Читать книгу Rhetorics of Fantasy - Farah Mendlesohn - Страница 24

Having outlined the rhetorical structures of the portal-quest fantasy tradition in its early stages and at its most typical, I shall now test this outline against deliberately challenging and subversive versions of the form. If the strategies I have outlined are fundamental to the genre, then they will exist to some extent or other in these more subversive novels, even where that existence is self-consciously challenged.

One route to subversion is to refuse the portal. Jeff Noon structures Vurt (1993) around a search for a portal. The fantasy as a whole is immersive: told in the first person, we sit in Scribble’s brain and, for the most part, must work out what this modern Manchester looks like by the hints and clues dropped in the course of his search for the yellow Vurt feather and his sister Desdemona. When we are invited into Scribble’s thoughts, he is usually considering a problem, not contemplating who and what he is—although we do receive some backstory through dream sequences. But these are dream sequences or flashbacks and are presented as such, not as reverie; they are rarely narrativized. There are moments of intrusion, in that the Vurt leaks, but because there is little surprise enacted, this is not an intrusion fantasy. The intrusion has become proper to this frame world. It is not in itself the means by which the fantastic enters the text.

But the portal lurks; it is an actor in the drama; the fantasy is a cross-hatch and we slip and slide between states (Clute, Encyclopedia 237). Some Vurts contain the metaVurts, that can link Scribble to the fantasy world on the other side. MetaVurts are looking-glass Vurts, infinitely recursive. But when we are in a Vurt we can immediately see the difference in the way it is written. Despite the complexity of the nature of the portal as it is depicted, the difficulty of finding the portal, of being sure that it is a way through, and not simply a fantasy, the Vurt world is still described, whereas Manchester is taken for granted. It can be described from the outside—“Dreamsnakes came from a bad feather called Takshaka. Any time something small and worthless was lost to the Vurt, one of those snakes crept through in exchange” (25)—or it can be described from the inside,

The garden was serene and beautiful, quintessentially English, just like I remembered, with burbling fountains and a mass of flowers growing wild, overflowing their beds … its heady perfume was caressing my senses, and a burst of pleasure was choking me, like every drop of blood in my veins had taken a sap-ride to my cock. (121)

Noon is sensitive to the “rules”: only when he is in the Vurt, is through the portal, does Scribble give us this kind of florid description. Even the description of the Dog hang out does not match it in aesthetic intensity, for it is much more purpose driven:

Along one wall were nailed the carcasses of dozens of dream snakes, shimmers of green and violet. Three dog men were eating there.… The smell was sweet to my nostrils. (301)

The first quotation makes of landscape a character; buried in the second quotation is information to be unpacked. Yet it is only at the very end that Scribble makes it through into the portal world, and when he does, it is a world reduced to the very essence of the portal fantasy. The Game Cat and Scribbler sit in a room piled high with objects. The Scribbler is now just one of them, as undifferentiated as all the other props in fantasyland.

Michael Swanwick takes the refusal of portal even further. An immensely complex novel, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993) barely belongs in this category. (I shall discuss this novel in much greater detail in chapter 2.) But for the moment we should consider briefly the way in which Swanwick evades the imperative of the portal fantasy.

The portal in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is so far in the protagonist’s past that Jane is a full citizen of the otherworld. A changeling, she functions in fantasyland as if a native. She is a native, and the rhetoric and language of the novel is that of the immersive fantasy, with information leaked in the interstices of the building site that is the fantasy. The portal is denied almost until the very end of the book: although there are leaks and slippages, only in chapter 23 does Jane finally enter the portal in Spiral Castle. There, for the first time, she is granted a guide, a self-declared cicerone (333) who baffles her with a description of his Trans Am and the Springsteen on the radio. According to the conventions, Jane should learn from this, but she does not: language cannot communicate meaning in the absence of a reference (MacDonald and Lindsay were right about that), and Jane is not the hero of a quest fantasy, conditioned by isolation to trust. Then, in chapter 24, Swanwick fully rejects the rhetoric of the portal fantasy. “Restored” to her own world, to the ostensible frame world that has not framed this narrative, Jane acts as if she has always been there. We know she has not, and she knows she is a stranger in the land, but she has learned to act as if she is competent in her world and she takes this learning with her into the new world. Jane will provide us with no more explanation than she did in her previous world: we must decode, rather than passively receive, a reader position disguised by our knowledge of the new world.

