From hell's heart I stab at thee: Re-reading Moby Dick

I spent much of March and April returning to Moby Dick by Herman Melville. There are certain books that are likely to speak to the reader differently, depending on where your head is at the time. I first read Moby Dick during a quiet summer without much thought, liking it enough to stick with it, but gliding rather inattentively over long sections of description. The second time, I appreciated the humor of it and the meticulous build-up to the ultimate scene of the Pequod's destruction.

Where before I was but little interested in the natural history of the sperm whale or the detailed rendering of every aspect of the whaling industry and the men who partook in it, this time I found it to be fascinating reading. I am much more curious about the natural world than I used to be, so even after putting aside the story, I found myself looking up pictures of the sperm whale, its skeletal framework, and the random Wikipedia articles about ambergris. I also had the added spur of planning a trip to Boston at the same time, where I knew I would at least be in the same general region of New Bedford and the early scenes of the novel (the picture here is taken from Marblehead, near Salem, which is well north of New Bedford, where the Whaling Museum is located).

Reading the novel for the second time, I didn't need to rely on its reputation as an American classic, I felt it on my own -- original, vivid, and deeply convincing in its very American-ness. The Pequod is a melting pot of New England characters -- black, white, and native -- foreigners and adventurers, young and old. They are deeply religious, pagan, opportunistic, competent, brave, witty, foolhardy, naive, mad, obsessed...a microcosm of the contradictory and mystifying American "character."

Melville wrote a masterpiece -- a novel that he described in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, as a very "wicked book."  There are many things he could have meant by that word, "wicked." He subverts stereotypes about race and otherness, takes on religion and the idea of God, pokes fun, and weaves in an extraordinary amount of sexually-charged language and sly innuendo. No doubt, he awaited Hawthorne's response to it with a fair amount of trepidation. In his rambling, elated letter, Melville is grateful to his friend: "But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book -- and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul." Unfortunately, the letter from Hawthorne to Melville is lost to us.

For pure majesty of language, Melville is hard to match. I'll end with the excerpt from Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale":

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? 

Melville redux

I've been a little immersed in 19th century literature lately. I just read a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- one of those writers whose presence haunts all of American literature. The Scarlet Letter always draws me in. If I pick it up again and begin reading -- somewhere at random, or from the beginning, I fall back into its spell -- the secret sin of the pastor, the female outsider who endures, and the wronged husband -- all the buried emotion and twisted obsessions that motivate the characters -- Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth. It is Hawthorne at his most assured, in beautiful, crystalline prose that for all its coolness, also burns and thrills, or so it seems to me.

And of course, that other novel that dominates American literature is Moby Dick, by Hawthorne's contemporary and passionate admirer, Herman Melville. I read Moby Dick years ago, one quiet summer while working in a university English department as an office admin and going to graduate school at night. It was the same summer that I put together one of those huge DIY office desks. Just me, Melville, and a power screw driver. It was one of the times in my life, when I was most solitary -- single, living in a town where I had no family and no close friends. Call me Ishmael. I, too, could choose a name, start a new story.

Melville has always been an interesting figure to me, both because of his writing (I always loved the perfectly weird short story, Bartleby the Scrivener) and snippets of his personal life that I've encountered here and there. His later life was rather sad, after his early success and fame. His finances collapsed and his home life disintegrated. He appears as a forlorn and broken man in Frederick Busch's darkly beautiful novel, The Night Inspector, when he has taken a job as a customs inspector for the city of New York and his oldest son, has shot and killed himself -- unclear whether by accident or suicide. Melville is buried in a cemetery in the Bronx.

Lately, I've been contemplating the value of re-reading old books as opposed to consuming new ones. Philip Roth, who announced his retirement from fiction recently, said that he was re-reading writers that he hadn't returned to for 50 years -- Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Faulkner, and Hemingway. It made sense to me, and after encountering Melville in the Hawthone biography, it made me think about that summer and how I was surprised and enamored by a book, that frankly, I thought might be a bit of a drag. So I've decided to re-read Moby Dick. I expect it will be quite a different experience nearly 20 years later, and living quite a different life. Maybe I'll identify more with Ahab this time. Who knows?

