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michaelcattigan's reviews
469 reviews
It is the story of Mary. That Mary. Mother of Jesus, Bearer of God, Theotokos, the Madonna.
Of all figures to try to give a voice to, Mary must rank as one of the most challenging. Do you present her as an innocent and unknowing vessel of God? An active member of the church of her son? A saintly and divine figure? Otherworldly? A political activist? A mother?
How do you reconcile the myriad beliefs, doctrines and images of her? How do you give a voice to the voiceless perpetual virgin? Tóibín has done almost the direct opposite of Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall: Thomas Cromwell was a shadowy figure about whom little was and is known; Mary is and has been for centuries on the limelight.
And how do you avoid your reader having that Monty Python Life of Brian quotation in the back of their head? You know the one.
“He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!”
The story that Tóibín creates focuses on Mary at the end of her life, almost in hiding. Men come to visit her for her story – presumably apostles – and she distrusts them too much to tell her story. Instead she tells it in monologue to us so that the truth be told at least once.
As a monologue, the story succeeds or fails on the strength of her voice and it is a convincing and human voice. For me, personally, it didn’t quite hit the mark, however.
Tóibín’s prose is beautiful and rhythmic but I felt perhaps a little bit overly so. I didn’t feel the rawness of the pain that I imagined Mary would feel to recall how her son was taken from her. I didn’t feel her worry, her fear, her horror.
Tóibín created distance between the narrative and the events narrated, and it is clearly a recollection than a re-living – it’s not, after all, as if anyone needs a spoiler alert for it – which perhaps accounts for the reduced rawness. But it left me wanting something… more.
The best parts to the novel? I’d say Lazarus. Really interesting and reminiscent of the Duffy poem Mrs Lazarus. It seemed that Lazarus didn’t really benefit by being returned from the dead: he was sickly and weak and distant, shunned by society. The impression given of Christ by this act was ambiguous: part arrogance, partially suspected confidence trick, partly to assuage his own guilt at not healing him earlier.
I also liked her protectiveness over Joseph’s chair.
It is such a difficult task Tóibín set himself. Mary does have a cynicism which almost leads to her trying to debunk or at least question her son’s miracles, but at the same time, she recognises the power in him. So immensely difficult!
I have to say I don’t feel he succeeded fully but it is still a very thoughtful and poetic and beautifully poignant book.
5.0
I am a huge Patrick Ness fan!
Let me put that out there at the start of this.
I hugely admired his Chaos Walking Trilogy but was utterly blown away by the visceral emotion and mythic scope of A Monster Calls. There are few books that dig inside you as much as that one.
This book is different again: much closer to the feel of Chaos Walking although without the epic scope and scale - and no less powerful for that.
At one level, the book is a rip-roaring adventure: Seth, our protagonist, dies in the prologue. On page 11. Dies with 469 pages left to fill. Those pages recount what Seth does after his death. Maybe.
Having died in a frigid ocean, in winter, in America he is somewhat surprised to have found himself on the path of his parents' old house in an abandoned and apparently post-apocalyptic English town in Summer. Alone. Perhaps.
Echoes of I Am Legend, Robinson Crusoe and George Romero's films - minus the zombies - abound as Seth navigates this empty town, discovers and loots from camping stores and supermarkets. There's even a discovery of a foot print to make the link to Robinson Crusoe stronger.
Seth discovers - or is discovered by - two other survivors in the town: the defensive and resilient Regine and the delightfully tenderly vulnerable Tomasz. And with them, the book acquires other echoes: a sinister black-clad visored Driver pursues them as if stepping out of a Terminator movie; the world has - or may have - integrated - or been forced to integrate - itself into a digital alternative reality programme in the style of The Matrix.
There are sufficient run-ins with, escapes and rescues from and fights with the Driver that this book could be read purely at that adventure story level.
It does follow the tropes, patterns and cliches of the science fiction / action adventure movie genre.
