties, there is a respectful transience about them—they will decay and pass from this world. Lin is forced to endure it forever. Is that not infinitely more disrespectful?

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China Mieville Books In Order

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China Mieville is one of the well known British authors who likes to write novels based on the fantasy, new weird, Steampunk, and weird fiction genres. He is also popular as a comic writer, novelist, and academic. Author China was born on September 6, 1972, in Norwich, England, The United Kingdom, and is working as a professional writer since the year 1998. He often portrays his work as weird fiction, inspired from the early twentieth century horror and pulp writers like H.P. Lovecraft. Also, he considers himself to be a member of the loose group of authors called as New Weird. Apart from writing exciting fantasy novels, author China keeps himself busy with the left wing politics in The United Kingdom. He was previously active as a member in the International Socialist organization in The United States, as well as the International Socialist Network for a short time. In the year 2013, author China went on to lay the foundation of the Left Unity along with several other members, after working as a member in some other political organizations. During the United Kingdom General Election of 2001, he stood for the Socialist Alliance. Later, he went on to publish his PhD thesis based on international law and Marxism in the form of a book. During the time between 2012 and 2013, author China was invited as the writer in residence at the Roosevelt University, located in Chicago.

Even though author China was born in Norwich, he spent most of his growing years in Willesden, located in northwest London. Since his childhood days, he has lived in this city along with his mother Claudia and sister Jemima. Claudia works as a writer, teacher, and translator. The reason behind the fact that author China remained throughout his life with his mother is that his parents got separated right after his birth. Because of this, he has said in his interviews that he does not actually know his father. His mother used the first name China after searching in the dictionary for a beautiful name. As of today, author China holds a dual citizenship of England and America, because of his mother’s birth in the New York City. China Mieville did 2 years of his schooling from the Oakham School, which is a co-ed independent school located in Oakham, Rutland. When he was of 18 years old in the year 1990, he used to teach English in Egypt. He worked there for a period of 1 year and during the same time, developed an interest towards the Arab culture and the politics of the Middle East. Later on, author China completed his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Clare College, Cambridge, in social anthropology in the year 1994. After that, he also gained his master’s degree as well as a PhD from the London School of Economics in the year 2001, in the subject of international relations. He even held a fellowship of Frank Knox at the Harvard University. Author China tried to study the theories of the post-modern history and politics, but was largely dissatisfied. Therefore, he went on to become a Marxist at the university. Consequently, he wrote and published a book version of his own PhD thesis, which was published in The United Kingdom in the year 2005 and then in the United States in the year 2006.

One of the most successful novel series written by author China Mieville is titled as ‘New Crobuzon’. This series is also known as the Bag-Lag series and consists of 3 books in total. Author China has described a fictional city-state named New Crobuzon, which is described as being located in the fictional world called Bag-Lag. Both the fictional city and country feature in the first and third novels of the New Crobuzon series and serve as the background and a plot device for the second novel of the series. The series is known by different named in different countries and was very much successful all over the world. The debut novel of the series is entitled ‘Perdido Street Station’. This book was published by the Ballantine Del Rey publishers in the year 2000. The main plot of this book is set around the primary characters named Issac Dan der Grimnebulin, Derkhan Blueday, Construct Council, Lemuel Pigeon, Yagharek, Bentham Rudgutter, Mr. Motley, and Lin. Author China has set the plot in a fictional city named New Crobuzon, located in the fictional world called as Bag-Lag. The book begins with the description of the city of New Crobuzon as lying beneath the bleached ribs of one of the ancient and deadly beasts. The city appears to be quite popular for its unsavory deal. Issac Grimnebulin is introduced as an eccentric and gifted scientist who keeps himself busy with his unique research work. Soon, he begins to face difficulties in his quiet life when a half-human, half-bird creature named Garuda comes to take him afar. Garuda makes a scientifically daunting request to Isaac, but he seems to be sparked by the curiosity of uncanny reverence of Garuda. In the end, the occurrence of an eerie metamorphosis takes place which permeates the city of New Crobuzon.

The first novel of the New Crobuzon series was followed by one of the other initial novels titled as ‘Iron Council’. This novel was published by the Del Rey publishers and is also set in the fictional country of Bag-Lag. This book appears to have a fantastic and fresh band of characters who form an important part of the plot set around several decades later in the city of New Crobuzn, than the first novel. At the beginning of the novel, it is depicted that conflict, wars, intrigue, and revolutions in taking place in New Crobuzon. These things are causing the destruction of the city, pushing it to the brink. The continuous rioting on the streets and the war with the neighboring city of Tesh is also affecting New Crobuzon a lot. After a mysterious figure begins a strange rebellion, the city gets filled with violence and treachery. Looking desperately for a solution and hope, a small renegade group escape from the city and cross the alien and strange continents. In the meantime, the dangerous hours begin in the city of New Crobuzon and rumors begin to spread that the time has come to the iron council. This book proved to be a lyrical and voluminous novel, which helped author China to become a more successful novelist and prolong his writing career.

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Artistic Revolution: On China Miéville’s ‘The Last Days of New Paris’

China Miéville has been publishing speculative fiction for close to two decades, beginning with King Rat in 1998.  In the course of this career he has become known as the foremost exponent of the New Weird, rivaled only by Jeff VanderMeer .  VanderMeer and his wife, Ann VanderMeer , brought the existence of the fledgling subgenre to the attention of a wider reading public with The New Weird , the anthology they edited in 2008.  In his introduction, VanderMeer maintains that the (Old) Weird, which is epitomized by H.P. Lovecraft and includes the likes of Arthur Machen , Algernon Blackwood , and William Hope Hodgson , is characterized by the combination of supernatural unease with visionary sensibility.  By contrast, the New Weird characteristically involves the triple combination of complex urban settings, surreal or transgressive horror, and covert or overt political awareness.  Miéville has prioritized the last of these in his critical work, describing the New Weird as a form of resistance against neoliberal globalization and rejecting the more inclusive definitions of the term.  This concern with the political in general and the relationship between art and politics in particular is conspicuous in The Last Days of New Paris , where it receives a singularly subtle treatment.