What books have you re-read? Mine is a short list: The Scarlett Letter, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Little Men. There may be a few more of far less stature, and maybe something else I've forgotten.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

If hard pressed to name a favorite novel, on most days my choice comes down between George Eliot's Middlemarch and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. It neatly balances English and American, female and male, feeling and detachment. I've read most, if not all, the production of both -- certainly the major works -- including Eliot's letters and multiple biographies. But of Hawthorne, I haven't read that much about the man, until the biography I just finished, James Mellow's Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Times, which won the National Book Award in 1993. It is a great biography -- meticulously researched, even-handed, and elegantly written. It doesn't make great leaps in speculation or psychological diagnosis -- it just presents a portrait that emerges from Hawthorne's own writings, notebooks, and letters and contemporary accounts.

One reason I love to read biographies of literary people is that the best ones take in so much more of the general history and culture of their lives. Hawthorne didn't go in for most of the transcendental philosophy of his friends, neighbors, and colleagues -- Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Alcott. He visited the Shaker communities (with some withering commentary) and was a resident at Brook Farm, one of the Utopian experimental communities, but he remained skeptical and conservative -- the original stiff-necked New Englander. He regarded radical abolitionists rather severely and seemed largely unmoved by the plight of slaves in the South (of whom he had no personal knowledge and seemingly little curiosity, much to the chagrin of Emerson and his own sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody). He wasn't so much skeptical of mesmerism and spiritualism, as he was leery of them. There might be something there, but he thought it was too dangerous to pursue.

He was thoroughly unsentimental (excepting, perhaps,  regarding his devoted wife, Sophia, who all her life, likened him to a demi-god or angel, dropped straight out of heaven), did not like to be touched, and was just this side of anti-social. He was notoriously hard to get to know, even for such a passionate admirer as his friend, Herman Melville. He met few of the literary lions of his age even after he had achieved his own level of fame. When he served as consul in Liverpool for several years, Mellow points out that he claimed to try to arrange a meeting with Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) but was not successful, although how hard he really tried is debatable. He silently observed Lord Tennyson ( a favorite poet of his wife's) at a picture gallery, missed a chance to meet Thackeray (an author he admired), and never showed an inclination to meet Dickens. He did attend a dinner with Anthony Trollope later in life when Trollope visited Boston, and according to Hawthorne's friend, James Field, who declared to him in a letter:

Trollope fell in love with you at first sight. He swears that you are the handsomest Yankee that ever walked the planet.

Hawthorne's obsessions with secret sin, historical guilt, and curses run through nearly all his fiction, but in even such a thorough biography, no particular reason for it is uncovered. Yes, his ancestor was a judge at the Salem witch trials, but his more immediate familial history and experience is rather unextraordinary. Why he held on to such remote, dark elements of his pre-history remains a mystery, unless, by comparison, his rather staid, small-town upbringing was so unimaginative that he had to cast back into the family's more colorful stories for inspiration.

The other small pleasures of biography are the random cross-hatchings that occur within the cozy world of 19th century literature. While serving as consul, one of the people Hawthorne met in passing was Ada Byron's husband, the Earl of Lovelace, looking for information on his wayward son who had gone missing (apparently the eldest, who joined the Navy and then deserted). Hawthorne made a pilgrimage of his own to visit Lord Byron's ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, shortly after Ada's death, thus creating a bridge to the last biography that I read last fall -- Ada Byron's (Bride of Science by Benjamin Wooley).

And then there's the weird trivia. For example, did you know that Hawthorne's only son Julian spent a year in an Atlanta penitentiary for his role in a shady stock scheme? Once sprung, he went to California, where he worked for the Pasadena newspaper as a journalist. He died in San Francisco in 1936. 1936! Hawthorne's youngest daughter, Rose joined the Order of St. Dominic and became Mother Alphonso, caring for terminally ill cancer patients until her death in 1926. I think I'm always surprised by how little time is encompassed in American history. That Hawthorne, who seems to belong to such an early era (compounded by his most famous novel being set in Puritan New England) could have a son who died just on the cusp of World War II is disorienting. I always have the eerie feeling of time being folded somehow.