And behind the adventure that awaits Seth in the world he wakes up in is a beautifully tender and painful tale of growing up. Seth is one of the very few gay characters I can bring to mind in Young Adult fiction. His secret relationship with Gudmund is described in beautifully tender prose. The taking of the photograph, which eventually exposes their relationship, is real and touching and deeply moving. As is the pain of separation between them.
And beneath this coming-of-age narrative is the deeply traumatic tale of Owen, Seth's younger brother, who was - perhaps - abducted from their home when Seth was eight.
It's a book of books, of stories, of narratives. Characters' pasts are revealed in dreams and flashbacks; characters reveal parts of their own stories to each other. The sharing and offering of their own stories rendering them vulnerable and binding the trio together.
Towards the beginning of the book in a flashback, Seth and his friends Gudmund, Monica and H are discussing the cheerleaders and Gudmund considers having sex with one for a bet to which Seth replies
"What," Seth said, "and then secretly find out that she's got a heart of gold and actually fall in love with her and then she dumps you when she finds out about the bet but you prove yourself to her by standing outside her house in the rain playing her your special song and on prom night you share a dance that reminds not just the school but the entire wounded world what love really means?"
He stopped because they were all looking at him.
"Damn Seth," Monica said admiringly. "'The entire wounded world.' I'm putting that in my next paper for Edson."
Seth crossed his arms. "I'm just saying a bet over Gudmund having sex with Chiara Leithauser sounds like some piece of shit teenage movie none of us would watch in a million years."
And that's the point. Seth knows how cliched some of the events are. He avoids living in the cliches of these narratives. The existence of convenient cliches cause him to come close to dismissing the reality of the world because it follows narrative tropes. He recognises that last-moment rescues would be expected if he were living through a story. He expects apparently dead antagonists to return for one last assault.
And he questions that. And we question it.
Is the world real? Are his memories and dreams real? Are Regine and Thomasz real? Are they echoes of Viola and Manchee from Chaos Walking? Are Owen, Gudmund, H or Monica real? Is the love between Seth and Gudmund real?
And does it matter?
This is one of the most thoughtful and - dare I use a deeply unfashionable word? - philosophical novels I have read for a long time. And the philosophy within it never becomes pure exposition. It is always embedded in character - and often undermined by either Regine's pragmatism or Tomasz' affection. As Regine tells Seth:
"I think I'm the only real thing I've got... wherever I am, whatever this world is, I've just got to be sure I'm me and that's what's real." She blows out a cloud of smoke. "Know yourself and go in swinging. If it hurts when you hit it, it might be real too."
In addition to the characters and relationships, the flashbacks and the power of stories, what (else) I love about this book - and I imagine others will be put off for exactly this as well - is that, in the end, on the final page, Seth and we are no clearer to knowing where this world is, how real Seth's experiences are or what is going on. At all. Ness saw no obligation to explain, tie things up or concretise anything.
The entire book is unsettling. Disrupts our sense of reality. Deliciously tilts our world. And it achieves it through simply written, elegant prose.
Remarkable.
3.0
This is a Carnegie 2012 shortlisted tale and very much aimed at the lower end of the age bracket: the main character Stuart is 10 years old and that gives a strong clue as to it's intended audience. Some older readers may find it a little light. Personally, I started reading it at four o'clock and had finished it by nine o'clock, having made tea in the middle!
Stuart is made to move homes at the start of the summer holidays because his mother has a new job. Aside from mild annoyance, don't expect family angst or emotional trauma from that fact! He moves to his father's home town of Beeton: quiet, Midlands and rather dull. There he discovers that his Great Uncle was a stage magician (why wouldn't his dad have said before?!) and had given his father a money box years before. Opening the money box, Stuart discovers a horde of old three penny pieces which then inadvertently lead him onto a trail of clues to discover his long lost secret magic workshop. There are friends made along the way; enemies thwarted; clues deciphered; perhaps even true magic discovered.
Small Change ... was, I felt, a good read. Younger readers will enjoy it and I am sure there will be a number of people for whom this is the book that turned them on to reading.
