Recently I read “Perdido Street Station” and liked it, so I did not hesitate to continue with part 2 of the China Miéville’s Bas Lag Trilogy, “The Scar”.

Trigger Warning: Water. LOTS of water.

Right off the bat: the world is the same, so drastic culture clash remains a standard situation. Again we meet the Cactacae, the khepri and all the other creatures who share the world of men; plus bloodsuckers of at least two kinds.

Scars feature in many ways in that book, for one due to a tribal custom that a lover takes and runs with, much farther than anyone ever before. For another due to scars suffered during this book, by many people, on the soul as well as on the back. Or right in the face. And scars of megafauna and scars of the world.

But let us quickly summarize the story:

Yo-ho-ho-hoo

Bellis Coldwine is a very gifted and intelligent linguist, although she has big issues when it comes to making social connections. She picks up nicknames like “Coldheart” or “Coldbitch” without even trying — although we as the reader are in her head so we quickly gather that she isn’t that at all. This wonderfully three-dimensional person flees from everyone’s favourite city New Crobuzon due to reasons connected with the events of Perdido Street Station, even though she loves the city somewhat fiercely and the broken life she leaves behind is just collateral damage, as she is basically a nobody like you and me who just happens to get thrown under the proverbial bus.

So she runs — but even out of the city she doesn’t catch any breaks. She gets abducted by pirates and finds herself stranded in their kind of Tortuga Bay, and is forced to integrate into a pirate society that despises everything she holds dear. At least she has an awesome job: She becomes a librarian in the big pirate library. Yes, that is a thing.

And yet, due to her unique skills as an unparalleled language prodigy she finds herself suddenly important to the pirates and their deranged overlords. Pulled from obscurity right onto center stage she must aid them in their lunatic quest. Seemingly culminating in an impossible feat of science and magic … but then escalating further in brutal maritime violence … and even further into surprising new directions unpredictable like the Sargasso Sea.

The weird and the world

Once again a very strong book, and once again fully weird, and yet, fully relatable.
Somehow China Miéville has the gift to bridge the known and the weird in ways that shed new light on our own world, while expanding his own by leaps and bounds.

If you like Perdido Street Station, you will like The Scar too.
And vice versa, if you hate the one, you will hate the other.

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Photo: Dr. Louis M. Herman. – NOAA Photo Library: sanc0602