But, whatever facts are yielded by the industrious biographers, nothing changes the indelible beauty and power of Hawthorne's masterpiece, and how wonderfully he enters into the experience of Hester Prynne -- a woman, an outsider, a fellow sinner, and an unlikely heroine, who shocked many of his contemporary readers in 1850:

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers--stern and wild ones--and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. (The Scarlet Letter, Chapter 18, "A Flood of Sunshine")

Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Hindenburg and Empire State Building, 1936. (silodrome.com)

Michael Chabon has become one of my favorite writers, based largely on The Yiddish Policeman's Union, The Mysteries of Pitsburgh, and numerous essays. I've had The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on my list for years, and it's considered to be his masterpiece (thus far). This is the first book I purchased just for my Kindle -- to mark the occasion, so to speak.

The story is immediately engaging, plunging the reader into the world of Prague on the eve of World War II. The Kavalier family is determined to get their oldest son, Josef, out of Prague and to the safety of America as the Nazi presence becomes increasingly hostile to the Jewish community. Josef is a budding "escapist" in the tradition of Houdini, and this becomes his only route out of Czechoslovakia, concealed in a coffin, bound for Lithuania, which contains not only the refugee, but also the famed Golem, a revered object that the Jews of Prague want to save from Nazi depredations.

This fantastic exploit delivers the Golem to a new hiding place, and by a long route, Josef, to his relatives in Brooklyn, the Klaymans. His cousin Samuel, at work for a novelty company, finds that Josef is an accomplished artist, which feeds into his own ambition to get into the new phenomenon of comic books. Together, they create The Escapist and enter the highly competitive world of comics in the Golden Era of the genre -- the late 30s and 40s. I won't belabor the plot points and descriptions of other characters. It is, above all, a wonderful story -- fully developed characters inhabiting a world, rich in detail -- the landscape of New York in the 40s providing the backdrop for Chabon's fertile imagination. I chose the picture of the Empire State Building above because it figures so importantly in the mythology and action of the novel.

The book that I chose as my first ebook download from our local library was Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It was a quick read and entertaining. I would recommend it as a vacation-friendly book, nothing too taxing.

I can't imagine giving up my physical library -- there's too much pleasure to be had from the handling of books that you love, especially those from authors that are favorites. And there's also the weird, limbo-land of digital "ownership." Is it really yours? It's pretty hard to loan books to friends and family this way. And if I were not a particularly savvy person who didn't back up my library safely, how much trouble would it be to retrieve the books that I lost even after I legitimately purchased them, not to mention the issue of changing formats, if I decided I like the Nook or some other reader better? But, for books that you want to read but aren't that interested in adding to your library, or for out-of-copyright, freely-available books that you can download -- the Kindle certainly is a convenient and lightweight alternative. It's probably worth it's price just for traveling with an adequate library to hand. I'll just be looking for a nice edition of Chabon's Kavalier and Clay in its antique form to grace my physical bookshelves.

Still reading...now with Kindle!

No, I wasn't knocked out by the 900 pages of Parade's End last August; however, I have been very lazy about blogging since then, obviously. Right after PE, I couldn't get away from WWI and read a historical novel by Jeff Shaara. Rather more workmanlike than Ford (Shaara is not the stylist that his father Michael Shaara was, much less FMF), To the Last Man is still very good for its fictionalized take on the outsize characters of Baron Richthofen, Raoul Lufbery, John J. Pershing, Petain, and Clemenceau. It also folds in the evolution of aerial warfare with the Lafayette Escadrille (French air service but with many American volunteers) and the German air aces, of whom the most famous is the Red Baron. It sticks to real people even when it shifts from the high-ranking strategists to the boots on the ground. Trench warfare and the brutal fighting on the Western Front are brought to life through the experience of the young Marine, Roscoe Temple, who fought at Belleau Wood and St. Mihiel.

I followed up with the breezy and charming The Plague by Camus (just kidding). One has to emerge from world war by degrees, so a tense tale of exile, deprivation, and inevitable death bridged the gap to...Angels on Toast. The sharp American writer Dawn Powell was writing about Mad Men way back in the 40s. Traveling businessmen, their wives, mistresses, and general shenanigans are skillfully and wittily satirized by Powell. Needless to say, there's lots and lots of drinking and smoking, lies, and ruination. She's one of those really fine early 20th Century writers who has slipped under the radar for the most part (although canonized in the Library of America series).

