A Hat Trick for Mr Mieville

Day before yesterday, The City and the City, that exquisite hybrid of crime fiction and conceptual speculation, became only the fifth novel - after Take Back Plenty, The Sparrow, Christopher Priest's The Separation and Air by Geoff Ryman - to win both the BSFA and the Arthur C. Clarke award.

Not only that: China Mieville became the very first author to have won that latter acclaim three times. They honoured him in 2001 for Perdido Street Station, the beginning of the Bas-Lag trilogy, then again in 2005 for its rather underrated conclusion, Iron Council. And now, well... the gent's gone and done it again.

Three cheers are in order, I think. One for each of his Clarke trophies! Wait, is there even a trophy? Never mind. As Niall Harrison observes over on Torque Control, it's a judgment "which instantly looks like one of those decisions that couldn't have gone any other way," though let's be honest here: the six novels on the 2010 shortlist represented an incredible and diverse collection of speculative fiction, each and every one of which was in its own way award-caliber fodder.

But there's no questioning the wisdom of the Clarke panel's decision. Not to toot my own horn here, but as I Tweeted shortly before the ceremonies began, The City and the City is a book deserving of every inch of the praise and acclaim that's been heaped on it, and of all the candidates - of the four I've read, I should say - far and away the most extraordinary. Would that I had a review to link to, but I'm the blog wasn't even a wicked twinkle in my eye when Mieville's last novel hit bookstore shelves, so let's just say it was my favourite book of 2009 and leave it at that.

So. Huge congrats to China, first and foremost, but also to Julie Crisp, Chloe Healy, and all at Macmillan and Tor UK for their well deserved triumph.

But I'm not just posting to pat everyone involved on the back. Some kind soul thought to record the author's short acceptance speech, and as per usual, China, in the space of three mere minutes, manages to be illuminating, funny and touching. Here:

I very nearly teared up there at the end. Would that China's dear mum, for whom he wrote The City and the City - and indeed the novel is dedicated to her memory - had been around to see her son so honoured. I've no doubt she'd have been the proudest parent in all of London. And as those of us who've had the pleasure of China's latest novel know, London is the world.

But transcripted for your convenience, here are a few of the most prescient points China raised in his speech:

"Earlier this year, in response to a critique of the Booker prize, for ignoring some of the most exceptional literature out there - by one of the shortlistees; by Kim Stanley Robinson - the judge, the academic and writer John Mullan explained that the reason he didn't consider science fiction was because science fiction is bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.

"He totally means us! I know it's very very cheap to rally the crown against a pantomime villain - but I never said I was expensive...

"One of the many reasons - I know we whine about this incessantly - one of the many reasons that I think that this is such a shame, this kind of contumely, is because as anyone who's been online knows and has looked around at the debate around this prize and science fiction prizes in general knows that by contrast science fiction readers are among the most critical, the most - they combine an extraordinary generosity with an extraordinarily rigorous critique in a way that I never see among many other readers. You know, the seriousness, the systemacicity, the fascination, the rigour with which the readers of this extraordinary field read is a constant amazement to me, and constantly something I'm very proud of.

"I think, at its best, they are the greatest readers and the greatest fiction out there, and I'm very very grateful to those readers for being open to a little bit of crime in their speculation. And just to conclude, I'd also say I'm extremely grateful to readers of crime for being open to a little speculation with their murder. It's meant a great deal to me to be read outside those traditional areas."

You've got to love a guy who can slip "contumely" into everyday speech with a perfectly straight face. I'm exactly the type to pride myself on knowing the meaning of all sorts of obscure words, and even I had to look that one up!

But to my point. I wonder, are we really "the greatest readers" of fiction? No man's above lip-service, I suppose, especially when honoured as China was on Wednesday night, but he honestly doesn't seem the type to be stroking our egos just because we really rather like his books. Certainly we are critical; sometimes overly so, I'd say. And speaking for myself, I know I'm capable of very generous praise when a book truly calls out to me - as Kraken did last week, for instance (review here).

And yet, China had barely finished giving his very gracious acceptance speech, calling us all lovely things, thanking us for our acceptance of him, in turn, for "being open to a little bit of crime in [our] speculation" and lo and behold, a debate calling into question the very openness China was speaking of was raging across the blogosphere. Was The City and the City really science fiction anyway, the instigators asked?