A good book however demands that the reader give it time; a good book has me reaching for a pen to highlight and annotate. The margins of Small Change ... are - in my copy at least - as clean as the day it left the print run!
5.0
Books appeal to me in a variety of different ways.
Some are intellectually challenging; some have intricate or gripping plots; some tug on the heart strings; some create whole worlds inside me; some create characters who live on inside my mind and imagination.
And some sing to me. They breathe under my fingers. They live.
And this was one book that did exactly that.
What is this book about?
A young woman, Ruth Swain, little more than a girl, is ill in bed. Surrounded by several thousand of her father's books in which she hopes to find him, most of which are names, referenced and catalogued throughout the novel.
That's pretty much it really in terms of plot! Oh, and she goes to hospital a couple of times. And it rains.
But, as she's in bed, she narrates the tale of four generations of her family, interweaving this historical saga with her own personal story: yes, the image of the river is a massively significant one in the novel and, as Ruth herself says, her story meanders and potters delving from deep pasts to presents and back again. Compared to Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, which, of course, won last year's Man Booker, with its very strict structure to the point of near rigidity, this is a breath of fresh air. The fluidity of the narrative(s) creates a beautiful dance between past and present and it is one of the few books I have read where you really do feel that time is not linear but the events of the past are just as much in the present - in our memories, feelings, in the way it shapes us - as the things occurring before our eyes are.
There is so much to commend this book that it is hard to know where to start.
Firstly, it is hilarious! The novel abounds with literary allusions both explicit and implicit some of which I got and many of which I am sure flew over my head. Characters in the novel are repeatedly compared to characters in other novels. Beyond that, however, there are moments of pure comedy: the kidnapping of baby Jesus from the school nativity was genuinely laugh-out-loud; the fractious and competitive marriage of Abraham and Margaret which consisted of "silent skirmishes... moving a chair back where he wanted it, leaving open a newspaper he knew she wanted folded away, opening windows she closed" . As Ruth tells us
But in those days once you were wedded you were in Holy Deadlock, and in Ireland the priests had decided that once a man entered a woman there was No Way Out. The vagina was this deadly mysterious wrestler that could get you in a headlock, well, metaphorically speaking, and then boys, you were rightly stuck.
That Will teach You was Number One sermon at the time.
It is a gloriously and joyfully silly, surreal, self-aware, punning social commentary that sums up their marriage, gender relations and a whole range of sociological and religious dogmas. Part of my mind rebels and wants to complain that this generalises and overstates the concerns and is probably not historically accurate. I don't know enough about Ireland and Catholicism to say. But it is joyous!
Poor Mrs P had the dubious benefit of hearing my reading certain extracts - baby Jesus being one - to her and seemed to find them funny even without the full context.
Alongside the comedy, however, there is incredible tragedy. I'll avoid giving away spoilers but the Swains set themselves up as a family to whom misfortune, failure and tragedy are familiar. Williams often undermines the failures with comedy. The family has declared itself to suffer from the Philosophy of Impossible Standard bequeathed by Ruth's great-grandfather The Reverend Absalom Swain and enshrined in the names of her grandfather, Abraham, and father, Virgil.
For example, Virgil Swain, father to our narrator, falls into farming through his marriage and lack of other option and planted potatoes contrary to the local advice and didn't spray them against blight. The crop failed and Ruth Swain tells us that the following year
... he tried potatoes again.
This time he sprayed.
This time there was no blight.
This time the river worms destroyed them.
Williams continues however with a second account of the same failure from Mary, Ruth's mother:
Those potatoes were all right, Mam said, when she told it. Aeney and I were maybe ten. All of us were at the table. A large bowl of floury potatoes had summoned the story.
"The way I remember it, those potatoes were all right," she said. She looked closely at one she held upright on her fork. "If you cut around the worms."
I screamed and Aeney ughed and Mam laughed and Dad smiled looking at her and letting the story heal....