Powell was a pretty good segue into another witty woman of the world, Nancy Mitford. One of the famous English Mitford sisters (right, Nancy is second from left), Nancy was brought up in the aristocratic atmosphere of a rambling country house with eccentric parents, and even more eccentric neighbors and relatives, all of whom people her stories. The Pursuit of Love in a Cold Climate is thinly veiled autobiography about the Radlett sisters, who go about finding and marrying and being variously tortured by all the wrong men. If Downton Abbey is the twilight of Empire, the Radletts exist quite a bit further into the gloaming. The Radletts are badly educated, irreverent, and outrageous in their quirks. The father of the clan is an irascible veteran of the Great War, claiming to have whacked several Germans to death with an entrenching tool, which is preserved with  bloodthirsty pride above the family fireplace. Mitford is effortlessly stylish, spinning out hilarious descriptions and dialogue that is shimmeringly droll. If you're suffering from winter blahs, Mitford will lighten your mood. I think I read this one during jury duty!

Okay, wrapping up very quickly here, I finished off jury duty with a good biography about Ada Byron (Benjamin Wooley's Bride of Science). Daughter of Lord Byron, she is considered to be the "mother of computer programming," due to her work with Charles Babbage, who created an early computer, the Difference Engine. Good stuff, for those of a geeky bent. Then, in the winter and toward the holidays, I got pretty lazy and/or distracted and read little -- The Call of the Wild by London and a very creepy occult novel of the late 1890's by Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan. If you're in the mood for rather baroque Satanic weirdness, you can download this gem from Project Gutenberg for free.

I'll break it off there for now, but as I hinted in the title, Santa hubby brought me my very first ebook reader for Christmas. I'm still in the early stages with it, but I have to admit, I kind of like the convenience: lightweight, well-lit, and I never lose my place or have to dig in the crevices of the sofa trying to locate my bookmark. How antique! Not to mention, downloading ebooks from the local library is pretty awesome. I'll tell you about the first book I bought and read on my Kindle next time. It had to be something to mark the occasion. Want to guess?

F. M. Ford's Parade's End

With the wisdom of hindsight I should have read Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End tetralogy when I was in graduate school so-and-so many years ago. It was Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (a brilliant study of the Great War poets and their cultural, literary, and historical context) that launched me on my topic for my master's thesis, but I quickly narrowed my focus to British women novelists writing about the war -- Rose Macaulay, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf. At the time, I felt I needed to take a different angle on the literature of the period, there being so much attention paid to the great poets and memoir-writers, particularly Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, who I read and loved. So, in devouring all the primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, I knew I couldn't include 900+ pages of a novel that wouldn't figure into my focus.

Oh, how wrong I was! So many of the themes and imagery that I traced in my work I found brilliantly illustrated in the pages of the four novels that make up Parade's End. Set roughly in the time period before the war from about 1912 through the war years (the Armistice was in November 1918), and coming to an end in the years after the war, the sequence follows the progress of the "last Tory," Christopher Tietjens of Groby Hall. A youngest son of an old Yorkshire family of wealth and position, Christopher's unhappy marriage to a woman who makes it her obsession to torment and ruin him is set against the tumultuous upheaval of the Great War.

Christopher's wife Sylvia may be one of the most hiss-able villains that I've ever encountered, and yet Ford doesn't make her a flat, one-dimensional character. She is a contradictory, deeply flawed, thoroughly dysfunctional woman, obsessed with getting the attention, if not the affection, of her saintly husband. To me, she embodies the idea of the monstrous female -- an image that cropped up again and again in the literature of the period of the Great War. The Woman Suffrage movement that was in full, militant swing before hostilities began and the deep psychological divide between soldiers and non-combatant women on the home front often resulted in an undercurrent of guilt felt by women who swept into the absent men's roles, attaining a freedom that they never had experienced before, and bitter resentment on the part of the men fighting in the trenches, who felt they were being sacrificed both by the old men in the corridors of power and gleeful, "patriotic" women. Christopher's long-suffering, Christ-like qualities are obvious throughout the four novels. Sylvia several times makes the comparison explicit:

"And I daresay if... Oh Christ! ...you're shot in the trenches you'll say it...oh, between the saddle and the ground! that you never did a dishonourable action....And, mind you, I believe that no other man save one has ever had more right to say it than you..."

