The Scar (Mieville, China)

Is that Mieville or Melville? With the same neck-wrenching plotting used in Perdido Street Station, China Mieville takes us on a fishing trip/pirate ship/spy story/exile's tale full of similarly wild imaginations in all-new settings. The Scar is less of an editor's nightmare than Perido Street Station must have been, and Mieville refrains from the worst of his tendencies to write long, semicomprehensible passages in an alien life-form's first person view. In the end, the novel is an exercise in non-too-subtle metaphors for the title, but surprisingly, it works. And it's effective.