Product Description

A human cargo bound for servitude in exile...A pirate city hauled across the oceans...A hidden miracle about be revealed...This is the story of a prisoner's journey. The search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger. From the author of Perdido Street Station, another colossal fantasy of incredible diversity and spellbinding imagination, which was acclaimed in The Times Literary Supplement as: 'An astonishing novel, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most jaded palate...exhilarating, sometimes very moving, occasionally shocking, always humane and thought-provoking'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13121 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 624 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The question was always: what would he do for an encore? China Mieville's third novel The Scar is set in the same world as his award-winning Perdido Street Station but is a very different book, set in a very different city. Where his New Crobuzon was an old metropolis of cruelty, oppression and glamour, the floating freebooter city Armada is a place of refuge even for those who experience it as a prison. Brilliant linguist Bellis Coldwine is on the run when she is press-ganged by pirates who turn out to be rather more; her abilities make her a valuable commodity and she finds herself intermittently useful to a project so ambitious that it takes her much of the book to comprehend fully. Mieville takes interesting chances by making Bellis his protagonist--she has an arrogant selfishness that at times makes one breathless--but her guts, determination and intermittent realism about herself gradually endear her to us. This is an intelligent book about how individuals and events influence each other and the meaning of freedom. Mieville has a sense of the sea as the place of a menace almost incomprehensibly huge; like Perdido Street Station, The Scar is full of breath-taking moments of wonder which are also moments of heart-stopping terror. --Roz Kaveney

About the Author
China Mieville has lived all his life in London. His first novel, King Rat, received superb reviews and was nominated for fantasy awards, and his second, Perdido Street Station, astonished the literary world with its imaginative power and sheer inventiveness.

Customer Reviews

The Obsession of the Possible
China has once more returned us to the land of the wildly weird, the stuff of nightmares, the packaging around an intensely complicated plot of obsession, mystery, betrayal, and twisted desire. Set in the world of Bas-Lag that he first introduced to us in Perdido Street Station, this work shows us a much wider view, a diorama of images and creatures that at first blush seem incredibly impossible, not related to our world at all, but one quickly finds motivations and emotions that ring around both your heart and your head.

Tinges of Melville surround the overarching story of the hunt and capture of a true miles-wide Leviathan, but trying to pigeonhole China is an impossible task, as one finds elements from Bram Stroker to Dickens to Richard Burton all thoroughly churned into this mix that China makes uniquely his own. Trying to predict what will happen or what a character will do is an exercise in futility, doomed to failure as China continuously surprises you. His characters, for all their incredible physiognomy, are recognizably human, richly detailed while maintaining depths that are just out of reach.

Uther Doul is a true man of mystery, wielding his Possible Sword and twisting events (and possibilities?) for his own unknown desires, the prime mover of the events in this story. Bellis Coldwine is the main viewpoint character, in some ways equivalent to Ishmael of Moby Dick, an observer who nonetheless takes important actions that have definite influences on the final outcome; cold, distant, but yet one who gets caught in more than one love affair. The Brucolac, a real, practical vampire; Silas Fennac, the New Crobuzon spy; Tanner Sack, a Remade man who is the epitome of loyalty yet will still betray his chosen country of allegiance; each character adds their own touch of flavor and complexity to this bitter and compelling tea. And in the distance are The Lovers, erstwhile commanders of the motley collection of ships that make up the Armada, defined by their odd sexual practices, practices that leave them mirror-image scarred, a metaphor in flesh of China's thematic investigation of the cuts and scarring that happen to and are part of the definition of everyone.

China's strength is his incredibly descriptive prose, much in evidence here, but the picture he paints is not as monochromatically dark as it is Perdido Street Station, as he dips his pen with bits and swirls color, highlights poking out of his black felt. His pictures of his diverse creatures are not as detailed as they were in the earlier novel, especially not for those creatures and near-human species that not new to this book. For this reason alone, I recommend reading Perdido Street Station first, so that one comes to this book steeped in the environment, the depressive bleakness of the earlier work.

The plot is a continual set of twisting surprises and seeming diversions, but each part is fully tied to the climax of this work. In this area, this book far exceeds his earlier work, showing all the signs of meticulous planning, where each element is necessary to the story, and events are driven by the complex interaction of each of his characters, rather than mere happenstance or coincidence.

My only real complaint with this book was the Coda that is tacked on after the main climax. While this Coda neatly wraps up all the unanswered questions and provides closure to some of the splinter stories, I felt it was unnecessary and spoiled the power of the highly emotional main ending line.

With this book, I feel that China has entered the top flight of today's speculative fiction writers, mature, confident of his mastery of the art of story telling, with a voice that uniquely and compellingly his own. I predict this book will take all the various awards for this year, and I can look forward to many more years and many more great reads from this brilliant new fable spinner.

Another excellent work
From the author who gave us the brilliant and phantasmagoric 'Perdido Street Station' comes a new work similarly brimming with wit, inventiveness and interest.

The author's use of language to paint vivid and engaging pictures is just as evident as in 'Perdido Street Station'. Sights which could be comic if handled only slightly differently hold chilling and at times repellent fascination. Mieville's ability to capture the essence of s scene, person or thing within the space of a few words is one of the things which makes 'The Scar' a truly enjoyable read.

However, it's not one for the faint hearted. The author is certainly emergining as one of the finest current exponents of weird fiction. His books blur the boundary between fantasy, SF, horror and all manner of traditional genres, giving a sense of the truly new and innovative. Like any author, there's a certain amount of hat-tipping to favourite and inspirational writers, yet the book has a freshness of idea and place which marks it out from others. The story starts off simply, with the escape of one character from the sprawl of New Crobuzon, the transporting of prisoners across the sea, acts of piracy and the amazing appearance of familiar objects (you'll know what I mean when you come to them).

All in all, if you enjoyed 'King Rat' or 'Perdido Street Station', then you'll most certainly enjoy 'The Scar'. If you've not read the authors work before, then I'd heartily recommend this and all of his novels.

unbelievable simply more than fantasy
Let me start by saying I am not really a reader of fantasy novels. I have never been inspired by Tolkein or the whole elves, quest, ring, giants, dragons, dwarves, good verses evil plot. I accept that Tolkein did it better than most but I just don't get it. Mieville, on the other hand, is a revelation. This is fantasy as I understand it. A believable world populated by characters who behave with all the venality and fear and occasional heroism of people in real life. An anti-hero who manages to be sympathetic in his worst moments and a heroine who would never dream of asking for the reader's sympathy stand out in a beautifully paced voyage through a world that is crying out to be filmed. This is an imagination run riot, a world which leaps off the page, every character, no matter how minor, seems real and believable. More than that Mieville breaks with convention - in the same way that Dorothy Dunnett was far more than a writer of historical fiction so Mieville can not be simply described as a fantasy writer. His books are compassionate, witty, violent and bleak at times, filled with both sacrifice and redemption. Having enjoyed Perdito Street Station I fell in love with The Scar - at once a vision of a socialist utopia and a disection of why that utopia and dreams overall may not work. A wonderful book and one that deserves more than to be hidden away in the science fiction section and ignored by those who, like myself, might previously have foolishly mocked the genre. I can not recommend this book enough.