To which question I would answer, after a not inconsiderable amount of thought: pshaw. I don't often take idle talk personally, but this particular thing, this bothered me. How incredibly discriminatory, to consider - even for a moment - the dismissal out of hand of a novel that unquestionably does touch on speculative concepts simply because it also incorporates elements of another genre. Not only that; it's a slippery slope. Should science fiction that has within its pages allusions of intimacy be thus deigned romance? I mean, really.

It's time likes these that I'm reminded of how utterly reductive the notion of genre is.

More on which subject soon...

In the meantime, let this be an open forum for celebration of China's landmark triumph, and perhaps further discussion of the notion of our worth as critics of speculative fiction. Lest we forget the question on everyone's lips: to those of you who've read the Clarke award-winner, do you think its incorporation of tropes more typical of other genres should somehow have excluded it from consideration?

I'll totally fight anyone who says so... ;)

Book Review: Kraken by China Mieville

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /

IndieBound / The Book Depository

"Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?

"For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he’s been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it’s a god. 

"A god that someone is hoping will end the world."

***

 

The single most surprising thing about Kraken is that, when you get right down to it, it's a comedy. Of course there's more to the latest from multiple award-winning author China Mieville than a wicked sense of humour and some canny wordplay - truly, a great deal more - but when all is said and done, Kraken is an elaborate, endlessly imaginative joke topped off with a punch-line that will take your breath away.

Meet Billy Harrow. An unremarkable curator in London's world-renowned Natural History Museum, Billy's crowning glory is the preservation of a particularly impressive giant squid. Guiding an excited tour-group around the facility one afternoon, he makes a mind-boggling discovery: the nine-metre giant squid, encased in a tank containing thousands of litres of Formalin, has vanished. His first thought, having come upon an ominous absence where the museum's star attraction stood only moments before, echoes the utter bafflement of all those who clamour around the scene of the crime. "What the hell?" indeed.

The guards know nothing; Billy's fellow employees haven't a clue; nor do the police have a scooby as to how someone could possibly have disappeared such a monstrous specimen. Only when the FSRC - the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime unit - pressgang Billy into an unsettling interview does the unlikely hero of Kraken begin to understand how very different London is from the city he thought he knew. The cult squad are a bunch of crazies themselves, but whatever Billy's qualms about Kath, Baron and Vardy, they serve to start him on an apocalyptic journey into the capital's hidden underworld; a journey which takes in all the darkly fantastic sights anyone who's read Mieville in the past will be familiar with.

Which isn't to say that Kraken represents the same old Mieville with a few new tricks. Certainly it treads on ground that the noted New Weird author's devoted readership will recall from the likes of King Rat and Un Lun Dun, literally in the first instance - Mieville does love his London, and in Kraken, London is the world - but also figuratively insofar as Mieville mines such customary subjects as politics, religion and revolution. But he excavates in those very metaphorical mines some extraordinary new material: an astonishing array of cultures and creeds easily the equal of those which made his trilogy of Bas-Lag books so beloved. And the London of Kraken is a city distinct from those Londons Mieville has surveilled in the past.

Of all the author's storied back-catalogue, Kraken most resembles a real-world Perdido Street Station in its unrelenting urban environs - even the sea, you will see, is encased in concrete - though to call Mieville's latest urban fantasy is to do it a grave disservice given the lamentable misappropriation of the term in recent memory. In its thematic concerns and narrative progression, too, Kraken is most similar to the Bas-Lag books: hardly a chapter goes by without a fascinating potted history of one invented faith or race or another - be it the union of magical familiars, the legion of Londonmancers, an embassy of the sea. Some will surely revolt at the notion of a story interrupted for an infodump apropos of apparently nothing, but in time Mieville wraps up each and every one of his demented inventions into the novel's narrative tissue with a deft touch and a fiendishly sinister sense of humour.

Muster up the concentration to penetrate Mieville's characteristically dense prose and you'll find your efforts amply rewarded, but patience is, as ever, a requirement when reading the work of this master craftsman. And yet, outside of Un Lun Dun, Kraken is without a doubt Mieville's most accessible novel to date - though there's no single thing you can point to as conclusive proof of its somewhat commercial sensibilities. Rather, it is a cunning conjunction of forces which work, in coalition, to render Kraken a more approachable narrative: the veracity of its vivid setting, a city whose boundaries are drawn in blood and stone and ink; the popular Lovecraftian connotations of its be-tentacled subject matter; the refinement of Mieville's powerful prose over the years.

