much of what she knows through books (predigested, reported, alienated description); and secondarily through the eyes of Tanner, whose own understanding is distorted by gratitude. It means Miéville can mostly avoid the conversations that explain the landscape or the politics of Armada (although he does have two, one with Carianne, and another with Uther Doul) and instead present it in negatives, the things that Bellis encounters and is repelled by or does not understand.
Consequently it is those scenes in which neither Tanner Sack nor Bellis Coldwine appear that are written most like those of the classic quest fantasy. For example, “Below the waist, the crays’ armoured hindquarters were those of colossal rock lobsters: huge carapaces of gnarled shell and overlapping somites. Their human abdomens jutted out from above where the eyes and antennae would have been” (41). Here Miéville has no choice but to simply describe, to pause the action while the characters are outlined. He has no one in place to mediate for him. In contrast, when Bellis observes the inhabitants of Armada, the Cray are simply “sluggish on their armoured legs” (79). We see what she notices, and only what she notices. Yet Miéville manipulates this rhetoric. Much later, he uses a moment of removal, a moment where there is no observer with whom we are identified, to deliver vital information. As Captain Sengka hefts a box containing a message, we are told of “the worthless little necklace that justifies the jewellery box; and beneath that box’s velvet padding … a heavy disk the size of a large watch”: the compass that will guide New Crobuzon to Armada. For a moment, Miéville breaks the illusion that we hear this tale from Bellis. We know more than she; it is a classic moment of recognition, but one that is denied to the “hero.”
For at the center of The Scar might be, but is not, our protagonist, Bellis Coldwine. Miéville has created a protagonist who is almost entirely marginalized from what is actually happening. Much of this marginalization is achieved by the careful construction of one of the most solipsistic “heroes” since Thomas Covenant. The construction of the lengthy missive—recipient unknown—that punctuates this tale, is a focus of this solipsism. Sent to a reader in New Crobuzon, it would have maintained the internal integrity of the club story. Presented to Carianne, however, to another witness, it becomes, in the end, one of many challenges to the impermeable narrative of the quest fantasy.
But before all this, Bellis must rethink her own place in the narrative. As Covenant believed that his own fevered brain generated a world around him, Bellis seems incapable of believing that it is not her story being told. Her anger at Johannes Tearfly when she realizes that her ship was hijacked in order to collect him, is in part a result of her sense of displacement from the center of the narrative (96).
Whether New Crobuzon is invaded, whether the Armada turns around—all are rephrased in her mind in terms of saving her city, and how far she will be taken away from home. She is incapable of abandoning a map of the universe that places New Crobuzon at the center even while she is capable of admitting its flaws and self-delusions (in a moment that reminds us that at least an element of this world is known to Bellis). We cannot understand “The accounts of the Money Circle and the Week of Dust,” because Bellis does not explain it nor does she receive an explanation. For a moment we are estranged twice: once from the world of Armada; second, and more conclusively, from the fantasy in which Bellis is immersed, her personal frame world of New Crobuzon.
Only reluctantly does Bellis ever admit the concerns of others, and she never admits that hers is one of myriad political interests. Miéville is not the first to attempt constructing a quest fantasy from the point of view of a minor character: Robin Hobb, for example, tries this in the Farseer trilogy where her protagonist is precluded by birth from ascending the throne. But somehow Fitz contrives to be at the center of the action. The quest is his even if he does not reap the reward.35
Bellis’s solipsism allows Miéville to undermine the other cardinal rule of the quest fantasy: what one is told, is. As Bellis herself acknowledges at various points within the novel—but without notable effect—her understanding of the world causes her to misplace herself within conversations. She is repeatedly manipulated by those who tell her stories. It is not a coincidence that the longest delivered speeches in the book are those of Silas Fennec, the spy (126–128, 164–167), nor that he is one of the few people to actually use the word “trust,” to imply that he is grateful that Bellis should trust him. Bellis knows that he is lying; the “maggot of doubt” that Droul plants in her mind wriggles because it is meaningful. But Bellis’s understanding of the world makes this nagging doubt of little relevance. She has chosen to believe, “caught up in it” as Doul points out (473), and we, instinctively, believe with her, because the pattern of quest fantasies has taught us to do just that. We too are caught up in the passion and belief of the moment; we insist that there must be a quest, a goal, and that those with whom we travel are part of that cozy conspiracy of companionship.
As an (ignored) reminder that such structures are deceptive, what Bellis learns from Shekel is delivered in the past tense, as reported speech: “Shekel told Bellis about Hedrigall the cactae aeronaut. He told her about the cactus-man’s notorious past as a pirate merchant for Dreer Samher and described to her the journeys Hedrigall had made to the monstrous islands south of Gnurr Kett, to trade with the mosquito-men” (100). In defiance of the conventions of the quest fantasy, diegesis is both more accurate and more important than anything we are told directly by the candidates for narrative authority, Uther Doul or Silas Fennec—as is the reported tale of the anophelli which Bellis tells to us (284–285).
The epistemology of the quest fantasy is also challenged: as much as in any other quest, knowledge is fixed and sealed either in the mouths of the narrative authority or between the covers of books. The sacredness of book knowledge is a given and here it is duly reverenced. The Lovers steal books, make of them communal property. The errors in their filing are lovingly described. Books are searched for because knowledge can only be recreated from what is already written. Thus Bellis’s destruction of the book is all the more shocking, because the convention is that what has been destroyed cannot be re-created, it can only be rediscovered. This convention is reinforced by what the found text says and how it says it. Krüach Aum does not claim invention or originality. Like Gandalf he narrates a history of what was done and discovered in the mists of legend: “I have … found a story to tell, of what had not been done since the Ghosthead Empire and was achieved once more, a thousand years ago” (190). At the most, he is a theoretician who has worked out the equations but never tested them. The dynamic of the novel demands not a reworking of the equations, not a pursuit of the physics that made it possible, but a pursuit of the physicist, or at the least, of his books—a dynamic reinforced when Krüach Aum is described as the one who “fishes for old books in ruins” (287). For all we know, the book at the center of this section is itself a copy of a copy of a copy, made valuable only by a belief that knowledge does not mutate but sits, waiting to be found. In part this dynamic may have been what Justina Robson meant when she wrote that The Scar “has the seeming of subversion but it doesn’t really blow up the foundations” (Robson, e-mail 20 May 2003).
I have grouped The Scar with quest and portal novels, and I have already identified the moment of portal transition, but the quest is harder to pinpoint in this novel. Miéville, like the other writers in this section, is actively denying us the conventional quest narrative, but this time in a much more direct fashion, and in a way that depends heavily upon the conventions of the quest novel.36 The Scar is an anti-quest novel. We are set up, time and time again, to expect that something will be found, a hero identified, a mission launched. And each time we are denied. Shekel does not turn out to be the predestined orphan; the magus fin is precisely that, a maguffin, even though it is perhaps the one moment of undisputed magic (as opposed to alternate science) in the book; and the Scar in the ocean is never reached nor is its power ever quite defined. The Scar may not even exist—we never have a direct view of the chasm.
For many involved, the quest remains opaque, a quest without the power to inspire. As Miéville has argued, the She-Lover is the only character unreservedly inspired by quest-narrative
