Having not touched his work for many years, I'm going through something of a China Miéville renaissance. I listened to one of his more academic works, on the Communist Manifesto out of curiosity a few months back - the man's an avowed Marxist and his views, although they don't chime with my own in many regards, are worth considering even when they're wrong - which led me to Un Lun Dun, his young adult novel set in an alternative London. An odd read, in many respects. His love of wild ideas had a tendency to run away with him, and it could be seen in Un Lun Dun. There's much to admire about the man's imagination and his energetic prose, but sometimes there's a lack of coherence that means the suspension of disbelief just isn't quite possible. Despite this, I did enjoy it. There's something about other worlds that triggers the imagination, even when it doesn't quite make sense.
This has led me to return to Bas-Lag, and his trilogy of new weird blockbusters, Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. I read them 15 years ago and always intended to return. They pulse with energy and imagination. Even now there's a freshness to them, returning to them as an older man and more experienced writer. His use of language is that of a man in love with what he writes, but it is highly evocative. It's the sort of prose which you either love or hate; I find I have to be in the mood for Miéville, otherwise I find him annoying in his early iterations. The prose can be glutinous, globulous, cloying in its phrasing and use of particular words.
I loved Perdido Street Station all over again. There's something really fresh about it. The plot rockets along even in its slower moments. The world of Bas-Lag and the city of New Crobuzon is built on structures that make sense - perhaps unlike Un Lun Dun, where the bones of reality bend and break, brittle as they are in a fantasy setting - with a real sense of history and depth. There are entire cultures realised in those pages.
The Scar? I loved it when I was younger, but this time the characters left me cold. The writing is of the same quality. The world is realised just as well, the new setting of Armada and its offshoots three-dimensional and believable. But the characters just didn't work for me this time, particularly Bellis Coldwine. A part of this is intentional on the part of Miéville - she's meant to be unsympathetic - but I just couldn't get past it on this read. It left me high and dry.
I'm about to embark on Iron Council, the most overtly political of Miéville's fiction works. It doesn't take a genius to connect it to the October Revolution (something else Miéville has written about, with October - a book I read and quickly passed on to an A Level Russian history teacher for him to scour for extracts; as a work of interpretation through the prism of a Marxist worldview, quite a book, but as a work of history... less so) with its threat of revolution against an oppressive regime, a train returning from exile, and the backdrop of a great power war. This is the book I've left it longest between reads, and the only one of the Bas-Lag novels I haven't previously revisited, so we'll see how it goes.
