Henry and I always make sure to post about China Miéville-related matters (here, for example; click from there for earlier posts. Here’s a more recent one by Henry.) So I have to make sure this exceedingly snarky Adam Lipkin review of Iron Council catches his eye, and gets a comment box (via the Mumpsimus).
I haven’t read Iron Council yet, so it may seem absurd to say I am sure this review is too harsh. But I’m sure it is, so I’ll just clear the air of this sour stuff before – sometime soon – Henry and I have our obligatory exchange.
The generic plot wouldn’t be a problem were it not for the writing itself. Miéville seems to have a thousand ideas that strike him as nifty, and he seems to feel compelled to throw them into the novel at any cost (I can only assume that that the deluge made it impossible for anyone at Del Rey to actually attempt to edit him). Some of it sticks, but then he’ll decide to toss out one of those cliched gems (like calling water magic “watercraeft”) that makes you realize that he can’t help slipping into the role of the fourteen-year-old writing his first masturbatory fanfic. bad fantasy language games (or “languagecraeft,” I suppose) and lines like, “I was verity-gauging,” are frustrating enough, but it’s less any one sentence than the overall structure and flow of these sentences into something resembling a cohesive narrative that makes this such an amazingly slow and painful read. Add in such gems as borderline stream-of-consciousness narration and an inability to avoid any digression, and reading the book just becomes a chore.
As I said, I haven’t read Iron Council, but watercraeft has been floating around since Perdido Street Station. And one of the most fantastic and visually memorable passages from that earlier book is the scene in which the watercraeft-working vodyanio dock workers have their strike broken up. I’ll just quote a bit:
That morning by Kelltree Docks dawn had been greeted with a tremendous shout. The vodyanoi dockers had spent the night digging, shaping, shoving and clearing away great weights of craefted water. As the sun rose hundreds of them emerged from the filthy water, scooping up great handfuls of riverwater and hurling them far out over the Gross Tar.
They had whooped and cheered raggedly, as they lifted the final thin veil of liquid from the great trench they had dug in the river. It yawned fifty or more feed across, an enormous slice of air cut out of the riverwater, stretching the eight hundred feet from one bank to the other. Narrow trenches of water were left at either side, and here and there along the bottom, to stop the river damming. At the bottom of the trench, forty feet below the surface, the riverbed teemed with vodyanoi, fat bodies slithering over each other in the mud, carefully patting at one or other flat, vertical edge of water where the river stopped. Occasionally a vodyanoi would have some discussion with its fellows, and leap over their heads with a powerful convulsion of its enormous froglike hind legs. It would plunge through the airwall into the looming water, kicking out with its webbed feet on some unspecified errand. Others would hurriedly smooth the water behind it, resealing the watercraeft, ensuring the integrity of their blockade.
In the centre of the trench, three burly vodyanoi constantly conferred, leaping or crawling to pass on information to their comrades around them, then returning again to the discussion. There were angry debates. These were the elected leaders of the strike committee.
As the sun rose, the vodyanoi at the river’s bottom and lining the banks unfurled banners. FAIR WAGES NOW! they demanded, and NO RAISE, NO RIVER.
On either side of the gorge in the river, small boats rowered carefully to the edge of the water. The sailors within leaned out as far as they could and gauged the distance across the furrow. They shook their heads in exasperation. The vodyanoi jeered and cheered.
When the militia shows up to break the strike, things get wild. Fantastic scene. A showcase for Miéville’s inventive brilliance.
We may grant the point that the writing could be tighter. (Who am I to talk about unsightly extra pounds of prose?) An editorial exercise: how many occurrences of ‘water’ in the passage above should be cut or exchanged for ‘it’? And phrases like “patting at one or other flat, vertical edge of water where the river stopped” are less powerful than obvious compressions: “patting at flat, vertical edges of water.” The charge that Miéville could do with an editor with a sharper red pen is made in the Mumpsimus post, and comment box, and in an old Jeff Vandemeer review of The Scar, also linked from the post.
