The Scar, by China Miéville

Cactus men, mosquito people and a disdain for heroic quests

Though The Scar is China Miéville's third novel, it seems like a second book. King Rat, his debut, was set in a contemporary London shot through with fantastical elements. Perdido Street Station, his second novel, moved into a world which seemed entirely different, though its teeming city of New Crobuzon is a growth of King Rat's London into a fantasy setting.

The Scar returns to Bas-Lag, Miéville's fantastical alternate Earth. It voyages away from the cityscape of Perdido Street towards the eponymous feature: a rift, ostensibly left behind by alien or extra-dimensional conquerors, which boils with possibilities and potentialities.

Bellis Coldwine, a linguist forced into exile as a side-effect of the vast plot of Perdido Street Station, is aboard a ship sailing for the equivalent of early-colonial America or Australia when the vessel is seized by pirates. They incorporate it, and everyone aboard, into Armada – a great floating township. A huge engineering project is being worked, and one of Bellis's fellow travellers is needed to provide expertise. Everyone else is press-ganged and found work in Armada.

The story advances in great, mind-stretching gallops. Concepts which would fuel a lesser trilogy (like the harnessing of a submarine being of Moby-Dick proportions) are stepping-stones to still larger concerns. The point is not the overarching skeleton of story, but the crowded flesh of imagined lives and societies that cling to it.

We meet cactus-men and vampires, spies and scholars, fish demons and mosquito people, but there is besides the sense of wonder a feeling for tangled, moving complexities. They would seem irritants for the standard find-the-ruby-and-kill-the-dragon fantasy tome, but are the pulsing life of a real book.

This audacious approach sets Miéville's project apart from the vast majority of fantasies. The generic post-Tolkien fantasist sets out a purpose by drawing a map, then fills in the gaps: the pleasures on offer are the domestication of wildwoods, with every level of human or non-human society set in stone and rules laid down for the workings of magic and science.

Miéville's Bas-Lag doesn't work like that. At the heart of Perdido Street Station was a city that at once was and was not London; at the end of The Scar, narrative itself must fray. The central characters question the underlying structure of most fantasy – the heroic quest – and set forth the point of view of all who had to be duped or forced to go along with the great voyage. The novel has a hero and a villain, but they are deliberately vague, secondary characters.

Like Miéville's first two novels, The Scar is a feat of the imagination, a rich reclamation of the pleasures of every genre. It's also a caution against imagination, a sobering look at the chaos left in the wake of every mad visionary.

Fantasy tends to work by furnishing worlds to which readers wish to return, as to a nursery or a garden. Miéville's Bas-Lag is the world we already live in – where stories can never be easily finished – but looked at in a way that we have never seen before.