January 2005

I’m in Ireland at the moment, where the much-needed light relief in the news is being provided by “Prince Harry and his Nazi Uniform”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4170431.stm. I’m less familiar with the ecology of royal commentary than I used to be, so it’s harder to sort out the toadies from the critics from the critics who are really toadies and vice versa. Happily, “Sarah Ferguson”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4173453.stm has intervened today to clarify thing, saying that “It is time for the press to back off. I know what it is like to have very bad press and be continually criticised — it is very tiring and unpleasant.” (For “very bad press” read “terrible judgment” and for “continually criticised” read “always making PR gaffes.”) Similarly, “Comedy Prankster” Aaron Barschak adopts the “Aw lay orf the lad”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/monarchy/story/0,2763,1390274,00.html approach, saying “I can guarantee that had anyone other than Prince Harry worn a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party, no one would have blinked an eye.” If he doesn’t want the responsibility he can always renounce his position as 3rd in line to the throne, refuse a public subsidy, move to a bedsit somewhere and do whatever he likes.

Controversies like this point to the fundamental uselessness of the Royal Family, other than for entertainment value. I think the next step should be for Harry’s non-apology apology (“I am very sorry if I caused any offence or embarrassment to anyone”) to get a bit more amplification. I suggest one or all of the following:

* My family are all German anyway.

* Bugger off, you oiks (but don’t cut my subsidy).

* I’m only 20, or approximately the same age as many of the men killed fighting the Nazis during the war. Whenever that was.

I think it was the late Queen Mother who, after Buckingham Palace was bombed during the Blitz, said, “I’m glad it happened — at least now I can look the East End in the Eye.” The gin-soaked old horse-fancier was no less useless than Harry, of course, but even she seemed more aware of her position in life. Barschak has the cheek to invoke the grand tradition of popular dissent in Harry’s defence. “The rebellion of the individual against society is quintessential to democracy.” But as any royalist will tell you Aaron, the problem with this is that Harry isn’t the individual, he’s Society.

The Iraqis will be going to the elections at the end of the month, so it is unsurprising that the insurgents have stepped up their campaign of blowing up tanks and chopping off heads. The is an awful lot of rubbish talked about the Iraqi insurgents; a simple look at the geographical distribution of their attacks shows that they unlikely to all be Sunnis or Ba’athists, and they are not targeting civilians in much greater proportion to military targets than we are. Whatever Christopher Hitchens thinks, they are the direct moral equivalent of the Viet Cong; they represent much of what is worst about the human condition, and any future in which they gained power would most likely be outright disastrous, but for all that, to take up arms against an occupying foreign army is not an ignoble thing to do, and I can quite understand why lots of people on the left have been sympathetic to them.

But history has passed them by. Iraq is not Vietnam (or more specifically, Iran is not China) and they have no hope of victory. All they can really do is prolong the occupation and therefore the misery. The time has well past by which anyone with brains in their head could reasonably hope for anything other than swift and reasonably democratic elections, a declaration of victory and for the coalition troops to jump in the tanks, start the engines and stop driving when they see the first McDonalds. Whatever happens, this war will have been a collossal waste of money and life; tens of thousands of excess deaths to create a puppet state. (By the way, as part of their debt relief deal, the Iraqis are currently negotiating a program with the IMF which will involve removing the market-distorting provision of subsidised food to the poor. I do hope that the Lancet will do a study into the effects of that, and that war crimes trials will result). But this is by the by as far as supporting the Iraqi resistance is concerned. Below the fold, I’ve posted a poem by Robert Burns that sums it up better than I ever could.

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Via the “Head Heeb”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/ , I see that “alt.muslim is hosting the Brass Crescent Awards”:http://altmuslim.com/brasscrescent.php for the best blogs by Muslims. There are also awards for the most insightful post and for blogs by non-Muslims that engage respecfully with Islam. “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/ , “Jonathan Edelstein”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/ , “Scott Martens”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000793.php and “Gary Farber”:http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/ [previously accidentally omitted] all get nominated in various categories. An opportunity for us to explore the diversity of the Islamic blogosphere.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the German Green Party who, for better or worse, have made a lasting impression on European politics. Der Spiegel (in English) “compares the fortunes of Die Grünen with those of the British Greens”:http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,336637,00.html (founded earlier, but never really made an impression). Deutsche Welle “also has a 25-year retrospective”:http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1457301,00.html .

