Review by Weston Ochse © 2002

The Scar is set in the world of Bas Lag -- the same as China Miéville's last novel, the Arthur C. Clarke award winning Perdido Street Station -- and within the pages of The Scar, language evolves and becomes an ambrosial grease for an epic tale of transformation and identity.

Labelers would call this cross-genre masterpiece part fantasy, part science fiction and part horror. Labelers would be right. The Scar is all of these things, most certainly, but more than anything, The Scar is very, very dark in its approach.

My journey into the fantastic began when I was ten years old on a steamy southern night in the hills of Tennessee when Frodo and Sam beckoned to me and I followed. Several years later, I became a morally ambiguous leper with Thomas Covenant and learned along with him what it entails to be a good man. Then I spent years in a dull wilderness where the fantastic wasn't even fantastic and the pretenders were legion.

Fantastic fiction sloughed through bland cliché until Clive Barker entered my life. Just as I'd felt that Donaldson had created more mature characters than Tolkien, Barker's characters were more mature and ambiguous than Donaldson's -- and darker by a mile. Each novel was a world where my heart both bled and leaped with the turn of the page. Barker's inventiveness astounded me. His characterizations carefully constructed. I felt certain that the realm of dark fantasy had finally found its master. From The Great and Secret Show to Weaveworld to Imagica, worlds and races were created and destroyed before me. I never imagined that Barker's dark fantastic could ever be equaled, but I was wrong, because China Miéville has taken dark fantasy to an entire new level with The Scar.

Scars are a prominent theme throughout the novel. Compassion and cruelty coexist in both metaphor and body. The remades either choose augmentation or are augmented upon. From mechanical appendages to tentacled arms, the races of Bas Lag are scarred by science. The Lovers, a man and women who horribly scar themselves, find mirror images of their pain the most evocative of loves. The planet itself is rent by a huge mythical scar at the edge of the world, the result of the Ghosthead Empire's crash into the planet and the cataclysmic invention of possibilities. In fact all of the characters are scarred in some way. These scars, these studies in transformation, detail China Mieville's intense interest in human nature. It's almost as if he's a mad scientist, scarring and rending his characters just so he can see what their motivations are and what paths they'd choose for survival.

Remades, Anapholei from Mosquito Island, the extinct Ghostheads, Sunglari Cacti Men, The Quick and the Dead of High Cromlech, the Brucolac Vampire, the Cray, the Scabmettlers and the Grindylow are only a few of the races/species that play upon Bas Lag. One must appreciate the loving care that China demonstrated in the construction and history of each one. The sheer detail left me in awe at his ingenuity and the hopes that I will encounter them again.

China Miéville's use of language is breathtaking. Many times I found myself re-reading passages, not because of a lack of understanding, but in appreciation and just a little envy. Several times, I book-marked a page so I could go back to it. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was to use the language so expertly all the while keeping The Scar accessible - a task not often accomplished.

I will not spoil any of the plot, for each chapter seemed to be more impressive than the other in its action, pacing, characterization, some so impressive I am still reliving them with winces and a smiles.

Just so I am clear. I love the works of Tolkien and Donaldson and Barker and will continue my devotion. I am not here to disparage my heroes, but rather to encourage you to discover China -- and if you're at all like Marco Polo, you'll come back and tell the world so it will be forever changed.

That's what I'm doing.

Weston is the co-author of the collection Appalachian Galapagos now available at Medium Rare and in better bookstores. He promises that no castrations were conducted during the research of this review. Try him at www.westonochse.com