- Paperback: 624 pages
- Publisher: Tor; New edition edition (4 April 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330392905
- ISBN-13: 978-0330392907
- Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 17.8 x 3.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 167,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The question was always: what would he do for an encore? China Mieville's third novel The Scar is set in the same world as his award-winning Perdido Street Station but is a very different book, set in a very different city. Where his New Crobuzon was an old metropolis of cruelty, oppression and glamour, the floating freebooter city Armada is a place of refuge even for those who experience it as a prison. Brilliant linguist Bellis Coldwine is on the run when she is press-ganged by pirates who turn out to be rather more; her abilities make her a valuable commodity and she finds herself intermittently useful to a project so ambitious that it takes her much of the book to comprehend fully. Mieville takes interesting chances by making Bellis his protagonist--she has an arrogant selfishness that at times makes one breathless--but her guts, determination and intermittent realism about herself gradually endear her to us. This is an intelligent book about how individuals and events influence each other and the meaning of freedom. Mieville has a sense of the sea as the place of a menace almost incomprehensibly huge; like Perdido Street Station, The Scar is full of breath-taking moments of wonder which are also moments of heart-stopping terror. --Roz Kaveney
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
A human cargo bound for servitude in exile...A pirate city hauled across the oceans...A hidden miracle about be revealed...This is the story of a prisoner's journey. The search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger. From the author of Perdido Street Station, another colossal fantasy of incredible diversity and spellbinding imagination, which was acclaimed in The Times Literary Supplement as: 'An astonishing novel, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most jaded palate...exhilarating, sometimes very moving, occasionally shocking, always humane and thought-provoking'.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another excellent work,
This review is from: The Scar (Hardcover)
From the author who gave us the brilliant and phantasmagoric 'Perdido Street Station' comes a new work similarly brimming with wit, inventiveness and interest.The author's use of language to paint vivid and engaging pictures is just as evident as in 'Perdido Street Station'. Sights which could be comic if handled only slightly differently hold chilling and at times repellent fascination. Mieville's ability to capture the essence of s scene, person or thing within the space of a few words is one of the things which makes 'The Scar' a truly enjoyable read. However, it's not one for the faint hearted. The author is certainly emergining as one of the finest current exponents of weird fiction. His books blur the boundary between fantasy, SF, horror and all manner of traditional genres, giving a sense of the truly new and innovative. Like any author, there's a certain amount of hat-tipping to favourite and inspirational writers, yet the book has a freshness of idea and place which marks it out from others. The story starts off simply, with the escape of one character from the sprawl of New Crobuzon, the transporting of prisoners across the sea, acts of piracy and the amazing appearance of familiar objects (you'll know what I mean when you come to them). All in all, if you enjoyed 'King Rat' or 'Perdido Street Station', then you'll most certainly enjoy 'The Scar'. If you've not read the authors work before, then I'd heartily recommend this and all of his novels.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Back to Bas-Lag,
By Shah Chowdhury (UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Scar (Paperback)
The second book after the innocuously titled "Perdido Street Station" builds upon the wonderfully leftfield creation from Britain best fantasy writer China Mielville. Insanely descriptive and awash with strange creatures fathomed from a otherworldly conscience this book is brimming full of ideas. Mielville tells the story of a pirate nation searching for a well of power found within a fabled scar, a rent in the bottom of the ocean. This is a backdrop for a myriad of subplots and twists involving politics, war and people. Motivations are mapped out and charted in rich detail that bring you into the tale and help expand the world of Bas-Lag. There are wider horizons than New Crobuzon but the echoing desire to explore that city from the first book is felt by the central character well carved out but never overshadowing the numerous other players in the tale.Miellville never disappoints in this weighty tome and leaves one wanting to find out more about what makes this world tick and what indeed fuels his mind.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ambitious but slightly inferior sequel,
By
This review is from: The Scar (Paperback)
Given the huge success of China Mieville's second novel Perdido Street Station, a follow-up was eagerly expected, but Mieville has bucked expectation by setting The Scar in an entirely different area of Bas-Lag - as such readers hoping for a return journey to the vivid city of New Crobuzon will be disappointed, though to be fair having explored it so thoroughly already any follow-up utilising the same setting may well have suffered from diminishing returns. Instead The Scar is set almost entirely on the floating city state of Armada - a pirate city that is comprised of a mass of stolen ships lashed together, and follows the fortunes of two shanghaied inhabitants: one of whom is desperate to escape, and the other who having been rescued from a prison ship finds a haven on Armarda.As such, The Scar is the best sort of sequel, in that it is only tangentially linked to the previous novel - in this instance the lead heroine is initially on the run from New Crobuzon because she is wrongly suspected of being involved with the Slake Moth outbreak that drove Perdido Street Station. However, while you don't therefore NEED to have read Perdido Street Station in order to enjoy The Scar, I would still recommend reading the previous volume first for one simple reason - it's slightly better. The Scar is filled with fantastic concepts -the city of Armada itself; the leviathan avanc that the Armadan's plan to harness to their city; an island of terrifying mosquito women; and a scar in the fabric of Bas-Lag seemingly created by a crashed alien spaceship that bleeds out quantum instability, and the characters are compelling, but the crucial difference between The Scar and Perdido Street Station is the lack of narrative tension this time round. In Perdido Street Station the narrative was driven by the deadly threat of the Slake Moths, and the characters desperate attempts to contain the threat before the creatures spawned - in The Scar the threat is much more nebulous - whether it's the threat of the monstrous Grindylow hunting someone on board Armada, or the Lover's quest to drive Armarda into the Scar, the threat's are always somewhere over the horizon, and during the novels middle section the book feels rather becalmed. As with Perdido Street Station this is a brick of a novel - unlike Perdido Street Station this feels in need of a little editing. Still - a fine book, but one it's easier to admire than love.
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