It’s my First Wednesday of the Month Book Blog – on the Second Wednesday of the Month! Some months are just like that…

Welcome to Embassytown, by China Mieville
There are a couple of possibilities to keep in mind when reading my review.

First, it’s possible I’m just not that into China Mieville. I’ve read King Rat and pretty much thought it was eh, ok. I tried to read Perdido Street Station and set it down and never picked it back up, but I can’t remember why. I read about 1/3 of UnLondon and I enjoyed the word-usage and ideas, but just wasn’t sold and once again put the book down and didn’t pick it up again.  However, I recommended it to a friend who I thought might get more from the “cuteness” of it than I did, and she did finish the book. And that’s all my attempts to read China Mieville books before Embassytown.

Second, it’s possible that I am just not dedicated enough for this book. It is long. I honestly have no idea how long, because I got it on my Kindle (and don’t get me started about the price of books for Kindle and how totally crap they are and how much I am starting to resent popular authors who have the sway to begin changing the publishing world’s insistence on outrageous prices for digital copies of books but apparently choose not to). But it was long – I swear, I read and read and read and read – and was about 50% of the way through. I was also sure I had reached the climax, and was ready for the reveal and to begin winding down, and saw that I was at about 63%.

It’s also really hard reading. There are books that are light and fun, books that take a little more time and attention and then books that it feels a little, but not quite, like doing homework. This book is the last variety. Every sentence or page is an effort, and you start to wonder if this is actually fun, and if it’s not, why are you bothering to keep reading?  Quicksilver, by Neil Stephenson, was a book like that for me – and I actually liked Quicksilver! But it took me like three tries to read it, and then I never bothered to finish the Baroque Cycle series because I think it’s rude to make your readers work that hard to get your story and message. And I feel like this book falls into the Quicksilver category. You might be getting smarter by reading it, but it’s not happening easily. Which takes me to my next point:

Third, it’s possible that I am just not smart enough for this book. People who are smarter than me may not have to fight so hard to get through this book and, therefore, they may have a more enjoyable reading experience. Many authors, particularly sci-fi authors, write books with great imagination and totally unique concepts. Generally, when this happens, there are a variety of things to which you can relate in the book, and those things you understand help to contextualize the things you don’t understand – thereby allowing to you understand and accept a new concept. This book fails to include the things you understand. For a significant amount of time you are pretty much lost as to what any words mean, what’s happening, how things work, or, quite honestly, the point of the story you are attempting to follow. So, maybe I’m not smart enough to understand it and someone else would have no problem. I also read incredibly fast – and perhaps that makes it a question of lazy as opposed to not smart. People who already read slower than me (which has nothing to do with intelligence levels!) might not be frustrated that it takes forever to read this book. In addition, I’ve read that Mr. Mieville made the book incomprehensible to increase the feeling of culture shock while reading the book. If so, I am unimpressed by the technique. I believe that if you are truly trying to share a story or idea or message, you will be more successful if your readers actually want to keep reading the book than by making it so inaccessible that a reader questions whether they should bother reading any more. There are books that are whimsical, wild, confusing, fun, and still just accessible enough that you want to continue reading them (see Vurt, by Jeff Noon for a good example of this). But this book is just difficult. Bringing me to my final possibility…

Fourth and finally, it’s possible that I am just not pretentious enough to read books that I think go out of their way to be difficult to read or relate to. Oh, don’t throw up your hands and yell about it – you know who you are. Do you love when your book has as many pages of footnotes as it does story (see Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – which was actually pretty fun, overall)? Do you think it’s great that you have to turn your book upside down and read it backwards partway through (see House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski)? Do you think it’s great that a book is so difficult to read that there are book groups and guides dedicated to helping a reader understanding one chapter at a time (see anything at all by Thomas Pynchon, but especially Gravity’s Rainbow)? Then I’m talking to you – if you like your books truly difficult to get through rather than enjoyable there is some pretention to your reading choices. Which is FINE! But it’s not me. And, obviously, Embassytown is not me either. This problem aside, let me tell you a bit about it anyway.

Embassytown’s main character is a woman named Avice. In some ways, this is its best feature! Avice is interestingly written in that you wouldn’t know her gender unless you were told (which you are). It is a rare individual who can write truly gender-neutral characters who are, in fact, a gender. This is a gift. Likewise, I think this book would appeal (such as it does) to either gender equally. Also, a gift.

Avice lives in Embassytown, a city on an alien world with truly alien aliens. And Mr. Mieville does a decent job conveying that alienness. There is also some interesting stuff thrown in about relationships and love. The definition of “marriage” for example is fascinating but is a throw-away and not much time is spent on the world (galaxy, universe) he has created.  Instead, there is a plot so convoluted it would be difficult to describe it without re-writing the book or at least giving too many spoilers. In very short: the humans who live in Embassytown with Avice inadvertently make dramatic, apocalyptic, changes to the aliens. And then shit gets real. The message/story is about language, and change, and Self, and morality. There is also a significant amount of interesting and confusing bio-technology; “herds of generators grazing” is a phrase I never thought I’d read. And the characters are well-developed and interesting but I honestly don’t know what happens in the end because I didn’t finish reading it for all the reasons I noted above. I stopped at about 80%.  Then I started again, and made it all the way to 83%.  And that is where it sits, glinting balefully at me each time I turn on my kindle to read something else and slowly moving down the list of most recently opened books.

The reviews of Embassytown have been overwhelmingly glowing, including a review by one of my most all-time favorite authors ever, Ursula K. Leguin. It makes me sad that I didn’t like it more and makes me want to go back and try again, or at least try to finish it. In fact, Ms. Leguin’s review really makes me wish I liked it as much as she did, then we’d have something great to talk about when I meet her someday but in the end, it just isn’t my thing, and I won’t let the reviews or reviewers blame me for that; when you have someone as ridiculously smart as Ursula K. Leguin saying “Mieville sets the bar rather high – I still haven’t figured out what a miab is – but most of his neologisms come clear with a nice shock of  revelation”, I feel comfortable saying the book is not accessible to a wide audience. Or, another favorite quote, this one from James Purdon: “Lexically, there are enough glimpses of familiarity to prevent any protracted confusion (“Immer” and “manchmal”, for instance, are clever borrowings of the German for “always” and “sometimes”) . . .” .  Ah ha! The vocabulary and the concepts Mieville is using it to describe are so easy to follow! Just learn German, then apply it to the nebulous concepts in the book and voila! You are totally able to understand the background information in the book! In fact, I figured out most words, but it’s amusing to me that reviewers spend a considerable amount of time trying to convince possible readers that it’s both accessible (clearly, it’s not!) and worth sticking it out.  I tried pretty hard to stick it out, and I found that the payoff, if there is one, is simply too far away. I also have to disagree with Ms. Leguin’s statement “If Miéville has been known to set up a novel on a marvellous metaphor and then not know quite where to take it, he’s outgrown that, and his dependence on violence is much diminished.” Nothing could more clearly state my problems with the book! Lots of set-up, it feels like it should be done by now, no idea where he’s going with this, and why did it just get so intense and, well, icky? Feel free to read it, prove me wrong, and point to any one of the above-listed grains of salt to temper my opinion. Oh, and then you can tell me how it ends. I really am curious.

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