Somehow the worm-ruined potatoes had become this happiness, somehow the years-ago-hurt had transformed, and I think maybe I had a first sense then of the power of story, and realised that time had done what Time sometimes does to hardship, turn it to fairy tale.
There was, however, a heartaching inevitability to the central core tragedy which unfolds in the novel: most readers will be able to see it coming from a distance but I won't make it explicit. For two nights this week, when I was towards the end of this book, I set it aside because I knew what would have to be described in the final 50 pages and I needed to steel myself for it and screw my courage to the sticking point. That doesn't happen with many books!
Gender is interesting here too. Sorry, this is just a little digression but Niall Williams has chosen as a man to write in the voice of a female character, despite the fact that she had a male twin whose voice he could have used. The first half of the novel felt very masculine: Absalom and Abraham Swain held sway both in their households and in the narrative. Virgil himself is an almost silent character: he is seen through his actions and the prism of other people. Once his narrative commences, female characters start to come to the fore: Nan, Mary, Ruth herself, even Mrs Quinty. Just an observation.
This is a book that - as stated before - is steeped in literature. It is also written in a particularly beautiful and lyrical way, wonderfully balancing the natural realism of Ruth's narrative voice with the lyricism of poetry. The world around Ruth lives and breathes and moves exquisitely
The River Shannon passes below our house on its journey to the sea.
Come here Ruthie, feel the pulse of the water, my father said, kneeling on the bank and dipping his hand, palm to current, then reaching out to take my hand in his. He put our arm into the cold river and at once it was pulled seaward like an oar. I was seven years old. I had a blue dress for summertime.
Here, Ruthie, feel.
His sleeve darkened and he rowed our arm back and let us be taken again, a little eddy of low sounds gargling as the throat of the river laughed realising what a peculiar thing was a father and his daughter.
How beautiful is that?!
The tenderness of the relationship between father and daughter. Look, look at the use of the phrase "our arm" as if the two people were one. Feel the immense imaginative symbolic and mythic power of the river water tugging "seaward": a metaphor for life, for story telling? Hear the onomatopoeia; see the personification. That river is as much a character as either of the human beings reaching into it, isn't it?
And that quote is from just the second page of over 300.
The book's ending is also exquisitely balanced - and the pinnacle of the lyricism of the novel. The final pages are some of the most gorgeous writing that you are likely to find. It is, i think, impossible to give spoilers because there is no ending to spoil: Ruth is in hospital for some form of investigation and is aware that she may not be strong enough to recover - details of Ruth's illness are left deliberately blank throughout and she explicitly tells us she does not want her story to be weighed down with science instead relying on euphemisms like having Something Amiss, Something Puzzling, being Fine except for Falling Down - and she is "taken down" as the novel closes.
Niall Williams has very consciously - I think - not given any suggestion whether she is ever brought back up again. How much self control must that have taken!
But how much better is that act of silence than either a Disney Happy Ending or a clumsy attempt - presumably by another narrative voice - to explain how she died. The reader, instead, is left waiting for news.
If you read, you will love this book. If you write, you will love this book. If you believe that we as people are as much a creation of imagination as we are of genetics, you will love this book. If you believe that stories matter, you will love this book.
So, go forth and read this book!
Stop wasting time reading reviews of it: go out and but it, download it, borrow it.
And love it.
5.0
This one is absolutely in that category. One of those books that I struggle to find an adjective to describe the experience of reading it. Astonishing. Scintillating. Experimental. Complex. Extraordinarily sensuous.
I can understand why many people might not like it. It is written in a non-linear way - using one of its own symbols, that of a shuffled pack of cards. It plays with and explores the whole nature of truth, deception, self-deception and the playing of and creation of roles. Focussing primarily on teenage girls, their self-creation is at the heart of the novel.
