The Scar

Starred review from May 20, 2002
In this stand-alone novel set in the same monster-haunted universe as last year's much-praised Perdido Street Station, British author Miéville, one of the most talented new writers in the field, takes us on a gripping hunt to capture a magical sea-creature so large that it could snack on Moby Dick, and that's just for starters. Armada, a floating city made up of the hulls of thousands of captured vessels, travels slowly across the world of Bas-Lag, sending out its pirate ships to prey on the unwary, gradually assembling the supplies and captive personnel it needs to create a stupendous work of dark magic. Bellis Coldwine, an embittered, lonely woman, exiled from the great city of New Crobuzon, is merely one of a host of people accidentally trapped in Armada's far-flung net, but she soon finds herself playing a vital role in the byzantine plans of the city's half-mad rulers. The author creates a marvelously detailed floating civilization filled with dark, eccentric characters worthy of Mervyn Peake or Charles Dickens, including the aptly named Coldwine, a translator who has devoted much of her life to dead languages; Uther Doul, the superhuman soldier/scholar who refuses to do anything more than follow orders; and Silas Fennec, the secret agent whose perverse magic has made him something more and less than human. Together they sail through treacherous, magic-ridden seas, on a quest for the Scar, a place where reality mutates and all things become possible. This is state-of-the-art dark fantasy and a likely candidate for any number of award nominations. (July 2).Forecast:
Perdido Street Station won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award. A major publicity push including a six-city author tour should help win new readers in the U.S.

March 1, 2003
Adult/High School-Even better than the author's Perdido Street Station (Del Rey, 2001), The Scar is also set in the alternate world of Bas-Lag, where linguist Bellis Coldwine is fleeing the city of New Crobuzon. On her journey, pirates capture her ship, and she and the slaves onboard are taken to the floating city of Armada, ruled by the twisted Lovers. The Lovers have a plan that will change the lives of more than the inhabitants of Armada forever, and the quest to find the mysterious reality-shifting place called the Scar begins. The world of Bas-Lag is dark and dangerous and its odd and macabre inhabitants are fully formed, however alien they seem. But even if the noir story and characters were merely ordinary, Mieville's writing would set this book apart. If poetry can have internal rhymes, the prose has an internal structure that uses sound and syllable repetitions, resulting in brilliant and biting word combinations that produce a style more analogous to music than to writing. The author's technique is something akin to Lewis Carroll's use of portmanteau. Sophisticated readers will be engrossed not only by the story but also by the very words used to detail the plot, and they will never think of the fantasy genre, or fantasy authors, in quite the same way again.-Jane Halsall, McHenry Public Library District, IL

Copyright 2003 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2002
A ship bearing prisoners and several persons fleeing New Crobuzon for their own dire reasons stops to pick up a mysterious figure, who has the course altered to return to New Crobuzon. Later, Bellis Coldwine is writing a letter, and in the holds, prisoner Tanner Sack is telling a cabin boy stories, when the ship is overtaken and captured by pirates from the great, cobbled-together floating city of Armada. Only the fleeing passengers and the prisoners are spared, on the assumption that they have no lingering loyalty to New Crobuzon. Wrong supposition about Bellis, who can't be reconciled to life in Armada, which, when the sinister plans of the scarred Lovers, who lead the greater part of the place, start coming to light, just gets stranger and more dangerous. This complicated fantasy seemingly could go in any number of directions and doesn't end up in quite the places a reader expects it to. Armada, a vibrant creation, with the uncertainties of its press-ganged residents and the machinations of its politics, makes this compelling reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)