British bookselling chain Waterstone’s “have sacked employee Joe Gordon from one of their bookshops in Edinburgh”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/weblogs/story/0,14024,1388466,00.html . Gordon’s offence seems to have been remarks made on his blog, “The Woolamaloo Gazette”:http://www.woolamaloo.org.uk/. Charlie Stross, “who seems to know quite a lot about this case”:http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi/2005/Jan/10#scandal-1 , reports that Gordon has been an enthusiastic and valuable promoter of science fiction over many years and that this looks like a really nasty attempt at corporate restraint of speech. Our campus bookshop is a Waterstone’s, but there are many alternatives nearby (and online). I shan’t be providing them with my reading lists or buying books there (despite enjoying a 10 per cent academic discount) until this case has been satisfactorily resolved. Others should do as they think fit.

China Mieville is one of the most interesting people writing in the field of science fiction and fantasy. His first novel, “King Rat,” riffs on drum’n’bass, Max Ernst, Robert Irwin and contemporary London. His second, _Perdido Street Station_, took the genre by storm; an urban fantasy written with vigour, wit and ferocious intelligence. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. As Michael Swanwick said in the Washington Post in 2002, “It’s a little cheeky of me to declare as classic a book that only came out two years ago, but I think I’m on safe ground here.” His third novel, “The Scar,” received equal acclaim. He’s an official member of the “salon des refusés”:http://www.granta.com/extracts/1949 of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists” list. China is also active in socialist politics – he ran for Parliament in the last election. His book, “Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory Of International Law,” based on his Ph.D. thesis, is being published this month by Brill.

China’s most recent novel, _Iron Council_ was published in August. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post “describes it”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17250-2004Aug19.html as “a work of both passionate conviction and the highest artistry.” A few months ago, the Mieville Fraktion within CT decided that it might be fun to put together a mini-seminar around _Iron Council_, and to ask China to respond. He very decently said yes; you see the result before you. We’ve invited two non-CT regulars to participate in the mini-seminar. Matt Cheney blogs on literature and science fiction at “The Mumpsimus”:http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/; he also writes for “Locus”:http://www.locusmag.com/ magazine and “SFSite”:http://www.sfsite.com/. Miriam Elizabeth Burstein blogs at “The Little Professor”:http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/, and teaches Victorian literature at SUNY Brockport. Miriam very kindly agreed to join the project in its later stages, revising a long comment/review that she had already written (and that China had independently cited to).

The essays are posted in the order that they are mentioned in China’s response (people who haven’t read _Iron Council_ yet should be aware that spoilers abound). “John Holbo”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003089.html begins his essay with comments on the relationship between Mieville and Tolkien; he goes on to use Bruno Schulz’s discussion of escape and the fecundity of inanimate matter to argue that Mieville can’t decide whether he prefers political economy or Expressionist puppetry as modes of expression. “Belle Waring”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003090.html complains that the unrelenting grimness of Mieville’s urban settings and characters’ fates is a little formulaic; he should let his characters get somewhere and perhaps even succeed in something. Matt Cheney “partly revises”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003094.html an “earlier essay”:http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2004/08/iron-council-by-china-mieville.html where he argued that Mieville needed to represent his villains a little more realistically; he discusses some of the reasons why Mieville might have done this, and talks about how Mieville reconciles pulp and avant-garde literature in his work. My “essay”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003095.html compares Mieville’s reworking of history, myth and revolution with Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history. Miriam Elizabeth Burstein “examines”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003093.html how Mieville reworks ideas of martyrdom and messianism through the figure of Judah Low. Finally, John Quiggin “talks about”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003099.html _Iron Council_ in historical context, arguing that just as the eponymous train of the novel becomes a myth that may return to ‘save’ us, so too the revolutionary traditions of the nineteenth century that are celebrated in _Iron Council_ may continue to inspire.

China’s response, which speaks to all the above, and more, is “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003092.html.

We’re opening up all of the essays, and China’s response, to comments. We expect that the main conversation will take place in the comments section to China’s essay; however, if you have specific points that you want to address in the individual essays, feel free to comment there. Note that offensive or inappropriate comments will likely be deleted – as always, we’re more interested in conversation than flamewar.

This seminar is being made available for distribution under a Creative Commons license, without any prejudice to the ownership of any material quoted under standard ‘fair use’ principles from _Iron Council_ or from John Curran Davis’ translation of Bruno Schulz’ _Cinammon Shops_. For those who would prefer to read on paper than computer screen, we enclose a “PDF”:http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/ironcouncil.pdf of the discussion.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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.

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WARNING: This contains massive spoilers to Iron Council, The Scar, and Perdido Street Station.