The dialogue is, at times, realistic and utterly convincing; at other times, it is deliberately unrealistic and crafted. As an example, this is the Saxophone Teacher's monologue to a prospective parent:
I require of all my students that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardour and uncertainty and gloom ... If I am to teach your daughter, you darling hopeless and inadequate mother, she must be moody and bewildered and awkward and dissatisfied and wrong.With that ringing in my ears, as a teacher, I realise that I've been doing Parents' Evenings all wrong!
This language is beautiful! Unnatural, poetic and calling attention to itself. But beautiful.
Rather like The Luminaries, the focus Catton has on playing with narrative structures and registers of language could have come across as somewhat self-congratulatory and, let's face it, pretentious. But it doesn't come across in that way for me. It is witty, unsettling and refreshing. It is one of those books that I felt giddy reading.
The plot revolves around two creative processes: the saxophone lessons offered by the unnamed Saxophone Teacher to three female students in preparation for a recital; and the local Drama Academy First Year drama performance. What links these two strands together is the revelation and response to a sexual relationship between a male teacher, Mr Saladin, at the local school and one of his female pupils, Victoria. The Saxophone Teacher teaches Isolde, Victoria's sister - and how telling is it that the first we hear of the relationship is as an excuse for not having practised and Isolde's obviously rehearsed recitation of it - and the students of the Drama Academy appropriate the story - or a version of it - as the focus of their drama.
Now that relationship in itself is a deeply difficult topic! It would have been easy to be preachy and demonise the teacher - Mr Saladin - as the Daily Mail article attached here does; but it is equally dangerous and offensive not to acknowledge the vulnerability of the children in those relationships.
Catton's response is to leave that relationship in the background and only to discuss it through the prism of another person's point of view: the girl's parents and sister, her friends, the school's counselling sessions, newspaper reports. By the end of the book, I'm no clearer as to that relationship: was he predatory, did she have a naive crush taken too far, was she a Lolita or was it just a stupid chaotic complicated human mess? We as the reader are excluded from that taboo relationship as completely as Victoria's friends and family are. And as a result, we indulge in and share and are therefore complicit with the same rumour-mongering and gossip that the characters do.
It is also not the source of the novel's sensuality: that comes through the writing and the relationships that surround the Saxophone Teacher and her pupils, especially Isolde and Julia. The language often lingers on tiny erotic details: the soft notched hollow of a collarbone, the down on her cheeks, glowing soft pink in the slanting light, the feathered lobe of an ear, a hand that snakes down the saxophone and trails around the edge of the bell. This sort of language pervades the book and, taken in isolation, looks perhaps a little too obvious, a little over-Freudian but within the context of the language of the book works brilliantly.
We are seduced by the beauty and poetry of the Saxophone Teacher's language through this book. Her playfulness and sensuality and pleasure in her art and the artifices of others was deeply attractive. She, however, has her own agenda as well and, as she guides and moulds her students she becomes far more sinister than Mr Saladin did, reliving and voyeuristically or vicariously using the girls she taught to recreate her own relationships from the past. Her sensuality and language tempts and moulds us as readers and we simultaneously complicit in wanting her students to get together and are horrified by her machinations and sympathetic to her own needs and pain which she has suffered.
She is an extraordinary character.
Even more remarkably, Catton was a mere 22 years old when she wrote this as a debut novel. The heady, sensual self-discovery she describes had an authenticity that an older writer may not have achieved; but, to exhibit the control and self-awareness and sheer confidence we see here, in an author of that age, is exceptional.
4.0
As you'd expect from Waters, The Paying Guests inhabits a very specific historical moment. In this case, she takes is to the social upheaval of the 1920s and the interbellum years. The aftermath of The Great War looms over the novel: a generation of men have been lost; soldiers returning have found themselves unemployed and unsupported; the division between the gentry and clerk classes are dissolving. Again, as you'd expect of Waters, the historical details are utterly convincing; her language never jars you from that period; her dialogue feels completely authentic. The voices of her characters and the way that their language is almost insufficient to reflect the depth of the emotions, passions and pain her characters feel is wonderfully evocative. It somehow recalls my grandmother.
