The Scar by China Mieville

I quite like Bas-Lag - Mieville's own take on a fantasy world. It's strangely steampunk without being too painfully nostalgic or sentimental but at the same time it's a little bit fantastical and just a slight bit weird. The scar is about the idea of identity, will and perhaps even the nature or what stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world.

As with all of Mieville's work, he does not take the obvious path and a fairly conventional beginning ends up somewhere else entirely. The world building sometimes feels a little bit clunky but as with much of his writing there are more ideas packed into this book than you might find in entire trilogies put together by other writers.

Mieville handles action effectively, using it sparsely and giving it weight when it does occur. It doesn't mean he makes it sombre or 'momentus' but it feels like it belongs when he deploys it.

I liked The Scar and I liked the ideas. The ending is a puzzler though - it wasn't what I was expecting but upon reflection I'm not sure where else he could have gone with it - the very nature of the story precluded any other avenue I could think of and in that sense it is both fitting and somewhat empty. Which in some ways is exactly the point of the story.