Title: As bad as "The Scar" was good
Product review: If this had been the first book I had read by Mieville, I would never have picked up another. Plot-driven, with a handful of poorly sketched out characters we never come to care about, and a plot that is deliberately left murky long past the point where the reader no longer cares. Every sentence has both a metaphor and a made-up word in it, making for hard slogging through pretension. I put the book down with 40 pages left to go and almost didn't pick it up again; however, I finally relented and read the purported climax when stuck in an airport. If this book had been better written, it would have been a Stephen King novel -- which is still about 30 levels below what Mieville is capable of.All that being said, "The Scar" is a jewel, surely one of the best books in the genre that I have read in fifteen years. Mieville is a young writer and some unevenness is to be expected. I'm looking forward to his next book and hoping that he recaptures some of his magic.
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