I’ve been saving this book for six months now. I was given it as a present and wanted to wait till I had the time to just read it from cover to cover, with no interruptions, no delays, nothing getting in the way of my consuming it. I was right to do so, it was worth the wait, it is worth lavishing attention on.
The Scar is based in the same world - Bas-Lag - as his previous book Perdido Street Station, loosely following on from the events in that book, but not vital to read and nothing to do with the plot. It serves at most as an establishing macguffin.
Bas-Lag is an incredible fantasy world, well thought out, brilliantly imagined. It’s full of plenty of fantasy tropes, but there’s no pointy eared elves or leather clad barbarians in sight. He builds the world well by referring to a plethora of off stage places and things, relating them just enough to the story, leaving the reader guessing and wanting more, but not writing too much about them. No boring info dumps about irrelevancies, just vignettes of stories you want to find out more about.
His prose is very readable, moving easily from Lovecraftian to contemporary modes of description or speech. The thing that makes his work exciting for me is the names. Names of people and places fit, you can recognise New Crobuzon names from southern pirates, undead kingdoms have the right sound to them and invented races and creatures sound magical. It adds that feeling of veracity, in the manner of Tolkien, everything named just right and rolling off the tongue like they’ve been spoken for years.
