The Scar (Bas-Lag Book 2)

First of all, I found this book to be vivid and engaging. I love the story and characters, and the picture Mieville paints of this world is just gorgeous. However, I find his writing to be alternately beautiful and amatuerish. Some passages are virtually poetic and some are plain ridiculous. And really, how many times can one author use the words puissant, and juddering in one book? Apparently an infinite, exhausting, countless number of times. My point is, he strives to employ unusual descriptives and then just beats them to death. If the story wasnt so good, it would have been laughable. So, yes, I am torn--is The Scar a veritable work of art or a pretentious, overwrought vocabulary exercise? Maybe its both, which is why I found myself re-reading particularly beautiful passages for the sheer enjoyment and then finding myself snickering and rolling my eyes.

This was a really good book. Better than the Perdido Street Station.

Armada is a fascinating finely dithered setting that sticks deep under your skull and begs to come out in fan fiction. Personally i was fascinated with uther doul, the lovers, and the brucolac. I wish i got the backstory on the lovers, or the brucolac. Especially the brucolac. Oh, and did I say the brucolac? Ahem. In fact, I would LOVE a prequel about him and HIGH CROMLECH and the Urok and how his a$s got to armada in the first place. Nevertheless for all the accolades Mievilles world-building gets, sometimes he gets too arrogant. A floating pirate city made of ships? Awesome! A beach filled with gears and clockwork instead of sand? Give me more! People whose blood coagulates into armor?? Shroedingers sword?? Sweet! A gargantuan whale that is summoned from the depths of an interdimensional sea? Yeaah! Beings with anuses instead of mouths, mosquito women, and cactus-people? Uhmmm slow down cowboy.....steven king territory, complete with lamp-monsters, straight ahead! A similar thing happens with vocabulary. You get four gorgeous descriptions followed by some awkward verbal gymnastics that just read like a thesaurus that make you want to scream COME ON, we know you looked that one up, ARGH! Nevertheless, the HD rendering of steampunk worlds, shroedingers sword, and the brucolac make up for things when all is done. Ah Mieville... you are so good....but if you grow some humility you could truly become the gibson of steampunk.

Mi?villes novel _Perdido Street Station_ introduced us to the world of Bas Lag, atop which the metropolis of New Crobuzon squats in all its malevolent indolence. New Crobuzon is home to humans, khepri, vodyanoi, garuda, cactacae and all manner of other strange races. Whilst seen by its masters in Parliament as the epitome of advancement, it is seen by many of its inhabitants as little more than a filthy, oppressive prison. After scientist Isaac dan der Grimnebulin unwittingly precipitated a disaster in New Crobuzon (an adventure recounted in _Perdido Street Station_), a former lover of his by the name of Bellis Coldwine finds herself being hunted down by Parliaments militia, as those in power seek to exact their revenge on Grimnebulin and those associated with him. Bellis--posing as an interpreter--escapes on the _Terpsichoria_, a ship bound for the New Crobuzon colony of Nova Esperium. Unfortunately for Bellis and the ships other passengers, they are waylaid by a ship belonging to the infamous pirate city of Armada. What happens after that changes both Bellis and Armada forever, and even sends tendrils of cause and effect across the miles of open ocean back to New Crobuzon. I was originally drawn to Mi?ville on the recommendations of friends who praised him for breathing new life into the fantasy genre. I was ill-prepared for his seemingly voluminous knowledge of the English language, and throughout _Perdido Street Station_ I kept a dictionary handy to ensure I missed nothing. _The Scar_ both uses a more accessible vocabulary and provides a deeper insight into the world of Bas Lag than its predecessor. We begin to understand *some* of the mechanics of Bas Lags magic--known as thaumaturgy--and gain a comprehension of just how vast Mi?villes imagination must be to have dredged so much up into the light of day--and make it coherent as well. I found the most enjoyable thing about _The Scar_ to be Mi?villes deft use of symbolism. I won?t get into it for fear of lessening your enjoyment (I got a little kick out of reading each new reference) but I have a lot of admiration for a man who can take one little thing and then sculpt it into so many different meanings for so many different characters. If you can cope with the somewhat intricate language and lengthy narrative, and enjoy reading cutting edge fantasy, youll love this book.

I was very curious at how Mieville would continue the stories in Bas-Lag. It did not seem possible, and by jumping to an almost completely different environment, he does a wonderful job of expanding the world and the worlds behind and around this world. It both stands as its own but also works with Perdido St Station excellently. Heartily recommend.

This is the first of Mievilles books for me. In retrospect, I would highly recommend reading the New Crobuzon series in order. I am just starting no. 1 Perdido Street Station and it defines a lot of things that you have to guess about if you jump in with the Scar, as I did. The series of 3 books take place on a different world, with early 19th century level of technology, sailing ships, some steam engines, no wireless or wired communications. But they do have airships and submarines. Thee are many kinds of creatures, Cactus people and Mosquito people to name two. Lots of fantasies about weird science etc. The central character of The Scar is Bellis Coldwine, a woman who had studied and written a book on an ancient extinct language. She teaches one character to read, another to speak the common language. She loves books and gets a job as a librarian, and hunts for a rare lost book. You might say that she is a Speech Therapist who loves books (any resemblance to persons ... is purely coincidental). She has an amazing epic adventure. Many reviewers criticize Mieville for his lengthy descriptions. Enough!, on with the story! I admit it was slow for me to get into the swing of the story, but once I did, I did not find the descriptions laborious at all. I enjoyed the book a lot.