Tietjens said:
"You believe that!"

"As I hope to stand before my Redeemer," Sylvia said, "I believe it....But, in the name of the Almighty, how could any woman live beside you...and be forever forgiven?"
(Some Do Not Part II, p.186, Everyman's Library Hardcover edition)

And Christopher's ruminations while he is serving in the front line trenches make it clear that soldiers often felt more affinity for even the enemy than they did their own countrymen (and women):

And it was curious to consider how the hatred that one felt for the inhabitants of those regions seemed to skip in a wide trajectory over the embattled ground. It was the civilian populations and their rulers that one hated with real hatred.
(A Man Could Stand Up Part II, p.679)

Christopher has more than enough reason to feel that sort of hatred toward the home front -- a place where his own wife constantly works against him. It is, in fact, due to her machinations that despite his already-damaged lungs, he is once more in the most dangerous position on the Western Front with men under his command dying horrifically all around him. What others describe as his big, lumpish body, and what he deprecates himself as a "collection of meal sacks" in war becomes valuable. He has the physical strength to save his soldiers from being buried alive in a shell explosion and carry them to safety. And while his own privileged class -- even his own family -- believe all the lies told about him and discount his worth, the men he commands, mothers, and tries to keep alive seem to be the only ones who understand his true worth. To them he is capable, heroic, fair, and courageous. Christopher, a throw-back to another age and clinging to an 18th-century code of honor, watches everything about his old way of viewing the world coming apart at the seams.

...All these men given into the hands of the most cynically care-free intriguers in long corridors who made plots that harrowed the hearts of the world. All these men toys, all these agonies mere occasions for picturesque phrases to be put into politicians' speeches without heart or even intelligence. Hundreds of thousands of men tossed here and there in that sordid and gigantic mud-browniness of midwinter...by God, exactly as if they were nuts wilfully picked up and thrown over the shoulder by magpies....But men. Not just populations. Men you worried over there. Each man a man with a backbone, knees, breeches, braces, a rifle, a home, passions, fornications, drunks, pals, some scheme of the universe, corns, inherited diseases, a green grocer's business, a milk walk, a paper stall, brats, a slut of a wife....The Men: the Other Ranks! And the poor - little officers. God help them.
(No More Parades Part I,  p.319)

But it is by witnessing the demolition of all that has come before that allows him to break from the feudal past of his ancestors -- to give up his family's money and estate -- and thus, break from his wife, to live openly with the woman that he does love -- the young Suffragette and Pacifist, Valentine Wannop.

The Good Soldier is considered usually to be Ford's masterpiece, but I think Parade's End is even more deserving of that honor. It exemplifies the Modernist techniques of using non-linear time shifts, varying viewpoints, and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Of the latter, my favorite example is the long passage at the end of A Man Could Stand Up where Christopher has become acting C.O. of his battalion expecting a German offensive; he inspects his men, thinks about Valentine, and considers his future, if he is to have a future at all. It's breathtakingly beautiful and sad, and often even funny. Ford has a great sense of the comic, and for all Christopher's sufferings, he is rather a sad sack. In the final novel, The Last Post, his brother Mark, who is dying, describes the lot of the Tietjenses, particularly Christopher:

A luckless sort of beggar, Christopher!...If you took the whole conglobulation at its worst -- the father suiciding, the son living with his sister in open sin, the son's son not his son and Groby going over to Papist hands....That was the sort of thing that would happen to a Tietjens of the Christopher variety: to any Tietjens who would not get out or get under as he, Mark, had done. Tietjenses took what they damn well got for doing what they damn well wanted to. Well, it landed them in that sort of post.
(The Last Post, p.821)

That passage made me laugh out loud when I read it, but you probably have to be there -- to have taken that long journey through all the humiliations, pains, block-headedness, and misunderstanding that finally lead to Christopher's imperfect, but at least more hopeful, post-war life.