It seems bizarre that I might write literary criticism which the author might plausibly read. This never happens when I write about Petronius. And so, because much of what I have to offer is criticism, I feel the need to begin with some lavish praise. China Miéville is a writer of astonishing creativity. The material in the average two-sentence Miéville observation would serve a more parsimonious author of fantasy as the meat of a trilogy. (Or more: just consider that there are about 18 Robert Jordan novels, none of which contains a single thought not pilfered, feebly, from Tollkein or Stephen Donaldson.) The roster of novelists whose work I ever feel inclined to employ as the setting for an idle daydream, a fantasy proper, with Lake
Como moved to Rome and so on, is very short, and most of the luminaries joined when I was younger than 15. So, when I tell you that I press Bas-Lag into this service, I am saying that Miéville’s works have captured my imagination in the most literal way.

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When I first wrote about China Mieville’s Iron Council, I wrote, toward the conclusion:

bq. Mieville has stated in interviews that he does not want to create stories with simple “good vs. evil” morality, but that is generally what he does. The government of New Crobuzon is populated entirely with people who operate with as much love and compassion as a Dark Lord . Mieville’s main characters are often conflicted, impulsive, selfish, and wonderfully complex, but they end up fighting against forces that are entirely loathsome, which is a cop-out.

This is an idea that deserves attention and discussion, and I think my original language made the issue seem more cut-and-dried than I know it to be.

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_Iron Council_, like Mieville’s earlier novel _The Scar_ has a lot to say about betrayal. However, the most important betrayals of _Iron Council_ have less to do with personal deceit than the the more subtle treachery of political mythology; its ambiguous consequences and necessary faithlessness to the individuals whose struggle is mythologized. On the one hand, political myths hold out hope and inspire action, on the other, they don’t reflect the aspirations of the individuals whose actions gave rise to them. _Iron Council_ has at its heart an unresolved and unresolvable argument about the relationship between revolution, myth and history.

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There’s been some grumbling about China Mieville’s third entry (which, apparently, is the last one he plans to write for a while) in his series of novels about the remarkably filthy city of New Crobuzon. I have to assent to the loudest grumble–namely, that the novel takes too long to get itself in gear: while the ambiguity of the opening chapters is fine in and of itself, narrative tension temporarily collapses under the cacophonous weight of the usual odd creatures. Once things get rolling, pun intended, the pace intensifies noticeably. The narrative itself is divided among three alternating focal characters: Judah Low, a would-be messianic figure who specializes in making golems; Cutter, his lover and most devout follower; and Ori, a discontented young radical. And then there is the “Iron Council” itself, a quasi-utopian mobile city of ex-criminals, ex-laborers, and ex-prostitutes, forever in motion on its stolen train. The plot’s actual workings are much closer to The Scar than to Perdido Street Station, although Mieville continues his cheerful habit of happily killing off or psychologically mutilating his main characters. Two of the novel’s major plot points resolve on complicated double-crosses, albeit not quite so detailed as the one in The Scar.

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Science fiction and speculative fiction have always been as much about the past as about the future. Buck Rogers, reawakening in the 25th century, liberates his oppressed compatriots by refighting World War I, complete with artillery barrages. A step up from this kind of pulp, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series inaugurated the “future history” genre with a replay of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Then there are the innumerable translations of medieval romances, sea stories and Westerns into various mixtures of SF and fantasy.

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Warning: Enormous spoilers to Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council, follow.

INTRODUCTION AND CAVEATS.

I am deeply flattered by and grateful for the attention that the Johns, Belle, Miriam, Henry and Matthew have paid to my stuff, and by their invitation to respond. Even more than having your work liked, having it thought about means a huge amount.

It puts me in a slightly awkward position, though. I don’t generally publicly respond to reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers’ responses to critics seem to me at best undignified. One of the usual arguments authors level is the foolishness that ‘I know better than you because I wrote it’. To make my position absolutely clear: authorial intention be damned. I do not necessarily know best. Which is to stress that this unusual and gratifying opportunity will inevitably be a Response To My Critics, and I beg them not to read it as defensive. Where I disagree, I say so in the spirit of open-minded debate.

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We can all stop blogging now (and not a moment too soon). “Query Letters I Love” has found the ultimate use for the medium: posting and mocking real Hollywood script queries from wannabe screenwriters. Just a sample:

“The protagonist’s challenges throughout the story are:

1) A seagull attack gave him Seagull Herpes, an incurable disease that will soon kill him.
2) The seagull attack also tore a bone within his calf in two. His best medicines are herbs and acupuncture, so the bone never fully heals, and it causes internal bleeding for him to walk. The story involves him running a lot…”

I’m in love.