Perhaps the easiest way to subvert the portal fantasy is to reverse the direction of travel. Two very good examples are in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle and Barbara Hambly’s The Magicians of Night (the second book in The Sun-Cross sequence).³⁰ Howl’s Moving Castle contains within it a portal fantasy that underlines the differences in language for immersive and portal texts. Although the book as a whole is clearly an immersive fantasy, toward the end Howl, Sophie, and Howl’s assistant (Michael) travel through the entrance of the Moving Castle into Wales. Immediately we are into the conventions of portal fantasy. The characters obey a guide (Howl), ask questions, and describe to us what they see. No longer must we just exist and interpret a foreign language; instead, they are our (mis-)translators in a world we know better than do they. Despite the book’s diversion into our primary world, it never ceases to be high fantasy because this glimpse of our primary world is contextualized through Sophie’s eyes as fantastic, creating in the reader “a feeling of awe and wonder” (Zahorski and Boyer 57). This moment, what M. John Harrison has described as “counter-trajectories of the counter-liminal,”³¹ is in itself a critique of the genre: with her inversion Jones challenges reader acceptance of the protagonist-interpretation intrinsic to the functioning of portal fantasy. It is also—and incidentally—interesting because it answers the question of whether a quest fantasy can take place in a “known space.” While the superficial answer is in the affirmative—all the characters find their treasure close to home—in reality only one of the characters actually knows the John Donne poem that forms the intellectual, or cognitive, space through which they move.

Barbara Hambly takes a slightly different approach. Here our protagonist, Rhion, knows that he is entering a different world. Yet in the opening chapters of The Magicians of Night, Rhion arrives ready to trust the guide. But Hambly wants to collapse this edifice, and she does this in part with the intense language of the portal fantasy: the language is both deceptive and revealing. Clues to Rhion’s real situation are planted in the shaping of the world around him: he is led at the very beginning to trust in the “glow of candles, a constellation of six small flames” (1) because they are a key to familiarity. He is welcomed by “the pitiless beauty of a god carved in ivory” (2), a phrase that warns both Rhion and ourselves. And elsewhere, Hambly is deliberately deceptive, severing the link between landscape and morality. The hills that are splashed with golden sunlight, covered in wild ivy and buttercups, shelter evil, not elves (12). Later, Rhion will be alerted to evil through the material objects he touches: it is interesting that in Hambly’s world, the psychic traces are attached to made objects. The world itself is not an active participant in the fantasy.

One critical difference that reshapes the entire fantasy is that we do not, in this case, ride exploring with Rhion. Except in the details of the plot, we are more familiar than is he with the environment he is exploring. We are displaced from our customary position. Consequently, when Hambly offers the usual little explanations of the customs and practices of the country (“Most of the people in this world were addicted to the inhaled smoke of cured tobacco leaves, and everything—cars, house, furniture, and clothing—stank of it” [13], she is playing a double game. Where in the conventional quest fantasy this detail is intended to familiarize us with the world, to make us feel increasingly at home, here the same tactic estranges us, reminds us that the “we” that is Rhion are strangers here.

Donaldson used the doubt of Thomas Covenant to convince the reader to trust. Hambly sets out to challenge the entire ideological edifice of the portal fantasy that assumes trust and constructs stupidity and passivity in the response of the protagonist in order to support that construction. Rhion is never a passive protagonist: once he is fully conscious, he interrogates the world around him. In other quest fantasies, the assertion that a gang of prisoners deserved to die, or to be used to test a drug (18–19) might be perfectly acceptable until conclusively proved otherwise³² (usually by a counternarrative delivered by a competing party). Rhion, however, from the first glimpse of an ethical dilemma, begins to doubt, and by chapter 4 is in a case of permanent suspicion. Estranged from the usual source of learning in the portal fantasy, he must do that which the hero of this subgenre is usually not required to do: he must analyze. In this fantasy Rhion learns not from what he is told but from newsreels, from newspapers, and from the behavior of those around him (69). There are no shortcuts, no physical markers of evil, no guide (unless we count the Jewish barmaid, Sarah) to absolve him from interpreting the world as best he can.