But even if we get rid of some ‘water’, do we need to lose the ‘watercraeft’? I fail to see the problem. Maybe the reviewer is just expressing a profound but completely generalized distaste for the whole venture. What he really wants to say is that a book with such an atmosphere shouldn’t have been written. But if that’s how you feel, quibbling about little details is rather beside the point. Come to think of it, there should be a word for that critical sin. Reviewers called upon to consider a work they just don’t believe could possibly be good, because it’s somehow profoundly the wrong sort of thing, according to them. And then they sort of waste everyone’s time, scrutinizing and pretending it’s some detail that’s vexed them. They could only love steel and glass and you gave them a gothic cathedral, and now they say the stone work is ‘too rough’. This reminds me of a thing I posted about in relation to Miéville before. Edmund Wilson reviewed The Lord of the Rings for The Nation in 1956. The piece was called, “Oo, those awful orcs”. It is surprisingly unperceptive, more or less as per above. So it seems to me.
Maybe this isn’t Lipkin’s problem. He emphatically insists he is well-disposed to Miéville’s general subcreative vision, minus the excess verbiage.
Well, maybe I’ll just push my building metaphor a bit harder. Literary subcreation is like architecture. When someone comes up with a genuinely style of building, everyone hates it for 50 years because so much of it seems unnatural and arbitrary. Well, not everyone: but new architecture inflames negative passion, even though it wouldn’t get built if it didn’t have its devout partisans. And after 50 years the new building style settles compacently into its foundations, becoming an ancient law unto itself. Everyone loves it. Well, not everyone; but no one hates it for the crazy artificiality that was the cause for all the original indignant howling. Tolkien is like that. He is such a law unto himself that pieces like Wilson’s read like – I dunno, like complaints from New Yorkers from when the Empire State Building was built and everyone thought it wrecked the skyline. It’s funny to align Tolkien with any sort of ‘shock of the new’, but I really think there might be something to that.
And Miéville? Well, maybe this is going to far, but he’s sort of in the same boat. Like Tolkien he’s got some style issues. A red pen could be applied. And, like Tolkien, he’s got some storytelling issues. Namely, he’s a better world-builder than a storyteller. But he’s also gone and invented a new kind of world. (You can point to all that British New Wave stuff from the 1960’s, but I don’t think Moorcock holds a candle to Miéville, for example.) Miéville really has broken out of the Tolkien ruts. The vodyanoi on strike – working their watercraeft – are a perfect example. The introduction of complex labor relations, in place of the resolute economic unrealism of Tolkien, is a very delicate matter. It’s so anti-Tolkien, but can’t help sort of resting on Tolkien because you can’t get away. And ‘watercraeft’ is, I suppose, one of the moments when Miéville’s foot may look to have sunk into the ancient ‘elves and dwarves and wizards’ mud. It would be so easy for this to decline into parody, or self-parody. Socialism meeting magic can give you one of those Reese’s peanut butter cup moments of dismay, coming around the corner. Certainly it will always be easy for any reviewer to find some detail to seize upon and make Miéville sound like a complete, infantile geek.
But that’s the fate of new architects. They can’t point to anything that has come before as a plausible example of why building this way shouldn’t be regarded as arbitrary therefore basically silly. No one wants buildings to be silly. Well, you can build silly buildings – joke buildings. Yes. But it’s hard to try to be serious about a building in a new way. You look like a joke. Worlds are like that, too. Fantasy worlds especially.
{ 27 comments }
Scott Martens 07.29.04 at 6:10 pm
Oh man, there’s a new Miéville novel out, and I didn’t even know. I have been so out of touch.
As for Miéville’s issues, I can sympathise. My own efforts at fantastic fiction floundered on a similar set of issues, and I’ve never taken the time to learn how to fix them.
Scott Martens 07.29.04 at 6:11 pm
Oh man, there’s a new Miéville novel out, and I didn’t even know. I have been so out of touch.
As for Miéville’s issues, I can sympathise. My own efforts at fantastic fiction floundered on a similar set of issues, and I’ve never taken the time to learn how to fix them.
Doctor Memory 07.29.04 at 6:50 pm
To my mind, one’s tolerance for Mieville is going to depend in large part on one’s tolerance for the specfic sub-genre known as crossover fiction. Did you think that “Superman vs. Spiderman” was the best thing ever (circa 1978), or did you think it was a misbegotten one-off that attempted to comingle two resolutely incompatible mythologies, to the benefit of neither?
Well, likewise, reading Mieville presents you with a stark choice: you may find that mixing one part of the Moorcock/Aspirin/Donaldson tradition of gritty, city-centered magical fantasy with the (equally fictitious) Trotskyist narrative of perfidious capital versus “mass movement” organizing is either a stroke of brilliance or you might find it an insult to both traditions.