Not to mention the author's fiendishly sinister sense of humour, and the whimsical tone with which he tells the tale. A man wearing a Gundam T-shirt practices extreme origami; a body "listlessly [humps] the stony shoreline with the slap-slap of the water"; the Lolcats make an appearance which I won't spoil; while characters discuss the notion of "squid pro quo" and the "squiddity" of how "martyrs [might] emerge from martyrdom's other side." Mieville's is a wit quite without equal. Pointed and gleefully profane, culturally aware but not for a second restrained by mere reality, his narrative turns on misunderstanding, on literal trickery, but none of Mieville's capricious play robs Kraken of its sophistication.

In its way, it is, for all its revelry, as impactful an experience as The City and The City, together with which this novel marks a startling new chapter in the continuing evolution of both the New Weird and its most powerful proponent, Mieville himself. There is nothing stagnant about these waters. Poetic, demented, surprisingly approachable and seething with intelligence, Kraken is a cracking read, no doubt about it.

***

Kraken

by China Mieville

May 2010, Macmillan

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Excerpt Emporium: Kraken by China Mieville

Well, I'm back.

We'll have a proper catch up tomorrow, once I've had a chance to find my feet - get talking about the reading I did and didn't do while I was away, all that. For the moment, I wanted to point you all in the direction of the latest extract to hit Pan Macmillan's site. It's for none other than Kraken, China Mieville's hugely anticipated - and not just by me - forthcoming dark fantasy. Here's a quick sample to whet your appetitite:

The sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: you’re a big boy.

The sea’s full of saints and it’s been full of saints for years. Since longer than anything. Saints were there before there were even gods. They were waiting for them, and they’re still there now.

Saints eat fish and shellfish. Some of them catch jellyfish and some of them eat rubbish. Some saints eat anything they can find. They hide under rocks; they turn themselves inside out; they spit up spirals. There’s nothing saints don’t do.

Make this shape with your hands. Like that. Move your fingers. There, you made a saint. Look out, here comes another one! Now they’re fighting! Yours won.

There aren’t any big corkscrew saints any more, but there are still ones like sacks and ones like coils, and ones like robes with flapping sleeves. What’s your favourite saint? I’ll tell you mine. But wait a minute, first, do you know what it is makes them all saints? They’re all a holy family, they’re all cousins. Of each other, and of . . . you know what else they’re cousins of?

That’s right. Of gods.

Alright now. Who was it made you? You know what to say.

Who made you?

Now that's a voice I've dearly missed. Is there any writer quite so distinctive as China Mieville, I wonder?

Click through to read the whole excerpt.

Here's to Kraken, a mere two months out at this point. You already know I'm excited - the preview I published on The Speculative Scotsman in the blog's first few foundling weeks makes that quite clear, I think.

 

Between this and Guy Gavriel Kay's incredible Under Heaven, tell me this isn't a great time to be reading speculative fiction.

Book Preview: Kraken by China Mieville

[Pre-order this book from Amazon

in the UK / in the US]

***

Whether he's to your tastes or your favourite fiction is more prosaic fare, there can be little doubt that few such fertile imaginations exist than that which China Mieville has mined in his increasingly diverse output this past decade. The oft-esteemed author made his name in speculative circles with a triumvirate of novels set in the wonderfully wretched world of Bas-Lag - the best of which, for my money, has to be The Scar, a perverse seafaring adventure that was also my first Mieville - but unlike so many once-promising new voices, this prominent proponent of the New Weird did not idly content himself by exploiting the wonderful world he had established until his dwindling legions of readers grew exhausted with it.

We might, perhaps, wish he had: neither the inevitable Young Adult experiment nor the abstract crime thriller that followed Un Lun Dun have quite recaptured the staggering sensation of exploring the seedier streets of New Crobuzon and its surroundings with one remade guide or another, and yet, Mieville's novels after Iron Council have not been without their strengths.

Un Lun Dun itself has been described as puerile, derivative drivel, and it's not difficult to see where such criticisms begin; sadly, I suspect those readers and sometime reviewers responsible for such slating resigned themselves to their ill expectations too soon, for Mieville, in the end, weaves a much more powerful and untraditional narrative than the blurb would have you believe. But I digress.

The City and the City, his last and arguably best effort notwithstanding the Bas-Lag books, was an existentialist crime thriller with a characteristic kick: the crime in question had been committed in an area on the fringe of two distinct cities that somehow exist in the same physical space. Mieville's greatest strength has always been in his settings, and the borderlines between Beszel and Ul Qoma - not to mention Breach - proved to be an environment rich enough in potential and subversiveness to rival the very best. Sadly, the brevity of The City and the City was a restrictive rather than a focusing force, and unless Mieville returns to its world, much of that inherent potential will unfortunately remain unrealised.