Miéville, China: Embassytown
Embassytown (2011)
Written by: China Miéville
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 345 (ARC)
The copy was received for review from the publisher via LibraryThing's Early Reviewer's Program.
Why I Read It: I haven't read any Miéville since Perdido Street Station, which I read back in 2006. I've meant to read him since then. I've even got a copy of The City & The City waiting impatiently on my shelf! But I glommed onto this one when I saw it in the Early Reviewer's Program because it was Miéville writing SF, and that I just had to see. I would've read it sooner than now, but Del Rey's ARCs ask that reviews not be posted until on or after the release date, in this case May 17th of this year. Which means I put it off a bit, but because it's an ARC, I refused to put it off for long.
The premise: ganked from publisher's website: In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.
Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.
When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties-to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.
Spoilers, yay or nay?: Honestly, this isn't the kind of book you can spoil, in that even if I revealed the ending, it won't effect your reading one way or the other. This is China Miéville, not Chuck Palahniuk, you know? But I'm not going to get into any real details that amount to anything regarding spoilers, so you should be safe. However, if you're paranoid and want to stay purely surprised, skip to "My Rating" and you'll be fine. Everyone else, let's chat.
The first thing I want to make very clear is that I absolutely loved Perdido Street Station. It's an excellent book, even though I have some quibbles about the end. It's also one of the rare books where I completely believe in the world-building, it's that immersive. So please understand: when I chose to read this book, it's because I have great faith and respect in Miéville as a writer.
I almost didn't finish it.
It's ironic too: a story that focuses on an alien Language ends up being somewhat unreadable due to its use of language. Two things here: 1) it's not actually unreadable because I did read it, after all, but it's by no means an easy read; 2) the difference between language (every day language, how the book is written, etc) and Language, which is the term for the tongue of the Hosts. Please note that I'm not being arbitrary with my capitalization in the review: language and Language refer to very different things.
Let's start from the top. I did manage to take quite a few notes for this one! I want to quote from this book too, but I can't because according to my ARC cover, I shouldn't quote without checking the quotes against the published copy, which I don't have, so boo!
So I've already complained about Miéville's use of language and how it borders on unreadable and how ironic that is, because it's book about language and Language. Yet it's appropriate: one of the criticisms of SF, especially space opera, is that everyone sounds like they do in this day and age. The books are written similarly. So I appreciate Miéville going out of his way to create a kind of dialec and syntax that is unique to our narrator, and given that our narrator is in the future, it makes sense that the syntax doesn't flow in a way that makes sense to our modern ears. My appreciation doesn't forgive the fact that this very thing almost made me put the book down, but it did help me put things in perspective and persevere. Yet sometimes that syntax seemed unnecessary wordy and difficult, with words falling in an order that seemed wrong or backward. The kind of thing that if you were editing an unpublished manuscript, you might suggest a rearrangement, and the style wouldn't suffer from said rearrangement and you'd end up with a cleaner sentence, you know? That was frustrating.
Not as frustrating, though, and not truly understanding what the hell the book was about and why Avice is the one telling us this story. When the "formerly" section wrapped up, I was at a loss as to how it related to the "Latterday" section, with no sense on how on Earth these two seemingly separate stories would connect in any sort of way that's satisfying. Don't get me wrong: read on to the end and you learn that they do connect, in a way that's as baffling as it is fascinating in terms of figuring out the logical how's and why's of everything. But before we even got to that particular marriage between parts, that fusion of storylines, I got bored.
See, part of my engagement was trying to figure out what was so wrong with EzRa that the Hosts were reacting so strangely. Once that was revealed, I lost interest rapidly as Avice watched the society she grew up in turn into a mini-war zone. Given that these sections were close to the end, it didn't bode well: I wanted Miéville to stop dragging everything and just get to a point and wrap it up. He does that, but not as quickly as I'd like, but fortunately, once he marries the "Formerly" portion of the story with the "Latterday," and we finally get a solution, I'm fully fascinated again. It's just taxing to get there.
Yet, I will give credit for Miéville giving us a different kind of war, an alien war, which is appropriate, given that one side of the battlefield is completely alien. Kudos, even if it didn't completely hold my interest until the solution was reached. And when we learned why lying for the Hosts was so important and detrimental to the overall plot, I was happily floored. Baffled, yes, because again, I'm trying to understand how and why it works -- that's how alien the Host's Language is to me, because a language without lies is just so very difficult to comprehend. Yet, when we learn why lying is important, it's very, very cool for the story.
Random things that grabbed me:
-- Parts of space that weren't invitations to come visit, but rather lighthouses warning ships to stay away (page 32).
