The Alien Nextdoor. Mieville, Monsters and Metaphors

[wingsmith]

Originally published at Tom Pollock. Please leave any comments there.

SPOILER WARNING: (You should defi­nately read the book before this post!)

First things first, this isn’t a review of Embassy­town.  Other peo­ple have writ­ten far clearer and smarter assess­ments of Mieville’s Language/Disaster/Philosophy/Spaceship mashup  than I ever could. Suf­fice to say its bizarre, bril­liant and utterly gripping.




This is just a note. An exer­cise in pat­tern spot­ting. There seem to be some trends run­ning through the bald-one’s oeu­vre that are wind­ing them­selves together in Embassy­town. Trends around the theme of ‘The Alien’, and I thought I’d share three of them, see if any­one wanted to argue:

1) Weird-ass crea­ture shit

That’s a tech­ni­cal term. Mieville gen­er­ally has a yen for Franken­stein­ism. He spawns crea­tures prodi­giously, but most of them are an aggre­gate of two or three famil­iar con­cepts. A scarab-beetle-woman, say. Or a city-antibody.  Every now and then though, Mieville gives us a mon­ster that’s harder to picture. One such is the Slake-Moths of Per­dido Street Sta­tion. They are described with lov­ing detail, but piece­meal. A chiti­nous fore­limb here, a frac­tal, non-euclidean wing there. The cam­era never really draws back to show the whole mon­ster at once.

The Hosts of Embassy­town are described with alot of the same fea­tures ( chitin, wings, pointy limbs) and with the same refusal to give a handy umbrella-concept to hang our men­tal image on. The effect how­ever, is very dif­fer­ent. In PSS the writ­ing is Love­craft­ian: hor­ror through extreme alien­ation, the writ­ing pro­vokes our arach­nid reflex.  In Embassy­town on the other hand, while the Hosts occa­sion­ally do hor­ri­fy­ing things, the sug­ges­tion that their alien-ness implies hor­ror, has been shorn away. The hosts hor­rify and endear in the same way as humans do - con­tin­gently.  Not because of what they are, but because of what they choose, and the cir­cum­stances that force their hands (or rather, giftwings).

2) Border-Breach Trauma

“My city is not your city” King Rat tells a trau­ma­tised, semi-willing abductee Saul in Mieville’s first novel. “It shares all of its points, but none of it’s properties.  The idea of two  incom­men­su­rable cities, ‘cheek by jowl, but cross the bor­der at your peril’ has been present in his writ­ing for alot longer the The City and The City.

But travel between Mieville’s twin poli­ties is grow­ing eas­ier. In King Rat, only Saul really tran­si­tioned from one world to the other. Other char­ac­ters were brushed by King Rat’s uni­verse, but they mostly wound up bru­tal­ized. In TC&TC unli­censed emi­grees are disappeared,even the unwit­ting ones. There are pro­to­cols for trans­fer, but they are inac­ces­si­ble to most, and a huge psy­cho­log­i­cal taboo for all.

Embassytown’s split cities have more porous bor­ders. The liv­ing flesh city of the Hosts, with it’s throat-pipes and dog­like bat­ter­ies, cra­dles the human ghetto. There are taboos, true. Cross­ing over does come with risk. You can’t breathe the air there, one char­ac­ter nearly dies try­ing, but there are ways around this. As the novel pro­gresses, more and more humans head into the host city, for an encounter with the weird. They do so in the midst of cri­sis, true. But in Embassy­town this dras­tic emmi­gra­tion is the response to dis­as­ter, it does not invite it.

3) The idea your cul­ture can­not understand

This trope reared it’s head in Per­dido St. Sta­tion, via the dark past of Yagharek: the Garuda.

Isaac, PSS’s pro­tag­o­nist, is told that this bird-man has com­mited ‘Choice-theft’: a crime so egre­gious in Garuda cul­ture that he’s been exiled for it, but one that Isaac could never comprehend.

In PSS, this innate untrans­late­abil­ity is used as an aggra­va­tor, to empha­size the dif­fer­ence between the bird­man and the human, to dis­tance the one from the other. When, at the end of the story, the nature of Yagharek’s crime is revealed, the effect is bathetic. While, we don’t really under­stand what choice-theft means to the Garuda, the crime described cer­tainly enters into Isaac’s (and our) lex­i­con of vio­lence. The effect seems to be as if to say: ‘You know that great inter­cul­tural mys­tery, we men­tioned? It’s actu­ally not all that mys­te­ri­ous.’ The dif­fer­ence between the two cul­tures is par­tially effaced.

The ‘untrans­late­able idea’ trope is at the heart of Embassy­town. The idea, in this case is the lie: the sense with­out ref­er­ent, with no state of the world to make it true. A con­cept famil­iar to humans, but one the alien Hosts can­not parse

With an entire novel as the stage, Embassytown’s treat­ment of this trope is far more sophis­ti­cated. The dis­tance between the human and hosts psy­ches is respected and main­tained, even while the hosts grope for ways around it, such as cut­ting them­selves off mid­way telling a truth to say a false­hood. When even­tu­ally the first Hosts cross the divide, and attain the abil­ity to use metaphor, the effect is a mil­lion miles from bathos. It is exhilarating.

For me, the key dif­fer­ence is that in Embassy­town it is the human idea which is taken to be imparsable, alien and bizarre. It’s the aliens who have the prob­lem that we need to under­stand if we’re to get the point of the book. This demands an act of empa­thy with the hosts from the reader, even to grasp that prob­lem. We are brought together with the alien, even while our dif­fer­ences are under­scored. There’s a kind of asymp­tote towards the impos­si­ble. Of course, we could never really com­mu­ni­cate with some­thing truly alien. But through this sleight of tongue, that goal feels a lit­tle closer.




Con­clu­sion…

….s are tough to draw, and mas­sive hostages to for­tune. But at the risk of even more tenous theory-wank, there does seem to be an over­ar­ch­ing theme to the above.

Mieville, some­what counter-intuitively for some­one with his record on mon­sters, is de-horrifying the Alien. He’s mak­ing it eas­ier to access, less frightening-as-default, but with­out remov­ing any of it’s alien-ness. The alien’s world is no longer a wholly for­bid­den zone, its weird appear­ance no longer a ves­sel of terror.

Embassy­town is post-monster Mieville. The Hosts aren’t crea­tures you fight, they’re crea­tures you talk to.  Nev­er­the­less, that con­ver­sa­tion is as dan­ger­ous, heroic and vital as bat­tling any mind-slurping hypno-insect. And for the first time in his work, it’s a con­ver­sa­tion that feels some­where close to possible.