Embassytown

I liked “Embassytown”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345524497/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217153&creative=399349&creativeASIN=0345524497 a lot (which will come as no surprise to long time CT readers). It wasn’t perfect. There is a longish section (between the two-thirds and four-fifths mark) which dragged – it had neither the intellectual pyrotechnics nor the pacing of the rest of the book. But where it is good, it soars, and better reconciles literary ambition and sense-of-wonder headkicks than anything else he’s written. It’s hard to compare with any other book – perhaps the closest is Delany’s _Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand_ in its mixture of space opera and linguistic speculation – but the comparison isn’t very close. The writing is more tamped down and Delany’s perverse romanticism is nearly entirely absent. Perhaps the best way to think of the book is as a kind of hard science-fiction, where the ‘hard’ theory that is being played with is linguistic theory rather than speculative physics (now that I think of it, Mieville’s suggestion that his imagined universe is a ‘parole,’ of the ‘langue’ that is the under-lying meta-universe is an obvious hint in this direction). Mieville is not trying himself to contribute to literary theory – but then, when Alastair Reynolds uses weird bits of information theory to come up with a justification for a cloaking device, he is presumably not doing this for the purposes of peer reviewed science. He’s having fun – and so too is Mieville. Some of the concepts – people literally being incorporated into Language as similes by aliens who _need_ concrete referents to think and to speak – are quite wonderful.

I’m not going to write a review of the book (I don’t think it would be possible to top Sam Thompson’s “excellent piece”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n12/sam-thompson/monsters-you-pay-to-see for the LRB) – but I do want to point to one interesting resonance between the book and _Iron Council_ (which of course we did a “seminar on”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/mieville-seminar/ a few years back. Since there are spoilers, the rest is below the fold.

“Miriam Burstein”:http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2011/05/embassytown.html points to the similarities between Scile ( a rather pathetic villain) and Judah Low in _Iron Council._ Both are guilty of choice-theft – they themselves choose in ways that deny the autonomy of others. As Miriam puts it:

bq. Much like Mieville’s Iron Council, which reworks and ultimately subverts the meaning of the Passion, Embassytown revisits the fall from Paradise. It does so, however, by questioning the fantasy of cultural purity. Avice reflects to herself that the majority of Ariekai similes “were Terre men and women: there was something in us that facilitated” (106). The process of producing similes, that is, literally brings humanity into Language, transforms it into what postcolonial theorists would call a hybrid. The Hosts speak with humans, literally. And, as Scile admits, their encounter with humans has spurred them to make more similes (56). Cultural contact spurs unpredictable and uncontrollable change. Scile, however, is rapt by the perfection of Language, in which “‘[w]ords don’t signify; they are their referents'” (80). This is God-talk, a language of absolute truth, in which interpretation itself evanesces before the absolute nature of reference. This is a language that admits of no fiction. For Scile and his followers, Language turns out to be Eden–not in a space, but in enunciation itself. When’ Scile realizes that one Ariekai is seeking to speak in metaphor instead of simile, he links him to Satan: “The world becomes a lie. That’s what Surl Tesh-echer wants. To bring in a lie […] It wants to usher in evil'” (141). To speak in metaphor is to become the Prince of Lies, to eject the Hosts from their self-enclosed Paradise. And yet, Language has already been “infected,” as it were, by the human similes and other tropes. Scile chooses to ally himself with those who seek to preserve the purity of Language, even though Language has already become impure (if it was pure in the first place); more to the point, in so doing he denies the agency of those Ariekai who choose metaphor. He wishes to preserve their innocence in the face of human contact, even if it means engineering the deaths of Ariekei “liars.” Scile yearns, in effect, to keep the Ariekei outside of history, even though they are already in it.

This is true – yet it is also true that the role of Judah Low in _Iron Council_ has been bifurcated. Scile, like Judah, serves as a betrayer, yet Judah’s intervention _works_ – it creates the tension that may one day lead to a revolution. Scile is specifically seeking to turn a revolution back before it becomes established. The actual revolutionaries are the Arieki Surl Tesh-Echer and Spanish Dancer, whose motivations remain nearly entirely opaque – but who somehow discern the potential for a different order, even if they cannot know what that order would be. For Surl Tesh-Echer, a world outside the prisonhouse of Language is literally unthinkable – yet such a world is what it struggles towards without knowing what it might be. The analogy with “Mieville’s ideas about revolution”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/01/11/an-argument-in-time/ is emphatic.

bq. if we take seriously the scale of social and psychic upheaval represented by a revolution, a post-revolutionary society is unthinkable: for someone not born in a post-revolutionary situation, it takes the process of going through a revolution to fully imagine it. To depict it is to diminish it.

The revolution that the Arieki bring through starts, quite literally, with a lie – Sul Tesh-Echer’s lie that “before the humans came we didn’t speak.” But this lie then flowers into metaphor, and then into a truth that Surl Tesh-Echer could not have understood when it said it. It is correct to say that the Arieki didn’t speak before the humans came – but it didn’t know, and couldn’t have known that this was true when it said it. As Spanish Dancer says to the Arieki at the end of the book.

bq. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. We were grown into Language. After history we made city and machine and gave them names. We didn’t speak so much of certain things. Language spoke us.

This is a solution to Mieville’s dilemma of how to depict a revolution while doing it justice. The revolution that the Arieki undergo is a revolution from a state of being without the possibilities of language. What remains obscure to the human observers, and even to the Arieki themselves after their transformation, is what it had once been like to have been spoken by Language rather than speaking it. And by depicting this revolution, the fruits of which we can understand, Mieville provides a metaphor for the kind of revolution that we can’t understand, but that he would like to see. _Embassytown_ is, as much as it is about anything (and it is a book about _many_ things) about the ways in which the promise of fundamental transformation is inevitably a lie, right up to the moment when the transformation occurs, because the person making the promise cannot possibly understand that which is being promised. This isn’t a claim that I subscribe to in the sense that I imagine Mieville does (I’m a meliorist social democrat rather than a revolutionary socialist), but it is a large part of what makes the book effective, moving, and powerful.

It’s a serious book. The Thompson review that I link to above is, among many other things, a deliberate rebuttal to a “piss-poor”:http://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/john-mullan-clapham-the-no-fuck-vampire-novel/ “essay”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/25/literary-fiction-twelve-best-new-novelists written by a Booker prize judge arguing that the difference between smelly genre fiction (which the Booker people don’t consider, naturally) and ‘literary fiction’ is that the latter is self-aware about form and “ask us to attend to the manner of their telling.” As Thompson points out, Mieville’s book is _all about_ attending to the manner of its telling (if I see another book this year which is as self-aware about language and representation, I’ll be astonished), but also takes its monsters _extremely seriously._ In an ideal world, it would be in serious contention for both the Booker and the Hugo (whether we live in anything approximating that world remains, of course, to be seen).