-- The idea that universes are born and die and are born again and die again and so forth, and that immer (which is never truly adequate explained), is somehow eternal through all of this. Neat idea, even if I can't figure it all out (page 34).
-- Once we learned what Ambassadors were and how they functioned, I'm glad I was able intuitively understand what Bren was, a cleaved Ambassador. Miéville confirms this before the book is over, but I felt proud of myself for paying attention to details and being able to put the pieces together.
-- I absolutely love Miéville's shout-outs to fictional aliens. on page 53. There's shout-outs to both Star Wars as well as Karen Traviss' excellent Wess'har series, which makes me grin like a maniac.
-- I have a special interest in all fictional ways in which minds are linked, so I was fascinated by the background of how Ambassadors were created and why.
-- Once I recognized the braided structure of the story as similar to what Ursula K. Le Guin used in The Dispossessed, reading became a lot easier. Especially after seeing somewhere that Le Guin herself blurbed this book (damn if I can find where that quote is though!).
-- I love Avice's doubts regarding her love CalVin, how she wondered which one loved her best, and if the other simply tolerated her or didn't care for her at all. That whole relationship and the dynamics between those two/three people were fascinating.
-- I remember seeing a comparison of this book to Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, one of my favorite books of all time. It, too, had a braided story structure, but also focused heavily on the communication between humans and an alien race and the misunderstandings that come from such attempts at communication. I think Russell does it far better, as I was able to emotionally engage with her book far more than I could here, but the comparison between the two is rather neat, to see two writers' different takes on the same subject.
-- Language takes a kind of religious significance in this book, with some characters striving to protect the Host's Language at all costs, even at the cost of humanity. There's a line about a character falling among Lucifers that I really hope made the final print version, because it's just an excellent line (page 339 in the ARC). I also really liked the refrain in this book, about how "Word always gets out." No matter how tightly someone's trying to keep a secret, word gets out because that's what it does. And in a book about language, that's neat.
And now for some drawbacks I haven't mentioned yet:
Avice is not a compelling character. She's an observer, and she ends up having an important role by the end, but that's kind of an accident of marriage and being at the right place at the right time. There's nothing heroic or unheroic about this character, so I was surprised to sympathize with her cause by the book's end, to realize she was right, because she was so bland for most of the time. Just because she's a simile for the Hosts doesn't make her special to me, so it made reading her narrative difficult, because she was important for reasons I couldn't fathom. But then again, isn't self-importance the hardest for everyone but the self to understand sometimes?
I guess part of it's because I never fully understood her career, let alone what floaking was. I interpreted it to mean what made most sense to me, that immersing was basically the same idea we see in SF where certain people have the aptitude/genetics/Force to be able to fly in hyperspace or lightspeed and every one else didn't. Floaking, well, hell if I know. Does it mean being a groupie? Or something? Not sure, but the undue stress on it didn't help me understand the character any better.
You may wonder why I decided to keep reading. For starters, it is Miéville, and I had the excellent Perdido Street Station under my belt. Seeing Le Guin's blurb for the book also made me look at it in a new light, a more soft SF light, which helped me get going. And when the mystery of EzRa was finally introduced I wanted to find out what the hell was going on and why and how it related to the Formerly parts of the book, so Miéville gave me, personally, just enough to keep turning the pages. And I did get used to the language and rhythm of the book. That really helped.
My Rating: Problematic but Promising
If you've not read China Miéville before, then for the love of everything pure and good, DO NOT START HERE. Instead, grab yourself a copy of Perdido Street Station and all will be good (for the record, this and PSS are the only two Miéville I've read). If I hadn't read this author before, I think I would've been utterly and completely lost. For a book about language and how it works and why it works (and with Miéville trying his damnedest to create an alien Language that's truly alien), it's not an easy book to read by any means, and I think Miéville's syntax could've been a little bit cleaner at times. That said, most all of the ideas propelling this book are fascinating, if you have the patience enough to GET to those ideas in the first place. Patience is the key, and I wouldn't think less of a reader who doesn't have said patience here. I don't believe this is Miéville's best, but I'm glad I got to read his take on the SF genre, because it was interesting on different levels, just not all the time. The book does sag at inopportune parts (like the beginning, close to the end) and that makes continuing very difficult. But for the dedicated fan of his work, there is something of merit to be found in these pages. But dedication is necessary. I'm hoping that The City & The City, which is still sitting on my shelf, will be a much better and stronger read. :)
Cover Commentary: My ARC has no cover art, but the actual cover art isn't anything that grabs my eye. Looking at it up close makes me wish it was a little more alien/SF looking; however, I do appreciate the letters falling from the title itself in a rather Matrix-like format. Nice touch, and an easy one to miss. Still not a cover that'll nab my eye from across the store, though.
Next up: Not sure. You shall be surprised!