Me, I lean toward the former, since “The Scar” was certainly a million times more readable than either “Thieves World” or “The Defense of Terrorism”, but let’s be clear here: as fun as the quoted section about the dockworkers strike is to read, Mieville is not (no matter what he may think) discussing economics any more than “watercraeft” is a comment on physics.
cleek 07.29.04 at 6:55 pm
The Scar was pretty good. But I much preferred Perdido Street Station, because the newness of Miéville’s world more than made up for the problems I have with his writing (ie. all the things VanderMeer describes). In The Scar, he comes up with a new world (well, a different part of the same world) that’s just not as rich and interesting as the other, and his writing ends up catching my attention, instead.
But, speaking of VanderMeer…
Carlos 07.29.04 at 6:59 pm
Craeft unions. I’d bet it’s deliberate on Miéville’s part. It’s a world where the supernatural is fully materialist.
Carlos 07.29.04 at 7:04 pm
… Doctor Memory, are you sure?
Doctor Memory 07.29.04 at 7:37 pm
Carlos: In much the same way that I am sure that when my family sits down and recounts the story of Moses and the plagues and the parting of the red sea (etc), what we are discussing is something quite distinct from history, yes, quite sure.
(This is only incidentally meant as a complaint about Mieville, who’s books I find entertaining even if I do find his politics odious, but more to mildly needle John and others for their repeated implication that what makes Mieville cool is that he’s brought “economics” to fantasy literature, when what he’s actually done is mix in a completely different strain of fantasy.)
Carlos 07.29.04 at 7:55 pm
Oh, OK. You think Miéville’s economics as economics are as plausible as watercraeft as physics; and you wanted to be needling about it.
You could just *say* that, you know.
Henry 07.29.04 at 8:55 pm
bq. Mieville is not (no matter what he may think) discussing economics any more than “watercraeft†is a comment on physics.
Not so. You may vehemently disagree with his take on economics and on politics (I do – but in a friendly way) but he knows his stuff. I’ve read China’s forthcoming mss on the origins and form of international law and it ties together with _The Scar_ in some interesting ways. Good and interesting commentary on mercantile capitalism. See the discussion I had with John on this last year for a fuller development of my thoughts on Bas-Lag and economics …
Patrick Nielsen Hayden 07.29.04 at 9:53 pm
Of course, what Doctor Memory calls the “Moorcock/Aspirin/Donaldson tradition of gritty, city-centered magical fantasy” is in fact the Fritz Leiber tradition of gritty, city-centered etc etc.
Which isn’t to say the Mieville isn’t doing something new and interesting; only that some of the threads he’s working with go back further than last week.
As for mixing magical urban fantasy with the “Trotskyist narrative”, China isn’t even the first Trotskyist genre fantasy writer to do this, having been preceded by the “Vlad Taltos” adventures of Steven Brust and by the “Alyx” tales of Joanna Russ. To say nothing of Delany’s “Neveryon” cycle. None of which, again, is a criticism of Mieville.
Carlos 07.29.04 at 10:23 pm
Hm. In the tradition of Harry Turtledove, perhaps someone should write a fantasy novel based on a thinly disguised version of post-WWII economic reconstruction. The Magus of the Animal Spirits is dying, and his colonial apprentice, Dextrose Wight, is left to take up the Great Work of rebuilding the System of the World. But little does anyone suspect that Wight is secretly an disciple of the Alignment of Starry Wisdom…
Charles Kindleberger as viewpoint character.
(Yes, I chipped in my two cents worth to that short story of Charlie Stross’s. What about it?)
chun the unavoidable 07.29.04 at 10:39 pm
There seem to me to be some unanswered questions here: Trumps, decans, or demerlayk? Goedel’s ontological proof–valid? Does accomplishment preclude snark (Wilson did write a lively erotic fantasy involving Hecate)? What was the ring’s relation to time? Who knows more about operations management, Mieville or Tolkien? Did Tolkien ever use the word “precog” in casual conversation?
Kip Manley 07.29.04 at 11:10 pm
Ah, but Miéville’s subcreation is hampered—I’d say crippled—by precisely that lack of a red pen: “Miéville seems to have a thousand ideas that strike him as nifty, and he seems to feel compelled to throw them into the novel at any cost” is pretty much the nut of the review, and I bobbed my head in time most vociferously. I won’t knock extra pounds of prose either; beams, eyes, glass houses, stones. But it’s possible to digress, and digress well, just as it’s possible to open up the wonders of a literary subcreation without boring the reader’s socks off. (It helps not to have a generic plot, yes.)
