EMBASSYTOWN (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

Published 2011, 368 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B+
Plot: B
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

Embassytown is a good book, an OK sci-fi novel, and a slightly disappointing China Mieville novel, given his demonstrated potential. Of the four Mieville books I've read now (I'm concurrently reading The Scar, but that review won't be up for a few weeks) Embassytown is probably the least-great. Probably, that just goes to show how strong Mieville is as an author. Yet here, he shies away from the those things that previously made him such an interesting, unique writer, even as he seems to embrace the same themes and stylistic decisions that should play to those very strengths. Embassytown, like all Mieville novels that I've read, is as much about the city in which it takes place as any of the other plot components. The city is a character — though here, it never becomes the main character, which is maybe the primary difference.

Embassytown only embodies that theme in its setting, a human ghetto set within the borders of an alien city on a frontier planet — it never really deals with the nature of cities within cities the way Mieville's other stories did. Embassytown is the name of a human colony nested within the city of the Hosts, aliens who speak an extremely unusual language. The nature of language itself, rather than that of cities, becomes the main "character" of the novel. There are two quirks to the language of the Hosts: first, they have two mouths, and so their language is layered, a dual language of simultaneously spoken sounds, thus making it impossible for a human to physically reproduce. Secondly, the Hosts are stuck in some bizarre stage of evolutionary psychology, and are not sentient in the way that humans are sentient, despite having evolved society, cities and complex bio-technology. This is also due to their unique language, which isn't a language to them at all, but manifested thoughts. To the Hosts, their words are not 'words' but simply shared, pure reality; they have not evolved the concept of signifiers or metaphors or language as humans understand it. As a result, Hosts cannot lie; what they speak can only directly relate to the world around them. Also as a result, all other organized language is gibberish to them, including their own when not spoken by another Host. In order to communicate with the Hosts, humans have bred special clones, identical dual ambassadors that are able to speak the dual language as one mind. Eventually, naturally, this tedious and imperfect system causes an upset in the balance between the species. Hilarity ensues.

So Embassytown is about language, more than anything. Every plot development is a result of language. The main character herself is caught up in the concept of language — as a child, she was forced to undergo a sort of performance for the Hosts in order to become a living simile, as the Hosts are only able to refer to things that have actually occurred. Embassytown deals with linguistic playfulness far more directly than any other sci-fi book I've read in the past, yet it makes the theme seem obvious and necessary. With an alien civilization, wouldn't the differences in language dominate everything, every relationship and interaction between those societies? And yet, with this interesting and undoubtedly unique conceit, the book takes on a directness that is simultaneously a great idea and its main flaw. Mieville's strengths are in his imagination, and his imagination seems to be best when he gives himself a lot of material to play around with. Embassytown is so straightforward in the themes it addresses that it misses out on the atmosphere and intrigue that usually go with Mieville novels. This isn't a fault — there's nothing wrong with what's actually there, just the sense of missing pieces that could make the story better. The plot seems weak and thin, and so do the characters. Mieville's past novels generally hinge on some mysterious outside force driving the action, but since it's the characters here who push things forward, their flaws become more problematic. I just didn't buy — or even understand — a lot of the developments in the second half of the novel, because I felt no connection to the characters' logic. Worse, a lot of the characters were wholly pointless by the time everything wrapped up.

Embassytown is still good, purely through Mieville's strengths as an author. While much of the book felt a bit thin and arbitrary, it was also consistently interesting throughout, and raises a few interesting concepts — just not as many as I've come to expect from Mieville, and not handled as well. It's easy to criticize a lesser book by a brilliant author, because they've already established their skill, making it hard to ignore when those talents are missing.