Waters locates the writing in a traditional grand house in Champion Hill, London - a house used to a team of servants and a family of five before the war, but which now houses only our main character, Frances Wray, and her mother. Saddled with debts, the Wrays take in a married couple - Ken and Lillian Barber - as lodgers in order to maintain the cost of the house upkeep. The novel opens with the Barbers arrival and the tension created by that arrival: the hesitation over whether to offer or even drink tea with the Barbers on their arrival; the awkward maneuverings and negotiations between two families finding a space between cool civility, pragmatic commerce, resentment and an uncomfortable enforced intimacy.
It comes as no surprise to those who have read Waters before that the awkward intimacy between Francis Wray and Lillian Barber becomes something more romantic and passionate.
And Waters is just as fabulous writing about emotions as she is in capturing a voice. Just read the following extract:
It is one of the most beautiful and natural analogies of the quickening of love that I have read. Domestic. Sensuous. Gorgeous. And the contrast between the narrator's lyricism and the characters' almost inarticulate and gauche attempts to communicate those feelings was exquisitely painful. Locating the story firmly within the Champion Hill house also worked wonderfully. It became claustrophobic and enclosing... reflecting the limitations and restrictions imposed on the characters by society and morality and family. The house almost became a character in its own right and a reflection of Francis' own psychological state.
It is the second half of the novel, however, that lost me a little. The novel shifts from the drama of Francis and Lillian' love to a more plot driven crime thriller. The turning point is quite horrific to read but something gets lost.
I stopped liking either of the two characters.
Their inability to communicate, which in the first part of the novel, was endearing and overcome through their contact, became frankly irritating. Their lack of agency</em, of control, became tedious. I'm sure that it was a realistic portrait of the lack of agency women had in the 1920s and the way the patriarchal machinery of society robbed women of exactly that self determinism.
However, as a novel, it alienated me.
I didn't find their actions and reactions credible in the second half of the novel... even though I know that Waters is a writer for whom credibility and authenticity are paramount.
It is odd though that this is the second lesbian novel I've read in a row, following on from Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal . The comparison is interesting: where Catton's novel is arch and self-aware and overtly literary, Waters is real and - I keep coming back to this word - authentic. Thinking about the two books together, and being fully aware of the subjectivity of this, it crystallises what it is in books that really grips me: it is the artfulness, the language games, the twisting of not just the plot but the very relationship I have - as reader - with the writer and his or her creations.
5.0
I discovered him through Perdido Street Station and adored the sprawling city of New Crobuzon: mercantile, rapacious, brutal but utterly compelling. It is a city populated by renegade scientists, scarab-headed khepri, eagle faced garuda, the amphibian vodyanoi, the cactacae and brutally Remade criminals. And badgers. This entire melting pot of a city - which reminds me of the bastard child of Ankh-Morpork and William Blake's London - is in the shadow of the towering ossified ribs of some unfathomable creature.
Since I read Perdido Street Station, I have delved into Miéville's more real-world novels, The Kraken, The City and The City as well as the sublimely gorgeous (allegedly) Young Adult Railsea. I had however skipped the other two books in Miéville's Bas-Lag Trilogy: The Scar and Iron Council.
The Scar is a sequel to Perdido Street Station only tangentially: the events take place in the same world and follow on chronologically but we have a completely different set of characters and setting. And races.
Save for a few interludes, we follow the novel through the eyes of Bellis Coldwine, a somewhat acerbic, chain smoking cynic, fleeing New Crobuzon for its distant colony Nova Esperia. That journey is interrupted, however, when Bellis and her fellow passengers and entire ship are taken by pirates and subsumed into the floating city of Armada.
Armada is a fabulous creation, nearly as puissant (a word you'll be familiar with if you've read the book) in the imagination as New Crobuzon. A floating city. Composed of thousands of hijacked ships from a hundred cultures over hundreds of years. Lashed together. Re-configured. Broken apart and re-fitted. And despite its isolation in the oceans, it hums with life: factories, libraries, bars, farms and parklands all knitted into the carcasses of the stolen ships.
