Embassytown

[sawyl]

I've been musing on China Miéville's Embassytown for a few weeks and while my thoughts are still settling, my feelings are firm: it's a big, ambitious, clever novel worthy of Le Guin and Delany. Set on a distant planet where a human ghetto is surrounded by a much larger city of almost incomprehensible aliens, the book recounts the events of a great upheaval from the viewpoint of Avice, a local woman who has made a name for herself by travelling the galaxy and who has returned to Embassytown in time to get caught up a huge revolution.

Opening with an account of her childhood and her travels though immer — a form of FTL — Avice describes her triumphant return to Embassytown, her new husband Scile in tow. As a linguist, Scile is delighted to be in Embassytown and to have direct access with the Ariekei and their profoundly strange Language which, thanks to a quirk of fate, only provide a one-way channel of communications: humans are able to understand Language relatively easily, but when individual humans or translating machines try to speak to the Ariekei the aliens only hear it as noise.

The reason for this disjunction is partly physical and partly psychological: phonemes in Language consist of two sounds made simultaneously, preventing humans from physically sounding it out; but in addition, words in Language aren't referents to thoughts but actual thoughts themselves, preventing the Ariekei from understanding written scripts or mechanical translators and, almost incidentally, preventing them from saying anything that isn't literally true. Having eventually overcome the language gap using a combination of biological and mechanical engineering to create the Ambassadors — paired clones mentally linked to provide the pretence of a shared consciousness — humans have managed to strike up a trade in bioengineered alien artifacts and to establish a small enclave with the Host city.

Avice, thanks to her status both as an immerser and as an important simile in Language — she is the girl who ate what was given her — finds herself at the centre of the events that change the course of human-Ariekei relations forever. The first happens at one of the Hosts' occasional Festivals of Lies, when an Ariekei who has associated himself with the human similes, says something that is impossibly untrue. The second happens at an Embassy party when an impossible Ambassador, a pair of friends from Embassytown's patron world, addresses the aliens for the first time and their words burn through Ariekei society like fire, altering it completely.

Embassytown is an exhilarating and occasionally frustrating ride, that more than delivers on its dazzling opening ideas. Almost the entire first half of the book is dedicated to setting up the universe, describing quirky Embassytown, and detailing the sheer alien incomprehensibly of Language where word and thought are inseparable. Then, almost abruptly, the action begins in earnest with the arrival of Ambassador EzRa and events flash past at an astonishing rate, leaving the reader as dizzy with ideas as a poor, word-shocked Ariekei at a Festival of Lies.

I'm fairly sure that the plot is intended to be allegorical, but I never quite decided what the underlying truth was supposed to be. I suppose it could be read as a metaphor for religion: Scile's view that learning to lie is akin to an abandonment of a state of grace; EzRa's words could be a stand-in for Pentecost and the tongues of fire that helped the apostles spread the gospel through the intervention of the holy spirit; while the final redemption through the abnegation of previous thought could be viewed as a metaphorical crucification of sorts.

More broadly, I suppose, the book could be read as a fable that describes the risks of wishful thinking — the Ariekei are unable to disbelieve what they're told, making them pathologically credulous and hopelessly vulnerable to any idea that comes along. It is only when they are able to introduce a wedge between the immediacy of though and Language, to use words as referents rather than as thoughts themselves, that they're able to develop a firebreak that gives them a chance to think about an idea before believing or rejecting it. Which, I suppose, encompasses my idea of a religious allegory but also covers a myriad of other theories from climate change denial to all manner of conspiracy theories and irrational thinking.

Despite my enthusiasm, I have some minor doubts about the foundations of Ariekei Language. We're told that Language and thought are conspecific and consequently, Language can only used to be refer to concrete things — this rules out lying and, it seems, much of abstract thought. Therefore, in order to employ a simile, the Ariekei must first reify it. But to do that, they must first have thought out what they want to do, in which case they'd be able to talk about it. (Bren, I think, fudges this question when it arises by taking about a pre-shadow idea that some sort of new simile is needed to enlarge the Language).

Further, I'm not convinced that any species without the ability to employ counterfactuals and abstracts would be able to develop the scientific and engineering concepts required to build a technological society — even the biotech society of the Ariekei. Perhaps I'm being to Popperian and prescriptive, but I can't see who a species without the ability to conjecture or pose what-if questions can possibly hope to come up with models and tests that can be use to probe the essential nature of the universe. (I wonder what the Ariekei concept of mathematics looks like!)

But these are quibbles: Language exists to serve the plot and to allow interesting ideas to be investigated and not to be a completely coherent entity in its own right. (And of course there's always the possibility that (a) I haven't thought about the ideas nearly as hard as they deserve, and (b) I'm being hopelessly human-centric in my assumptions about how the Ariekei can and can't think) And none of this takes away from a ferociously clever, fascinating readable book with more than a slight hint of Delany's Babel 17 about it.

Definitely required reading.