China Mieville: Embassytown

My first experience reading China Mieville was his noirish "crime" novel, The City and the City -- still one of my favorite books of recent years. Calling it a crime novel is, of course, deceptive. The premise is startlingly complex -- a police procedural that unwinds itself between two cities that are really one. The cities have different names, governments, cultures, but rather than occupying distinct physical spaces they are overlapping, really the same place, but its citizens are adept at "unseeing" anything that doesn't belong to their own city. And there are fearsome penalties for anyone who makes the mistake of  "seeing" what is forbidden, for moving across borders in any but the prescribed fashion -- a transgression that is known as "breaching." It's a difficult concept to wrap your head around, but once you've suspended disbelief, the story is addictive.

Embassytown is Mieville's foray into science fiction -- there are aliens, exotic planets, advanced technology, and intrigue, but again, calling it simply sci-fi doesn't begin to describe the full range of its concerns. Primarily, the novel is about the nature of language -- its power, how it transforms the world, or limits it -- how it corrupts and how it can heal. Embassytown is a distant outpost of humans from the ruling country of Bremen on the planet of Arieka, whose natives are simply called the Hosts. They are large, hooved, winged creatures, with multiple appendages, eyes on stalks, two mouths -- thoroughly alien to their colonizers (see this blog for one person's artistic rendering, based on Mieville's description) but existing in a peaceable state of long-standing compromise and trade (although it's never clear to me what the Ariekei really get from the humans of Embassytown, other than the curiosity factor). The planet's atmosphere isn't adapted to humans so they are somewhat confined to their ghetto adjoining the Host City, thanks to a bio-rigged bubble that allows them to breathe without additional equipment in Embassytown.

Mieville drops you into a world that is thoroughly disorienting -- he doesn't do a lot of exposition, so you just have to go with the flow, even if it means you are thoroughly lost for 40 or 50 pages while the new-coined words and bizarre culture eventually begins to make sense in context. The protagonist is a woman, Avice Benner Cho, born in Embassytown, educated to become an "immerser" -- a space traveller, a sort of trader, adventurer, and minor functionary of the Bremen government. After many years in the "out" she returns with her new husband, a linguist, who is fascinated with the Hosts' unique language. Here is the crux of the story, and without getting into all the nuances, the idea is this: The Hosts speak a language that the humans have learned to understand and mimic to an extent. However, since the Hosts speak with two mouths, simultaneously, and from the perspective of a single mind, humans can not duplicate it in a way that Hosts understand. A human speaking the duality of Host Language is mere noise, the equivalent of scrambled static.

Hosts' minds were inextricable from their doubled tongue. They couldn't learn other languages, couldn't conceive of their existence, or that noises we made to each other were words at all. A Host could understand nothing not spoken in Language, by a speaker, with intent, with a mind behind the words.

 The only way humans have found to communicate "in Language" to the hosts is through an elite caste of Ambassadors, not just twins, but identical clones, bred so as to share a natural empathy with one another and enhanced by an embedded link that enables them to speak Language, from a single mind, even though to other humans they are separate people. They are known by a single name, such as CalVin, MagDa, CharLotte, fused forever. The other complexity of Host language is that they can only speak what is essentially a truth claim. There are no metaphors, no abstractions, no imagination. No word exists without a referent. Nothing "signifies." This is where your old linguistics class might come in handy. The Hosts are unable to lie. The entire plot of political intrigue, dysfunctional relationships, planet-wide catastrophe, addiction, and war is powered by this fundamental limitation of Host Language and the humans who must try to communicate with them.

To say more won't really clarify the plot -- it is a story you have to experience, and you have to be willing to play with ideas and be a little perplexed on the journey. I found the payoff to be worth it -- unexpectedly powerful and beautiful, and unlike anything I've ever read.

If you've read other Mieville novels, let me know what you think of this writer. I'm reading backwards through his oeuvre at this point, having read only the two most recent ones, but I'm certainly planning to work my way through the preceding books. It might take awhile to get there because they do take a bit of brainspace (speaking for myself).