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The Tain
by China Miéville, introduction
by M John Harrison
(PS Publishing, £8, 89 pages, signed, numbered, limited edition paperback,
also available as signed, numbered, limited edition hardback priced
£25, published December 2002.)
 China
Miéville doubtless wasn't planning it this way, but reading his
novella of a chaotic, militia-ridden London in the week when Baghdad
went from dictatorship to anarchy was an uncanny experience. The
Tain initially looks as if it's going to be a savage rewrite of
the cosy catastrophes which were a mainstay of British sf for a long
while:
There was small-arms fire coming from Brompton. He had heard
that a squad of paratroopers had regrouped somewhere to the west of
Sloane Square, and the noise seemed to verify that. He had no idea what
they were fighting, nor how long they would last. (12)
Miéville is, unsurprisingly, very good at reworking the familiar
trope of a half-deserted, threatening city; as in his novels, a particular
strength is the degree to which he conveys the physicality of
fear. One is constantly aware of how watchful the protagonist Sholl
has to be, how much his few possessions matter, and how much has been
stripped away from everyday life since the cataclysm which changed everything.
The nature of that cataclysm is the subject of a second narrative thread,
which alternates with Sholl's. There has long been, it transpires, another
race of beings, the ones we see every time we look in a mirror or a
pool of water. They have been compelled to do or suffer whatever we
have done when we have looked at our reflections. It was a humiliation
and a punishment for them, and became infinitely worse once humanity
discovered the tain, the silvering on the back of mirrors: "Every house
became Versailles. Every house a hall of mirrors." (23) Mass-production
of the source of their pain made the last few centuries a source of
particular bitterness for them, and so they found a way to break free
from their mirror-world into our own, where they created the havoc which
engulfs London.
Once this premise is assimilated, everything else in the story follows.
There's the striking image of a city where nothing reflects -- not the
Thames, not shop windows, not even puddles on the pavement. There are
brief, surreal glimpses of disembodied hands or lips, partial reflections
given autonomous life. And there's the story of Sholl's gradual realisation
of the nature of the war he's embroiled in, and his place in it. It
becomes clear that the story is directed to making the reader see the
scale of the mirror-peoples' suffering and then, perhaps, put down the
book and look outwards for a moment.
It's not difficult, in other words, to arrive at an explicitly political
reading of The Tain. If, Miéville seems to be saying,
I made you see the horror of the mirror-peoples' plight, what is there
you take for granted in the real world which is also founded on exploiting
other beings? The clothes you wear? The food you eat? What would you
say to those who make the things you use if you met them face to face?
As a story which uses the tropes of the fantastic to address the real
world's injustices, The Tain can stand with the best work of
another stylist of decaying empires, Lucius Shepard. It has a stunning
and sombre wrap-around cover by Edward Miller, and comes with an introduction
by M. John Harrison which unpacks the story as an artefact of the "New
Weird". Harrison suggests that, by taking a less fantastic setting than
usual, Miéville's London is more estranging than his New Crobuzon.
I'd put it a different way. Here we have a China Miéville book
which feels stripped down to its essentials. That's not just because
it's 89 pages rather than 890. Sentence to sentence, as well, it feels
as if the author has deliberately pared away his story, omitted the
scenes or details which would be merely striking diversions, and given
us a narrative in which form follows function with emphatic rightness
and force.
Review by Graham Sleight
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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