Coming late to writing a review is gift and curse at once. Wandering the Perpetual Now of the internet, one can’t but hear the buzz around a book of note, and Embassytown—China Miéville’s ninth novel—was certainly a book of note when it was published to great fanfare back in May. So what might you already know about Embassytown, notwithstanding your careful avoidance of (gasp!) spoilers? You’d surely know it’s Miéville’s first “true” science fiction novel (with actual spaceships and aliens and everything) and perhaps you’d also know that language, lies and semiotics are its core themes.
Embassytown takes a long time to get itself moving, and it wears many masks: a bildungsroman which becomes an intrigue of court politics which becomes—as if shaking itself awake from a daydream of a more dignified era—a full-blown secondary-world science fiction disaster plot, complete with fractal factions, deceits within deceits, terrible consequences, deadly jeopardy and numerous races against time. This latter sfnal phase, comprising pretty much half the book, is by far the most compelling; however, I can’t quite decide whether the set-ups of the preceding phases could have been done away with or compacted any further than they already were. Whatever the cause, Embassytown lacks the structural grace and poise I usually associate with Mieville’s output.
Embassytown is a subversion of the classic crypto-imperialist model of space opera, delivered in a baroque style that puts me in mind of Aldiss and M John Harrison: unapologetically verbose and intellectual, cerebral rather than visceral. There is an embassy, which means there must be an empire to which the embassy reports about the colony it controls, and there are natives, incomprehensibly non-human. Literally so: the Ariekei—better known to Embassytowners as the Hosts, at least at first—do not have a language that human minds can speak or truly understand. Instead, they have Language: sounds spoken by two mouths at once which do not signify their subjects but which instead speak their subjects into being: “Language… was speech and thought at once.”
But where there’s a will (or a motive) there’s a way, and humans have discovered that two empathically linked and almost-identical persons trained in speaking the doubled words of Language in tandem—Ambassadors, unheimlich doppels with a single identity—can make themselves heard by the Hosts, to whom humans are otherwise voiceless critters of minimal curiosity. And so it is that Embassytown is an imperial backwater far out on the edges of the immer, the ocean-metaphor hyperspace upon which interstellar spacecraft sail.
Avice, our elliptical narrator (and reluctant heroine), is a rare bird in that she flew the Embassytown cage to become a floaker, a sort of freelance sailor-of-the-immer with a go-with-the-flow philosophy; she’s rarer still, in that she came back (unwittingly smuggling Shiva). But rarest of all, perhaps, she is a part of Language itself: the Ariekei use a few special humans as living similes, as a way to expand Language and, in the process, expand the set of thoughts it is possible for them to think.
This unity of thought and word means that the Ariekei cannot speak untruths. But humans have exposed them to the concept of lying, and now some Ariekei are trying to teach themselves the trick, much to the consternation of the established order. Meanwhile, the distant Bremen empire seeks to displace the de facto colonial aristocracy of the Ambassadors and their Staff in order to fend off the inevitable fumblings toward secession and independence. They dispatch their own Ambassadorial candidate, the unexpected side effects of whose speech are the seed crystal for a phenomenal and drastic phase change in the Hosts and their relations with humans
For me, Embassytown is a failed-state story about the culture-shattering power of neoliberal imperialism, a book whose most timely truths we—and possibly even Miéville himself—will only truly be able to parse once we can look back at the period in which it was created, and at the botched realpolitik being practiced in the Near and Middle East, in Africa and Latin America. Read this way, the Language of the Ariekei becomes a concrete metaphor for cultural otherness, an ad extremis extrapolation of those jarring sensawunda shocks encountered every time you venture out of your sociocultural comfort zone: an alienness whose impact you can’t fully explain to yourself, and whose nature cannot be explained to you in your own terms or idiom.
Miéville acknowledges the side benefits that can accrue to cultures in a colonial relationship, especially one as currently benign and back-burnered as that between Bremen and the Ariekei. But he also recognises that synthesis can—and often does—become a symbiosis or parasitism, leaving the Hosts dependent on the diplomatic status quo and handing a long lever to the empire. As often in Miéville, there is revolution, but here the proletariat is an entire species undergoing a cultural transition of unthinkable profundity, and the permanent cost of their qualified victory will be their innocence. Far from indulging in Noble Savagery, however, Miéville suggests that this “fall from grace” is an inevitable result of an encounter with different and more domineering cultures, that there can be no going back, should be no naïve idealisation of The Way Things Were. The only way is forward, together, toward a new culture forged in the fires of necessity, a new way of relating (to) the world—a classic Marxist narrative of struggle.
And so it goes. Embassytown affords many more readings than mine above, and critics more attuned than myself to the theories of semiotics will provide plenty that cleave closer to the book’s central theme. “But is it any good?” I hear the peanut gallery screaming. Well, then: Embassytown is good, but it is not easy; it partakes of the tools of genre, but it does so in ways that are unusual or even antithetical to the conventions of genre; it is a Miéville novel, but it sees Miéville expanding his remit in directions that I didn’t expect him to expand. I liked it, but I can see clearly why others might not.