Looking For Jake - China Miéville (Guest Blog)

Hiya! This is a "special edition" guest blog from Chrissy's husband, Jeremy. I've just read Looking for Jake, which Chrissy said she was sadly not going to have time to review, but wanted a review for it.

There were a couple surprises waiting for me to discover:

• This is a book of short stories that I actually enjoyed. No, really.
• The author, China Mieville, is a guy. That was only semi-related to the name - I didn't discover the gender bit until the very end, when I read the 'about the author'.

The collection is 14 short stories, for some reason labeled as science fiction, likely due to the fact that, well, they're really weird.

How weird?

I won the lottery!
     I mean, I didn't win the lottery. But I was one of a bunch of runners-up, and it was a peach of a prize. An invitation to a special, licenced Christmas™ party in the centre of London, run by YuleCo itself.
     When I read the letter I was shaking. This was YuleCo, so it would be the real deal. There'd be Santa™, and Rudolph™, and Mistletoe™, and Mince Pies™, and a Christmas Tree™, with presents underneath it.

- from 'Tis the Season

Some of them I was a bit indifferent to (including the title piece), because they started a bit interesting, but would then either fizzle or go somewhere stupid. Even those, however, had some neat ideas (also including the title piece).

But, boy, the ones that are good, are GOOD.

"Reports of Certain Events in London" details the events that follow after our lead receives incorrectly addressed mail from the 'Brotherhood of Watchers of the Viae Ferae', a secret society that tracks roaming feral streets and the battles between them.

"Entry Taken From a Medical Encyclopedia" details "Buscard's Murrain", a curious literary disease, also mentioned in The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.

"Details" is creepy. Really really creepy. I'm now trying to avoid ever staring at anything for too long:

     "I opened my eyes fully, for the first time.
     "I had chosen an old wall. I was looking for the answer to some question that I told you I can't even remember now, but the question wasn't the main thing. That was the opening of my eyes.
     "I stared at the whole mass of the bricks. I took another glance, relaxed my sight. At first I couldn't stop seeing the bricks as bricks, the divisions as layers of cement, but after a time they became pure vision. And as the whole broke down into down into lines and shapes and shades, I held my breath as I began to see.
     "Alternatives appeared to me. Messages written in the pockmarks. Insinuations in the forms. Secrets unraveling. It was bliss.
     "And then without warning my heart went tight, as I saw something. I made sense of the pattern.
     "It was a mess of cracks and lines and crumbling cement, and as I looked at it, I saw a pattern in the wall.
     "I saw a clutch of lines that looked just like something... terrible - something old and predatory and utterly terrible - staring right back at me.
     "And then I saw it move."

But the best, the one that's kinda stickin' with me when I look out into the dark or catch a reflection, is The Tain. This won the Locus Award for Best Novella. Good. It's a story about post-apocalyptic London that has been overrun by Imagos, bringing about what could be the end of humankind.

The only technical bit of the story, but it's so deliciously complex, I had to look up some references after reading it:

     There is something called the Phong Model, Sholl said. It's a graph. It's a model to show how light moves. The shinier the surface, the more precise and bright the reflected light, the narrower the range in which it can be seen. The model used to describe how light bounced off concrete and paper and metal and class, its angle of specular reflection narrowing, approximating the angle of incidence, its bright sport brightening, as the surfaces became more mirrored.
     But something happened, and now Phong describes a turning key.
     It used to be a sliding scale. Asymptotic. An endless approximation to infinity or zero. It's become a threshold. As the reflected brightness grows more precise, as its angle of exit narrows to more closely mimic its entry, it's approaching an edge, it is becoming a change of state, he said. Until a critical moment is reached: until light meets the sheen of a gloss surface, and everything alters, and the light unlocks a door, and what was a mirror becomes a gate.
     Mirrors became gates, and something came through.

It bounces between two different characters: the human, 'Sholl', who is trying to make sense and survive, but has a plan; an unnamed Imago who gives us insight (and history, but the quote's insight):

I have seen my people debased. Entities more powerful than your moon made to smear scarlet wax and fat on peeling lips, lick it off lumpy teeth, made to preen with you. Bulked into spasming fibrous meat and mutely raising and lowering iron bars, without complaint, unable to complain, as you stared at yourselves, at them, made to wear your sweat-wet clothes and jostle mindlessly from machine to machine as you worked to change you shapes. You have put mirrors by your beds, or over them, and trapped my people in your clammy fuck-embraces. You made us fuck each other, stare at the eyes of our siblings with shared hatred and apology as the bodies you made us wear did the corporeal things you did.
     For six thousand years, and forever, you have held us down. Each of us alive and watching, and waiting, and waiting, undying all that time. You didn't know, but not knowing is no excuse. And you have taken our freedom away in slow increments, until in a sudden flurry of three centuries you sped it all up, and took away our last escapes, and made our world yours.
     One day, we whispered. We had whispered it forever.
When it came, the time was not one day but many, stretched out over months, a luxuriant, languorous release, in pieces, in parts and parcels, and the more infuriating but ultimately the more wonderful, liberatory, for that.

So, all in all a good read, but definitely dark. A strange uplifting dark. Read it, but prepare for it to leave a strangely pleasurable melancholy taste.