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Article Excerpt
At odd moments and in odd places I have begun to feel as though I am in the world created by the novels and short stories of China Mieville.
The first came with the overgrown canal boats and barges in the Zeeburgedijk district of Amsterdam. In the city of my parents, I sat and looked over yet one more canal. In the midst of the endless collection of skiffs, barges, houseboats, water-taxis, and other watercraft that I can't name, three or four canal boats stood out. Rather than the occasional small window box or pot with herbs and flowers in a corner on the deck, they were over-run with grass, flowers, small trees, vines and vegetables, covering what might have once been the sleeping quarters of a houseboat, or perhaps a mast. 'Armada', I realised: here were the first signs of the city of boats and ships, chained together for centuries, growing, changing, but always moving with the tides and the tugs, the renegade city that was half-legend, half-reality in Mieville's The Scar(Pan Macmillan 2002).
I entered Mieville's world again when I sank into the endless text of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Here were the secretive workings of an underground opposition, the working-class Radicals organising their rebellions and protests, as well as corrupt politicians making use of spies and informers to infiltrate the Radical organisations and calculated brutality to close them down. Here were the myriad trades such as spinners, weavers, dyers, smiths, cutlers, tailors, type-founders, stone-makers, thatchers, carpenters, wheelwrights, shoemakers, spring-makers, platers, brace-makers and many more that made up the world of nineteenth-century England, a world that felt eerily familiar to Mieville's vast city of New Crobuzon. Thompson's liking for the curious and homely names of English towns and their trades--such as the Spitalfields silkweavers--evoked the deep Englishness of names like Stoneshell, Ludmead, East Gidd, Dog Fenn and Salacus Fields in Mieville's texts.
Once again, in Trotsky's My Life: An Attempt at an AutobiographyI met another element in Mieville's world: the legendary armoured train. As for Trotsky, when he was the head of the Red Army, making a name for himself with brilliant tactical innovations during the civil war, he lived in a train buttressed with armour plating. Carrying crack troops dressed in leathers, armoured cars, books, a full kitchen and a bathroom, the train also had a carriage for...
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