They have conceived a dangerous plan: to find a crack in the world, the Scar of the novel's title, which is supposedly a source of unimaginable power. It is governed by the Lovers, a couple who cut symmetrical patterns into each other's faces to show their devotion. Her ship is attacked by pirates and subsumed into a vast flotilla, a floating city named Armada.
Its heroine is Bellis Coldwine, a woman who is fleeing New Crobuzon aboard a ship bound for a distant colony. The action of The Scar roams beyond New Crobuzon's confines, but exists in the same imaginary world.
If everything is novel, there is nothing to care about.Ĭhina Miéville won high praise for his previous work, Perdido Street Station, a dark steampunk confection set in a city named New Crobuzon. Miéville might be aiming for constructive alienation, but the effect threatens instead to become one of plain, fatiguing confusion. Portentous short paragraphs mingle with clumsily archaic constructions, unconvincingly ramped-up emotions (is there such a thing as "contemptuous pity"?), and the slightly nauseating poetry of invented place names ("Gnurr Kett and Khadoh and Shankell"). All through the first 40 pages or so you can hear the grunts of a writer straining too hard for effect. The opening of The Scar is riddled with such preening.
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