Finally got around China Miéville’s The Scar a couple of weeks ago, after picking up a mass-market paperback copy in Heathrow on my way to Brussels. (Couldn’t find a UK trade edition to match my Perdido Street Station, unfortunately. Still, at least I got the UK cover art.)

Figure 1. The UK cover art.

If The Scar has a flaw, it’s that while the protagonist, Bellis Coldwine, is not so cold and remote that you can’t identify with her, she’s cold and remote enough that it’s hard to really believe in her emotional attachment to New Crobuzon — which you have to, in order for her actions to make sense. The thing itself is not so implausible (I have known sane people to love London, Los Angeles, even Texas), but given that New Crobuzon is such a nasty place — and that Bellis knows that, having found herself on the wrong side of the city’s monstrous government and ubiquitous secret police — I would have liked to see Miéville spend more time developing that love / hate relationship.

It doesn’t matter much in the end, though, because there’s so much else to like. The minor characters are fantastic — the Brucolac was my particular favorite, one of the best vampires and best antiheroes I’ve seen in quite a while — and the scenery is magnificent. The plot, appropriately, twists like a fish, raising hopes and fears aplenty; I must have been wrong three or four times about what was really going on, and yet it nearly always made sense. The writing is less extravagant than Perdido’s — Byzantine rather than Gothic — and mostly excellent. I can’t think of the last book I read that could match it for sheer atmosphere (Walter Jon Williams’ Metropolitan and City on Fire, maybe?) and there are some brilliant set-piece scenes that I think will stick with me for years.

In short, it’s just as good as everyone said it was; maybe better.

Figure 1. A model of the Great Eastern.

One side note, just because I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else: Those of you who have read Stephen Baxter may have already run across Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s monumental steam liner, the Great Eastern, also known as the Leviathan.

The centerpiece of The Scar’s floating city Armada, the Grand Easterly, is an obvious reference to Brunel’s ship; but while the only on-line notes of this I can find (a review in the Philadelphia Enquirer and a note on the LiveJournal NeoVictoria) call this a “salute” and a “tribute,” I think it should properly be characterized as a “jab.” Miéville’s Grand Easterly is presented not as a marvel so much as a monumental engineering folly.

Figure 1. The Great Eastern being broken up for scrap.

What I’m wondering is: Who’s it a jab at? Brunel? Baxter? The Victorian idea of better living through engineering? Or — taking the rest of the book into account — the whole imperial, English, Victorian project?