Review
Bellis Coldwine, a reserved and somewhat contemptuous academic from the great city of New Crobuzon, is forced to go on the run for reasons initially unexplained. Taking to the sea, her ship is seized by a mysterious group of pirates and carried off to their floating city of Armada. With the other protagonists - Tanner Sack, an old remade man with a pair of squid tentacles grafted to his chest, and Silas Fennec, a mysterious diplomat - she is forced to make a new life there and foil, if she can, the plans of its horrible rulers, the Lovers. Here China Mieville returns to the world of Perdido Street Station. In so doing, he has written a book which has all of Perdido Street's virtues, but also, perhaps, a few of its flaws. Its best feature, and the one for which it is most worth reading, is Mieville's extraordinary inventiveness when it comes to creatures and places. Armada, like New Crobuzon, is a wonderful setting, full of evocatively named and strange districts, races and beings. Mieville has something of Clive Barker's knack for creating forms of the physically grotesque that are also beautiful, although his primary model seems to be John Harrison. Like Harrison, Mieville creates worlds where science, technology and the just plain weird mix and mingle in interesting ways. The flaws - and they are small - have to do with the pacing. The story takes a while to begin: Mieville is fond of giving his characters rather more depth than most fantasists would, which is generally a plus; but, ironically enough, his books tend to take off when the plot, rather than the characters, moves into the foreground. There are also a few too many descriptions of landscape. Although a sense of the strangeness of his places is one of the things Mieville takes care to develop, and although he does write well, the eyes begin to glaze over a little upon encountering yet another two or three pages devoted to a cliff or a set of boats. Still, this is a good book - a welcome change in the genre of fantasy, too, from dull trilogies about a farm-boy who discovers he can wield the power of magic and use it to go off and kill Bob Evil in Evil-land. Mieville's work endeavours to shock with the strange rather than to reassure with the banal; a laudable goal, and one which, here as in Perdido Street, he achieves impressively. (Kirkus UK)
Another beefy fantasy set in the same world as Mieville's landmark Perdido Street Station (2001), where recent upheavals in the city New Crobuzon have caused linguist Bellis Coldwine to fear for her life; she hopes to find sanctuary and anonymity in the colony Nova Esperium, a long ocean voyage distant. But before reaching the colony, her ship's intercepted by pirates from Armada, a huge floating city composed of the hulls of captured vessels. Armada's population, human and nonhuman, is governed by the Lovers, a sadomasochistic pair with momentous but arcane plans, and their assistant, Uther Doul, an unmatchable warrior with artifacts from the ancient, vanished, nonhuman Ghosthead Empire. Also aboard, and opposing the Lovers' plans, is the Brucolac, leader of a vampire cadre, and sinister New Crobuzon superspy Silas Fennec. In addition to the ships, Armada has captured a New Crobuzon drilling rig to extract oil and rockmilk, source of vast thaumaturgic power. The Lovers seek a book written in a language only Bellis can interpret: the book contains the knowledge they need to help them harness an avanc, a vast, half-unreal denizen of the abyssal oceans, strong enough to tow Armada across half the face of the world. But to what purpose? Uther Doul and the Brucolac know, but disagree. And amid the swirling plots, machinations, and secret agendas, Armada's being stalked by a group of shadowy, ocean-dwelling, utterly merciless beings. Again, panoramic and stunningly inventive, but awash with half-baked experimental passages, irritatingly manipulative, overstuffed, and hastily constructed: as frustrating as it is astonishing. (Kirkus Reviews)
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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