Planet Leave

Written by Nina Allan Tuesday, 14 June 2011

Something Rotten In The State Of Denmark

For Something Rotten this month I thought I’d take you on a journey not just to another country but to another planet. China Mieville is one of the most talked-about writers in any genre at the moment, and I’ve just finished reading his latest novel, Embassytown. I’ll get to that in just a moment. First though ,and just to confuse things, I wanted to tell you about how this new book brought back fond memories of another, older one and why that mattered to me.

I must have been about twelve years old when I first read John Christopher’s 'Tripods' trilogy. It wasn’t called that then – a BBC adaptation in the mid-eighties ensured that the books were not just reissued and repackaged but renamed as well– but the terrifying thrill of meeting alien life was, I’m sure, as great for me as for a new generation of budding SF fans a decade and more later. Each of the three books had its own distinct character, but it was the second that I consistently remember as being the most frightening and also the most exciting. The Wellsian tripods have set up strongholds on Earth, and The City of Gold and Lead tells the story of the two young men who eventually sow the seeds of rebellion – by allowing themselves to be taken captive and serving as slaves within the alien city.

I read the book over and over. I could never get over the mixture of fear and awe I felt, watching my heroes trying to grapple with a world whose rules they did not properly understand and that could kill them in an instant if they made a mistake. To my intense delight, China Mieville’s new novel Embassytown reproduced that sense of wonder for me almost exactly, proving that, some forty-five years after John Christopher created the tripods, British science fiction is as daringly inventive as it ever was.

Embassytown tells the story of Avice Benner Cho, a young woman of Earth ancestry working on board interplanetary craft as an 'immerser', one of the specially trained crew who are able to withstand the particular rigours of faster-than-light space travel. Married for the third time, she returns to her home planet Arieka for a holiday with her new husband only to discover that the centuries-old détente between the human colonists and their alien ‘Hosts’ is about to be overturned, endangering the lives of everything and everyone in the city and eventually the planet as a whole. In order to help save her world, Avice has to relearn everything she thought she knew about the society she grew up in, not just in its physical manifestation but in its metaphorical mindset as brute force and twisted intellect collide to reshape reality.

On one level, Embassytown is a fable about war and revolution, about the cataclysmic ramifications of extreme societal change, and about what can happen to the civilian population when their political masters - not to put too fine a point on it - cock up. Mieville is a left-wing socialist of the old school and knows everything there is to know about the Marxist dialectic of stasis to change to new order, and Embassytown can be read as a radical re-enactment of these theories. At the story level the novel works well. The planet Arieka is alive with the sounds and scents of the New Weird, strange beings and teeming landscapes of a type that will be familiar to readers of Mieville’s earlier novels, Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Avice Cho, like Bellis Coldwine before her, is a woman of substance and intellect, and the deteriorating relationship with her husband Scile is skilfully drawn. The sense of danger, the calamitous instability of an alien society in disarray, is involving at the gut level.

But the true excitement of this book lies not in its outward reality but with its metaphorical heart. The language of this novel is diamond-bright, a feast for the mind and the senses. Mieville is never afraid to be poetic, and in its descriptive passages – both of cityscapes and ideas – Embassytown is often strikingly, bravely beautiful. But it goes deeper than that, for Embassytown is above all a novel about language, and Mieville plays all kinds of games with it. We’re travelling with people whose ancestors, once upon a time, were German – so we have the planet-state of Bremen, the lives of its citizens dictated by the constant interaction between those two key German abstractions the manchmal (sometimes) and the immer (always). Indeed our Saxon heritage runs a linguistic thread right through this tapestry, in much the same way that you might find the gracious Russian of Turgenev and Chekhov sneaking in through the back door of Nabokov’s ‘American’ trilogy: Lolita, Ada and Pale Fire. To these rich ingredients Mieville adds contemporary slang, rhapsodic high fantasy, and a steady stream of words and phrases that seem alien to us when we first start reading but that we soon accept and understand as part of the novel’s underlying culture.

We’ve seen artists invent ‘alien’ language systems before – Russell Hoban in his post-apocalyptic fantasy Riddley Walker, for example, or the director Rian Johnson in his 2005 film Brick. When Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange he had his readers reading Russian without realising it. One of the wonders of Embassytown is that it shows us how naturally the human mind assimilates language, how readily – unlike the Hosts of the novel – we accept even a ‘strange’ word as code, as signifier, as a verbal translation of physical reality.

