Is it
scifi? Speculative fiction? There's not much 'science' to it. But somewhere out
in the distant reaches of the universe at some future time is where British
author China Mieville chooses to set this piece of largely entertaining make-believe.
Mieville is
known to me as the author of "The City & The City," a brilliant
fantasy on urban man's adaptive ability to see and "not see" given
parts of his environment. As in that book, the characters and issues of
"Embassytown" are all too human.
Avice, our
heroine, discovers at the end of her childhood that she can "immerse"
-- that is, she can tolerate the symptoms of crossing the "immer,"
the author's word for the deep, conventionally impassable space that separates
universes. It means she will leave the provincial, backwards planet of her
birth, a mere village among the stars, and visit the fabled places of the universe. Think
leaving the farm to see 'Paree.' But she maintains a nostalgia for the old place, called
Embassytown, and the early scenes in which we see her dashing about with other ordinary
children testing the limits of their freedom like children everywhere struck
me as marvelously evocative. When the novel brings Avice back, now a
universe-traveler with her sort of husband -- much in this book is "sort
of" like life on earth, the legendary home of the human diaspora -- we
realize this smalltown world will be the setting of what is in essence a
linguistic fable.
Aside from
sending its protagonist off and bringing her back to her gossipy, living-is-easy, Peyton Place nowhere land, it's
hard to say that anything happens in the first 150 pages or so that could not
have been shown to happen in, say, the first fifteen. Aspects of the book's the setting,
its pace, the restricted social circle, the gatherings in which little or
nothing happens made "Embassytown" appear increasingly like a
stand-in for some remote college campus somewhere; a kid of low-wattage utopia poised
on the edge of tedium. Except of course, some of your friends are automatons, and
the Hosts, as the humans call the indigenous race, appear to be something like
giant, fanciful winged insects.
The indigenes,
or Ariekei, live in a "biorigged" world where -- in the book's best
sentence; one of the most entertaining sentences anywhere in scifi -- "factories
were grazing in the fields." Do the Ariekei do this enormously useful rigging?
There's no systematic exposition of this or many other out-of-this-world
matters, a sleight of hand the author gets away with because Avice, our
narrator, is plausibly too familiar with her homeland to feel a need to
describe it. The place's human colonists, apparently, live off the produce of
farms and factories that grow themselves, and the Hosts receive in turn some
human "tech," again never closely specified.
The
thinness of this narration suggests the character of our so-so reliable narrator,
a little too self-referential in her style and much too satisfied with her
shallow existence. Back in Embassytown, Avice -- a cowboy, sailor, rodeo rider type
-- appears to have no life of her own apart from "the scene." She is
the scene.
The husband,
however, is the sincere academic enthusiast. He's the language nut. Because of
his interest, we learn that the Ariekei's language -- alone of all the
speech systems of sentient beings -- consists entirely of "truth claims."
They can't say anything that isn't clearly so.
Maybe this
explains the humans' easy life on their planet, since their Hosts' less
sophisticated language is whole time-space continuums behind our own and makes
them easy to manage. Humans, of course, can lie like a rug.
To keep
them happy the human colonists put on regular entertainments, in particular the
can't-miss "Festival of Lies" in which people pronounce simple
sentences that contradict observed reality and have the Hosts rolling on the
floor.
What
happens to their world, to their existence, their very "selves," if
we teach them to lie? Here's where the scifi depiction of academic theory
comes into play. About halfway through, the issue of "lying" emerges
as the book's plot, and Embassytown lurches from crisis to crisis as the change
in the meaning of "Language" itself changes everything in the Ariekei
themselves, their relations to humans, and in consequence the relations among
the various teams of human characters, as they are forced to deal with the genie
they've unintentionally released from the bottle. The consequences include the
determination by many of the Ariekei to exterminate them all.
Lots of
brilliant stuff here. Have I mentioned that the Ariekei language requires two
voices speaking at once -- which may, or may not, mean they have two heads? The
point is never clarified. It does mean that certain humans are "bred"
as doubles with a hoped-for empathetic tuning that enables them to speak in
perfect synch to the Hosts.
Conceits
like this reward the reader. But I'm thinking that inside this loosely-paced novel
lies a brilliant novella.
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