Teaser

At the edge of the Universe stands Embassytown, where the Hosts can speak no lies and only a treasured few Ambassadors can bridge the language gap. But when even language itself is uncertain, how can any peace last . . ?

Review

It’s been a crazy week. Work and personal life have been rather hectic, hence the lack of reviews here, but I have managed to read two books, the first of which is actually a reread of China Mieville’s 2011 novel Embassytown.

I first read Embassytown soon after it came out, felt very confused, wrote Mieville off as one of those pretentious authorly types and promptly forgot all about him. At the start of this year, a friend convinced me to read his fantasy novel Perdido Street Station which, while a little confused in places, was actually very enjoyable. So when another friend proposed a buddy read of Embassytown, I eagerly jumped on the opportunity. Maybe I had misjudged Mieville, or maybe I had grown as a reader. Or maybe it would be just as bad as I remembered. Whatever the case, I wanted to find out.

I always feel slightly awkward writing negative reviews for authors who are still alive. I’m writing here for other readers, not addressing my criticisms directly to the author, but there’s always that niggling concern that writer, publisher, or friend will stumble across my harsh words. Nevertheless, I believe it’s best to be honest when talking about art, and there’s no getting around the fact that I did not enjoy this book.

Nor is there any getting around the fact that Mieville is one of the most inventive and skilled writers of his generation. The problem is that I don’t enjoy the way he has employed those literary skills. Embassytown is an experimental work and a meditation on the nature of language that few other authors would even attempt. Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 springs to mind as the only truly comparable work, while the writing itself has echoes of Ursula K. LeGuin . It’s science fiction not driven by anything as simple as an idea, but by a theme. And a weighty one at that. Just how can different cultures communicate, when not only do their languages differ, but even the terms in which they think of language?

The first half of this book is so dense as to be almost painful to read.Because there is so much attention given to language, I couldn’t tell the characters apart, I couldn’t connect with any of the setting, and there didn’t even seem to be much in the way of a plot. It was just a big pile of theme sitting there as Mieville stirred it with a stick. Lots of cool ideas, but nothing to latch onto. Mieville is also a very experimental writer, and I think his choices here didn’t help. This is a book about a strange language, yes, but it feels like it was written with an open thesaurus sitting to one side at all times. Yes, it was nice to see the Welsh word eisteddfod appear in a science fiction novel, but the end result of this verbosity is a book that was confusing to the point of irritation. At the same time, the book is frustratingly vague about physicality. I pictured the alien Hosts as being cowled, oily, and somewhere between a monk and a crow, whereas my reading buddy found fan art depicting them as somewhere between a crab and a spider. Likewise, the human characters were remarkably indistinct. Mieville builds vivid worlds, there can be no arguing, but the details are harder to discern.

In the second half, things become a little clearer. An actual plot emerges, and the hard work of the opening act begins to pay off. But is it worth struggling through two hundred pages for a mediocre political thriller? I’m not sure it is. The start could have, with some trimming, been a fantastic short story, but as a novel the two wildly different halves left me wanting more of what was hinted at, and far less of what I actually had to read.

Despite all this, I haven’t been put off Mieville. Certainly not for another fourteen years. He’s experimental, and his other experiments are clearly more suited to my tastes. The City & the City and Railsea are already calling to me. I’m not in a rush, but I do hear them. And if there’s one thing I can comfortably say about China Mieville, it’s that he’s much better enjoyed with a buddy at your side.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• First Published 2011
• 405 Pages