Warwick's Reviews > Embassytown

I see I'm going to be a dissenting voice here, but I'm afraid I found Embassytown to be weak, poorly-plotted and fundamentally unconvincing.

The book is concerned with a settlement on a planet at the edge of the known universe. The city is inhabited by Ariekei, a strange species whose distinguishing feature is a unique language which has a double articulation and in which it is impossible to lie. A small enclave of humans lives there, and communicates with their ‘Hosts’ via a series of Ambassadors – two people bred to think as one, who, by talking simultaneously, can communicate effectively with the Ariekei natives.

So far so good. Unfortunately, a lot about Miéville's world here just doesn't add up. The narrator, Avice, is special. She's an ‘immerser’, born with special abilities to navigate the ‘immer’, or sub-space underlying the known universe. We hear all about how unusual this is, and the special training she receives to be able to navigate vessels through the vast reaches of space this way.

Then, the whole concept is dropped and never reappears in the novel again. The whole thing turns out to have no bearing on the plot whatsoever (apart from a very tangential callback during the climax). Avice and other characters keep banging on about how she has these special, unique abilities – but they are NEVER called on and have no relevance to anything. Obviously I don't expect everything to tie together at the end, but this was just bizarre in its pointlessness.

The language element of the plot, too, irritated me. I am no expert, but linguistics is an interest of mine and the ideas on display here seem deeply unconvincing. A couple of vague references to langue and parole are not enough to back up some very shaky concepts. The whole idea of a language where you cannot lie is very problematic, if not impossible: certainly it requires far more explanation than we are offered here. Saying that it is a language where ‘words are referents’, far from convincing me, only made me feel that Miéville doesn't know what he's talking about. It really makes no sense to say (as we are told in the book) that the Ariekei employ humans to perform certain specific actions just so they can then speak of them as similes, this being necessary because unless something has literally happened they would never be able to express it in their language. To ask for these actions to be carried out in the first place, they must be able to formulate the idea in advance and express it to someone. This is actually pointed out by a character in the book, but no one, including the author, bothers to answer the question despite the fact that it's clearly a major flaw with the entire set-up.

Then there's the fact that the dénouement depends on large chunks of the Ariekei population suddenly learning to lie practically overnight – not only that, but they invent an entire writing system in a single afternoon. Give me a break. I just didn't believe any of it.

The City and the City had its flaws, but it was a much better-written novel than Embassytown, and I'm at a loss as to why so many people seem to think this is his masterpiece. The plot is all over the place, and the theories underlying it are dodgy in the extreme. It's just not a particularly great book (and that ain't no lie).