New Paris is Paris after the S-Blast, which occurred in 1941.  In Miéville’s alternative Europe, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) — the German drive to the Channel in May 1940 — was sufficient to cause the collapse of France, making Fall Rot (Case Red, the push west and south the following month) unnecessary.  The S-Blast transformed Paris from a city of occupation to a city of resistance, with various French factions rising up against the Germans and the “battalions from below” rising up to join the chaos.  The resistance includes the Free French, led by Charles de Gaulle and backed by the United States, and the Main à plume , the surrealist irregulars, some of whom — like Thibaut — have been able to harness the power released by the detonation.  The most significant effect of the S-Blast was not the release of hell’s minions (who show only a passing interest in the city), but to create the living manifestations of surrealist artworks, “manifs,” that roam the streets either on their own or under the less than perfect command of surrealist or SS handlers.  By 1950 the Germans have sealed the city, which has become a “free-fire zone and hunting grounds for the impossible” and are attempting to destroy the resisters by all available means, including the control of manifs and devils and the creation of manifs of their own, using the work of National Socialist artists like Arno Breker .  The S-Blast has of course given literal meaning to metaphors such as art coming to life, having a life of its own, and being a form of life.  Similarly, this is art that wields power physically as well as through the imagination and emotions.

Miéville is too sophisticated a writer to promote a conception of art as essentially opposed to oppression and his mention of Breker and the second part of the climax (which I shall not reveal) shows that he is well aware of the variety of ends art can serve.  While Breton’s surrealism provided a Marxist opposition to European fascism and American Fordism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurism provided active and enthusiastic support for Benito Mussolini , and the fascist sympathies of many prominent modernists are well documented.  Miéville is concerned with surrealism in particular over and above art more generally because movements like surrealism (and the New Weird in his own definition) resist nationalism and neoliberalism in virtue of being politico-artistic movements in the first instance.  Surrealism is not an artistic movement in the service of Marxism, but a Marxist artistic movement.  As such, The Last Days of New Paris calls for a revolt in art rather than a revolt in politics, for integrating politics into art rather than employing art as a means to political ends.  The link from New Paris to the contemporary world comes in the perfectly-pitched anti-climax with which the narrative concludes, as Thibaut takes it upon himself to write his own book, to start “from scratch, redo history, make it mine.”  In Thibaut’s return to the fray to write his revolution, Miéville urges readers to artistic revolt, to the reconception of art as essentially rather than circumstantially political and the New Weird as essentially rather than instrumentally resistant to nationalism and neoliberalism.

Rafe McGregor is the author of The Value of Literature , The Architect of Murder , six collections of short fiction, and one hundred and fifty magazine articles, journal papers, and review essays. He lectures at the University of York and can be found online at @rafemcgregor .

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Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville/China Miéville: Critical Essays

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Freedman, Carl. Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville. Canterbury, UK: Gylphi, 2015. 183 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-78024-030-5. $29.99.

Edwards, Caroline and Tony Venezia, eds. China Miéville: Critical Essays. Canterbury, UK: Gylphi, 2015. 296 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-1-78024-0275. $29.99.

Two recent books attest to China Miéville's popularity with critics and scholarly presses. As will be the case when any writer becomes the focus of so much attention, especially in the case of a living writer whose body of work continues to grow and evolve, the discourse on Miéville has moved past a neutral accounting of the tropes and conventions which define his work and on to the staking out of critical territory and the development of arguments about the proper methodology for understanding his position within contemporary literature and culture. Carl Freedman's monograph, Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville, and Caroline Edwards and Tony Venzia's edited volume, China Miéville: Critical Essays, both make important contributions to our understanding of a writer not only interesting in his own right but also in connection to the popular and critical rehabilitation of weird fiction. Freedman devotes chapters to each of Miéville's adult novels published prior to 2016, in order of publication (with the notable exception of Kraken [2010]), as well as a chapter to Miéville's dissertation on international law and writings on genre. Doing so allows Freedman to make a case for reading Miéville as a didactic writer committed to Marxist dialectics and revolutionary thought. Thus, Freedman extends his own important work on these subjects, first elaborated in Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000). Edwards and Venzia's edited collection, which includes a preface from Miéville himself, stands in implicit opposition to Freedman's focused Marxist approach and agenda insofar as it offers a wider range of critical methodologies and interactions with Miéville's body of work (although it is hardly comprehensive in this second respect, largely eschewing discussion, for example, of King Rat [1998], The Scar [2002], or the short fiction collected in Looking for Jake [2005]). Many of the essays collected therein develop their positions in specifically theoretical lenses, through the work of such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Other, less theoretically inclined essays situate...

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London's Overthrow Paperback – August 1, 2012

• Print length 96 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Telegram Books
• Publication date August 1, 2012
• Dimensions 4.33 x 0.59 x 6.97 inches
• ISBN-10 1908906146
• ISBN-13 978-1908906144
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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Telegram Books (August 1, 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1908906146
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1908906144
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.33 x 0.59 x 6.97 inches
• #13,049 in Essays (Books)

About the author

China miéville.

China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award (Perdido Street Station, Iron Council and The City & The City) and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice (Perdido Street Station and The Scar). The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published in 2009 to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell (The Times) and Philip K. Dick (Guardian).

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