The Scar is as inventive and rich with unconventional ideas as any other books penned by the author. We have all the elements here for a proper fantasy experience: the vast ocean-world is brimming with awesome creatures, legends, societies and history - and all this rendered in an original way that makes us wonder why so few authors dare to step out of the cliche-circle of Tolkien-inspired high fantasy. The first 400-500 pages will keep us chained to the book: the prose is fluid and elegant, the story rolls on with a carefully balanced speed and there are so many amazing characters, ideas we want to know more about. After that, however, the narrative gradually loses its momentum and similarly to the legendary beast towing the pirate-city, Armada in the book, it all but stops in the end. The most original concept in the novel is the so-called possibility-mining: a fascinating injection of quantum-physics into a fantasy-setting. Although the author clearly intends to use this idea as a focal point for the story, it never gets explored deeply enough. The same superficial approach applies to a bunch of interesting characters (Tanner Sack, Uther Doul, the Lovers, the Brucolac) who are really the key engines and highlights of the story, but whose background and motivations is not unveiled at all. It seems that the author stubbornly insists on limiting in-depth characterisation to the rather irritating protagonist, the cynical Ms Coldwine (what a telling surname), whose inability to get liked by the reader becomes quite frustrating by the end of a very long journey. Reading the last 200 hundred pages or so left me with an impression that the author might have been overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of his own ambition and resorted to using a rather lazy short cut to finish off the story. In a novel closing on 800 pages, however, you cannot build up tension and promise, and then get away by not delivering some climactic experience. The shockingly mundane and simple twist in the end leaves a bitter taste in the readers mouth: the Scar is scarred by unexploited potential.

Hugely creative, breahtaking prose, frequently grotesque, always captivating.

This book is basically second in the trilogy of <b>Bas Lag</b> and if you were amazed by <b>Perdido street station</b>, I think you will love this book too.This book basically takes place on a convoy of ships known as <b>Armada</b>. <img src=http://www.curufea.com/games/crobuzon/scar.jpg height=233px width=357px alt=Armada></img> But the Armada is definitely more than just rag tag convoy of assembled ships.It is basically a flourishing city like <b>New Corbuzon</b> where engineers,shopkeepers, doctors and costermongers(can help using this word :P) go to work everyday.It is divided into district of ships like Garwarter,Dry Fall,Curshouse and Shaddler and each of these districts have their unique set of rulers and unique set of taxes. The most powerful of districts is basically the Garwarter district and it is basically ruled <b>The Lovers</b> who love to have symmetrical cuts on each other faces and get some kind of orgasmic high from that.The district which is in direct opposition to Garwarter is basically the Dry fall which is basically ruled by Vampir yes you heard me right there are Vampires on these convoy of ships too known as Brucolac. The book basically starts with Bellis Coldwine who is basically a linguist and she is running away from <b>New corbuzon</b> as she is being hunted by the militia as she was an ex lover of <b>Issac</b> our renegade scientist from first book.On this ship she meets a host of characters like <b>Johannes Tearfly</b> and <b>Silas Fennec</b> also unknown to her who will play a larger part in the story are sailor <b>Shekel</b> and a remade <b>Tanner Sack</b>, out of them Tanner Sack is being escorted to Nova esperium so that he can spend rest of his life as slave. <img src=http://outtherebooks.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/tanner_sack_by_trabbold.jpg height=500px width=500px alt=Tanner sack></img> But unfortunately their ship gets hijacked and they are thrown into the new world of <b>Armada</b>,but although it is a pirate city but the city does not your average Captain Jack Sparrow like pirates but there is a structure to the society of Armada where in each member of the hijacked ship gets pressganged i.e. adopts to the culture of Armada and starts contributing to the city in one way or another.Th difference between personalities starts popping up as soon as this takes place because <b>Bellis</b> tries in vain to continuously struggle against the situation in which she is put and starts getting involved in murkier plots by <b>Silas Fennec</b> who has his own agenda to follow while the other people like <b>Tanner Sack</b> who is an engineer by profession adopts smoothly to the Armada culture, even the young boy <b>Shekel</b> manages to learn a lot of new things on Armada. Also Armada has its own story where the lovers are doing something without taking their fellow rulers in consideration, we get a lot of murkier politics in the plot which is very fascinating to read, and finally we come to understand who is playing whom.And standing in the middle of these power games is powerful fighter known as <b>Uthar doul</b> who can change the rules of the game due to the possibility sword which he is using. I think Mieville has outdone himself in <b>The scar</b>, his imagination has no boundaries.I think if he wouldnt have been an author then he would surely have become some kind of mad scientist, because the way he manages to walk the fine line between sci-fi and fantasy and mutation is simply mesmerizing.for me this book is 5/5 stars.

Not too many years from now, there will be college kids studying the books of China Mieville, and The Scar will likely be included in the syllabus. It is, perhaps, not quite on the level of Moby Dick, say, but thats the kind of comparison that comes to mind. Its giant and epic and the characters are real and, for the most part, complex. To describe the book in any kind of detail would be difficult; Im sure other reviewers have done so below. But its interesting to point out that The Scar exists in a sort of nether-world: It MIGHT take place in the deep future, long enough after humans had populated the world of The Scar for so long that theyve apparently forgotten about Earth (at least, our world is never mentioned). But their world is a weird mixture of steampunk along with decaying technologies that sometime exceed our own. Just as likely, however, the book may exist in a universe where The Earth never existed and, if thats the case, one might call this a fantasy novel instead. IN terms of stars Ive given The Scar 4 stars, because it is not in my mind quite up to the level of The City and The City or some of the others, but were still talking some real substantial writing here. Oh dont get me wrong: Its fun, too. Its got a plot that unravels slowly and that just keeps getting more and more far out as time goes on, but nothing is revealed to readers in advance. So do not miss this important work, or any of the other Mieville books.