The Hosts’ tragedy is that they cannot make the leap from the real to the imagined. It is their insistence on quotidian truth at the expense of a more slippery metaphorical one that threatens to destroy their society. In order to survive and evolve, the Ariekei have to learn what humans take for granted: that the facts should not be confused with the truth.

Indeed, we might do well to consider science fiction itself as a metaphor here, the purest illustration of how the depiction of ‘unreal’ things, persons and situations – of lies, if you like - can illuminate our human situation and enrich our understanding of the world more powerfully and with greater insight than much of the artfully constructed quasi-realism we are led to revere as literary fiction.

For me as a writer the most touching and significant aspect of Embassytown is its final message: that it is the gift of written language, of writing itself, that is the most enduring, the ultimate code for life.

As a footnote, once you’ve read and enjoyed Embassytown, I would recommend you seek out China Mieville’s short story Covehithe, as published recently in The Guardian. This story is a superb little spin-off from Embassytown, using its ideas and imagery in surprising ways.

It’ll also tell you how the tripods came to Norfolk……

Continuing with the multi-ethnic thread, I was lucky enough to be at the prizegiving ceremonies last month for two of the major science fiction literature awards and was fascinated to see that in both cases the winning books were works of ‘World SF.’

The worthy winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel was Ian McDonald for The Dervish House, an urban fantasy of the near future. The novel is set in Istanbul, a city straddling the dividing line between Europe and Asia and teetering on the brink of a whole new age. Seething with political ferment, old scores and nanotechnology run riot, the world of The Dervish House is familiar yet strange, both a hyper-realistic portrait of the universe we’re already living in and a glimpse into a future that is thrilling and limitless and potentially more dangerous than anything we’ve yet encountered.

The story follows the lives of six characters during a week of momentous change for them as individuals and for the city they live in. As the action unfolds, the six separate narratives begin to converge and intermingle, demonstrating in the most powerful manner the way the actions of one can ultimately affect the fates of all.

The narrative is compelling and complex, but the star of the show, here and always in McDonald’s fiction, is the writing itself. Here we have image piled high upon memorable image, an oriental bazaar of colour and texture opened before us in a language so rich and so personal that as both reader and writer I cannot help but be in awe of McDonald’s achievement. There is never a dull sentence.

Born in Manchester but resident in Belfast from the age of five, McDonald grew up during the seventies at the height of the Troubles, and is often quoted as saying that it was this atmosphere of conflict and change that left the most indelible mark on him as a writer. Throughout his evolving oeuvre we see him concerned with precisely these subjects – but as his language is never dull, his polemic is never preachy or didactic. As with all artists of genuine stature, it is as a writer and not as a politician that McDonald is most passionately engaged, and it is to all our benefit that he is more comfortable asking questions than providing answers.

McDonald was widely tipped to carry off the Arthur C. Clarke Award as well as the BSFA, but in a surprise turn of events the Clarke went to Lauren Beukes for her novel Zoo City, a noir fantasy set in an alternate Johannesburg.

The narrative follows the story of Zinzi December, a young woman whose troubled life hits an all-time low when she shoots her brother in a drug-fuelled rage and ends up with a sloth on her back as an ever-present visible reminder of her guilt. The world of the "animalled" is nasty, brutish and short; a culture of gang rivalry, drive-by shootings and loud music familiar to us from other films and novels of the urban noir but revealed in a new way and thus illuminated with an extra intensity.

For all the violence in Zoo City, the word I’ve used most consistently to describe this novel to others is warm. It is not the killing and the fight scenes that you take away with you, but the intensity of the friendships and the high value of loyalty in a community forced out to the edge of society. The characters in Zoo City are a new breed, and it is surely no accident that – like McDonald - Beukes has chosen to set her book in a city that might itself stand as a metaphor for evolution and change.

Together with books like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Kaaron Warren’s collection Dead Sea Fruit, Zoo City and The Dervish House can be seen as vanguard works in a new New Wave of genre fiction in which other cultures, ideologies and above all languages play a pivotal role. I am delighted to see both McDonald and Beukes gaining official recognition for novels that have as much to say about good writing as enthralling plot. I am equally delighted to see writers as bold and exciting as these recognising speculative fiction as the boldest and most exciting arena in which to fulfil their talents as creative artists.