We encounter new races: scabmettlers whose blood congeals immediately on contact with the air to form impenetrable armours; vampires, known as vampir or haemophages - haemophage what a great word! - who don't stalk the benighted streets but who rule one of the city's ridings openly in the shape of the Brucolac; the bloodsucking mosquito people or anophilii trapped on an island; the part crustacean cray people; and the grindylow who shadow the narrative from the opening pages but who don't make an appearance until the final chapters.
I loved the grindylow who seem to occupy a space between the monstrous and justice. This is Miéville's description of them once he introduces them into the story:
They jutted prognathous jaws, their bulging teeth frozen in meaningless grimaces, massive eyes absolutely dark and unblinking. Their arms and chests were humanoid, tightly ridged with muscles and stretched skin, grey-green and black, shiny as if with mucus. And, narrowing at the waist, the grindylow bodies extended like enormous eels, into flat tails several times longer than their bodies.
The grindylow swam in the air. They flickered, sending quick S-curves down the lengths of their extended tails, rippling them liquidly.
As is typical with Miéville there are a number of stories working simultaneously. The novel is about Bellis' refusal to be assimilated into the city of Armada and her eventual resignation; it is about The Lovers - the most powerful leaders in the city - and their plan to raise a monstrous sea creature, the avanc, harness its strength to tow the city and reach the titular Scar, a break in reality, in order to mine possibility from it; it is about the machinations of Simon Fench and his attempts to be rescued from Armada; it dwells on Tanner Sack, a Remade convict freed by Armada, who embraces his new life and second chance with both arms - and both grafted-on tentacles.
Ahhh the avanc! There is something deliciously Lovecraftian in this vast inter dimensional sea creature, summoned, harnessed and docilely and implacably towing the city. The descriptions of it in seismic and geological terms are astoundingly beautiful and powerful. Does this creature echo something Melvillian too? The desperate quests, first for this massive leviathan and then the Scar itself, had something of Ahab in them.
Scars in the novel are as significant as you'd expect from a novel with this name! The Lovers cut and scar each other over and again to prove and mark their love for each other, freggios intended to claim a lover and mar their beauty to ensure their fidelity. Tanner Sack remakes his own Remade body to become amphibian. Floggings leave scars. One of the most moving depictions of scars may be Shekel (a teenage New Crobuzoner who forms a relationship with a Remade woman
She was Remade she was Remade (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep.
Heal me, he thought.... There was a caustic pain as he peeled off. Clot of old life and exposed himself open and u sure to her, to new air. Breathing fast again. His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar.
Once Tanner had re-Remade his body, the doctor informs him that he will scar but that scars "are not injuries.... A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole."
I also found that the passages in which Bellis translated particularly resonant with the sense that language was passing through her without the associations of meanings. My next Miéville book is going to be Embassytown, his foray into science fiction, which (I believe) will again explore the idea of interpretation, translation and the power of and our relationship with language.
This is one of those novels which, when you finish it, leaves you with the sense that you have only scratched the surface. The same feeling, in fact, which Bellis is left with. Who actually was in control of the city? Who or what was Uther Doul? What was his actual relationship with the Lovers who appeared to be his superiors; the Brucolac who haled from the same culture, albeit the Brucolac was an ab-dead vampir and Doul a living human; and with Bellis? Did Bellis come to accept that Armada could become her home?
Having cast as eye over a handful of other reviews of this book, I think Miéville's had a bit of a pounding on sites like Goodreads. People have complained that he overuses certain phrases such as puissance for magical power or thaumaturgy for a steampunk mixture of magical and scientific force. I think they're missing the point: Miéville is consciously eschewing or subverting typical cliched fantasy tropes and creating his own. Oddly, I did feel that his descriptions of the cactacae relied overly on the phrase "fibrous vegetable muscles". However, having just searched for the word vegetable in my e-version of the book, I find that it occurs only four times. In over 500 pages.
Perception can be a strange thing!