Nor was I thrilled with Miéville’s take on gender, neither.
—But my own snark is based on a quick and quickly disappointed reading of Perdido Street Station a whiles back; there was hype, from individuals trusted, and his failure to live up to it, come to think of it, added immesurably to the ennui and disaffection I’ve been feeling of late with regards to the whole darn enterprise as she is currently wrote, but that’s a revolver of a different color entirely; don’t mind me.
Still, John: a lot of Miéville’s soi-disant inventiveness is due to sampling beats from the AD&D Monster Manual, and “craeft” is an eyeworm: negligible to those who pass over it, inexplicably annoying to those who can’t. Not as bad as “magick,” no, but close enough to grate on my optic nerve something fierce.
Kip Manley 07.29.04 at 11:14 pm
(I should add that the dogged refusal of fantasy in general to deal with politics, economics, or any ethics more complex than FATE and DESTINY is one of my major sticking points with the whole enterprise as she is wrote; Miéville’s attempt to get past that deserves props. But dammit! He shoulda been better! I wanted more! Wahhhh!)
Matt 07.29.04 at 11:45 pm
I ain’t Lipkin, but I think his issue with “watercraeft” (and, to be honest, mine too) was the hypercliched and of-dubious-necessity spelling of “craft” as “craeft”. Why? To distinguish it from “craft”? But why should this distinction be necessary when the whole point of that sequence is to present the magic as being effected in a very mundane fashion, just like regular construction work (craft)?
This kind of creative spelling is a hallmark of very, very poor authors (especially amateur ones) looking for a cheap way to add the illusion of depth to their stories. (Like putting “song” or “dreamer” in the title.) I love Mieville, don’t get me wrong, but I also applied face to palm when I first read that spelling. Maybe he doesn’t bother to read bad fiction, and so didn’t know; maybe he thought he could rehabilitate silly spellings and make them work again; either way, it doesn’t work for me.
peter ramus 07.30.04 at 4:27 am
Gaah!
You mean my four–part Cycle of Dream of Ye Songdreamer of Dreamsong’s Cycle is no go?
Neel Krishnaswami 07.30.04 at 5:26 am
I haven’t read Iron Council yet, but one of the things I really liked about Perdido Street Station was the way that he made the socialist myth fit in perfectly with the collection of other myths that were used to build the world. The idea of treating the mythology of the union as just a fantastical a device as elves or artificial intelligence or sorcery was a knockout. I didn’t like The Scar nearly as much, pretty much exactly to the extent that he tried to give the socialist myth more reality-weight in it. It had its moments — I really loved the anti-Orientalist moment of truth when the grindylow revealed what they were really after — but all in all it seemed like a much lesser work to me.
I think it’s really, really hard to make a piece of fiction work as a political vehicle, simply because it’s so patently obvious that the writer can stack the deck any way he or she likes. That’s why I thought the grindylow worked, and much of the rest didn’t — the hand of the author becoming visible was precisely the point of that scene, because it was needful to make a very pointed and political observation about the conventions of the fantasy genre.
Ray 07.30.04 at 8:50 am
You’ll need to change that title to
Cycle of Magick of Ye SongCraefter of Dreamsong’s Wyrd.
Someone call Dave Langford, his title generator needs updating…
Doctor Memory 07.30.04 at 4:19 pm
(Neel is, I think, articulating my point a bit better than I, so parenthetical props to him, even though I actually liked The Scar quite a bit better than PSS.)
In re craeft-vs-craft, that bugged me as well, precisely because it seemed like a (rare) instance of Mieville falling into the same trap that most (all?) of Tolkien’s more slavish imitators do: that of pulling neologisms directly from their ass, not realizing that the reason JRRT got away with it was that he’d done the heavy lifting in philology necessary to make all that gobbledegook sound naturalistic.
Neel Krishnaswami 07.30.04 at 5:26 pm
I’m firmly in the camp of liking Mieville’s neologisms.
Trying to conceive of it as “heavy lifting in philology” is to miss the point — it’s bricolage, in the sense of Derrida. He’s taking a grab-bag of words, cutting them loose from their original contexts and grafting them onto his fantasy world in order to create new senses for old words. In an important way, this is a more “realistic” kind of linguistic development that Tolkien did, because this is how languages change in real life — when coining a new word, I certainly don’t try to invent a word which fits into a historical evolution of vocabulary. Instead, I try to add new senses to existing words, warping the sound a bit if it’s not a good fit.
Carlos 07.30.04 at 7:04 pm
I would guess that Miéville picked the knowing use of the weirdly spelled common word from Mary Gentle’s _Rats and Gargoyles_, where one is used to describe a fifth cardinal direction.
ian 07.30.04 at 8:56 pm
There is also the point that watercraft are boats!
Doug 08.02.04 at 6:54 am
“Reviewers called upon to consider a work they just don?t believe could possibly be good, because it?s somehow profoundly the wrong sort of thing, according to them. And then they sort of waste everyone?s time, scrutinizing and pretending it?s some detail that?s vexed them.”
This also explains almost all of the reviews of Bill Clinton’s book. Although the more parsimonious explanation on that one may be that the reviewers didn’t actually read the book and instead gave us their personal take on the author. Of the reviews that I’ve seen, only Larry McMurtry’s makes me think that he not only read the book but considered it with some care.
Adrian Spidle 08.02.04 at 6:37 pm
August 02, 2004 John Kerry will never win when the electorate finds out that two thirds of all Vietnam Veterans can’t stand him.
This is the issue that can determine the outcome of this election if we can get the word out. It will have no impact on the 30% of the electorate who hate Bush and America, but it will keep some Bush haters from voting and it will flip enough of the undecided to totally preclude a Kerry victory.
I recently asked a Viet Vet buddy if he knew any Viet Vets who liked Kerry and he thought for a moment. He then said…
http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/08/john_kerry_will.html
Adrian Spidle 08.02.04 at 6:38 pm
August 02, 2004 John Kerry will never win when the electorate finds out that two thirds of all Vietnam Veterans can’t stand him.
This is the issue that can determine the outcome of this election if we can get the word out. It will have no impact on the 30% of the electorate who hate Bush and America, but it will keep some Bush haters from voting and it will flip enough of the undecided to totally preclude a Kerry victory.
I recently asked a Viet Vet buddy if he knew any Viet Vets who liked Kerry and he thought for a moment. He then said…
http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/08/john_kerry_will.html
Adrian Spidle 08.02.04 at 6:38 pm
August 02, 2004 John Kerry will never win when the electorate finds out that two thirds of all Vietnam Veterans can’t stand him.
This is the issue that can determine the outcome of this election if we can get the word out. It will have no impact on the 30% of the electorate who hate Bush and America, but it will keep some Bush haters from voting and it will flip enough of the undecided to totally preclude a Kerry victory.
I recently asked a Viet Vet buddy if he knew any Viet Vets who liked Kerry and he thought for a moment. He then said…
http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/08/john_kerry_will.html
Adrian Spidle 08.02.04 at 8:21 pm
My Personal Experience of the Vietnam War
I am a US Merchant Marine Vietnam veteran and a Vietnam era US Navy veteran. I was never a hero but I knew plenty. this is my little story:
I’ll never forget September 1964. The long voyage from Bombay and through the straits of Malacca was marked by my poignant view of Singapore as we sailed by. Much to my regret it had been scratched from our itinerary at the last minute but that didn’t keep us from sailing close enough to get a view of that great Asian city. Then, on a steamy hot day, the Clipper wended its way up the Saigon River towards the capital city of Saigon. My watch partner Manny, my buddy Willie and I were leaning on the railing enjoying the breeze in our faces and admiring the translucent green “lawns†that bound the river on both sides. “Oyez, Manolito, what’s with all those lawns around here?†I asked curiously. “Estupido! – Them are rice paddies.†he answered as he and Willie laughed knowingly at me, the no-commonsense college-kid.
I will forever be grateful for the experience of working with those street-smart unlicensed seamen as one of them. In those days, the globally-wise working guys on US flag ships were mainly white-trash, Hispanic and or black. Even though they continually made fun of me, I made great friends among them and admired their manly competence and unpretentious bravery.
My buddies at MIT and I all thought we were so much smarter than everyone else, and that that was very important and that obviously entitled us highly evolved cognoscenti to rule over the great unwashed masses. Perhaps that explains why, today, I am so unimpressed by the over-educated social theorists who feel so compelled to control our lives so that they fit their ivory tower theories.
I was recently reading about a Harvard professor’s research in to why so many highly intelligent people are hopelessly unable to effectively navigate everyday life. It seems that…
http://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/08/my_personal_exp.html
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