This content is reflected in the rhetorical structure that Hambly deploys. Only those accounts of the world that are most unreliable, most despicable, are delivered as a closed narrative, whether an account of the disappearance of magic (11) or von Rath asserting the inferiority of women (68). It is not a coincidence Hambly has Rhion reject the “rediscovered” scholarship of past ages with its claim to be copied from yet older documents: “This was a usual claim made by occult societies, in Rhion’s world as well as this one” (134). Nor that the coven consists of men who will not listen either to Rhion or to each other: books and men are each engaged in constructing and delivering their own sealed narrative, impervious to experimentation or to reason. Both elements are usually critical to the success of the portal fantasy. Here, dismantling them becomes the quest.

Samuel R. Delany’s Neveryóna (1983) begins with a dragon flight; it follows a young girl’s adventures, but at the end leaves her neither with a quest achieved nor returning home. But despite this, and although his appendix B rather undermines my case—Delany states that he took the structure from Frank Romeo’s Bye Bye Love—there is a rather startling resemblance to the structure of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,³³ starting with Pryn’s ride on the dragon, a veritable whirlwind: “Flying, she saw the crazy tilting mountains rise by her, the turning clouds above her, the rocking green, the green-licked rock” (6). Pryn leaves behind her aunt, in a place of poverty, but thinks about her constantly. Being the person her aunt brought her up to be is at least part of the reason for her journey. She is inquisitive and self-centered, much as her aunt was in her obsession with developing the loom. As desperate as she is to leave, there remains a sense of “There is no place like home.”

Once Pryn arrives in the world, the action seems to take place over a year. And yet, as with Dorothy, there is very little development of Pryn (what happens to the pregnancy?); we actually learn very little about her. Instead, she becomes the vehicle through which we ride through the fantasy. The world is narrated to Pryn in much the way it is narrated to Dorothy. There is one solitary moment where we might be seeing the world through an omniscience narrator: in chapter 8, “Of Models, Mystery Moonlight, and Authority,” Madame Keyne, and Jade are talking in the garden. For nine pages (159–168) it seems as if we see them separately from Pryn. Then:

Somewhere a branch fell, off in the bushes …

Certainly it was no more than a branch.

But it made Pryn pull sharply back from the window’s edge. (166)

It has been an illusion. Even in this private moment, we have seen the world through Pryn’s eyes.

But Delany is not using his protagonist to create an impermeable narrative. Neveryóna, like Oz, is a bracelet tale, each section linked at the beginning and end but otherwise with relatively little overlap: each section is a discrete adventure and the incidents are frequently less important that the understanding of the world that is communicated. This need to understand the world is perhaps clearest in chapter 3, “Of Roads, Real Cities, Streets and Strangers,” in which Pryn is taken around the city by Gorgik. His narrative of the city takes up two-thirds of an approximately fourteen thousand–word chapter. Yet what disturbs the reader is the ease with which Pryn moves from one truth to another. She is always slightly distrustful: what do each of the free liminals want from one another? She specifically breaks the rule that says the protagonist of the quest narrative must trust those who interpret the world on her behalf. But equally, the links of the bracelet are constructed of those moments when she carries the desires of each person encountered over into the next sequence.

The critique of the quest narrative that structures the book. Neveryóna is a discussion of the structures of narrative and the epistemological conventions of fantasy. It begins when Pryn first meets the storyteller at the end of the dragon flight. The storyteller’s tale is polysemic, and shaped by this polysemy. What is told is mutable. And the tale is understood, not because it is right, or prophetic, or handed down from an authority, but because it is constructed. We are made to understand that neither storytelling nor oral traditions are natural; they are learned, and the rolling phrases of the high oral narrative, the understanding of the importance of reader response, is as yet uncoded in Neveryóna: “You want to know the outcome—I think it’s very important to alert your listeners to the progress of their own reactions. I can foresee a time, after lots more tales have been told, when that won’t be necessary. But for now it’s a must” (15). Pryn’s reactions are shaped in part by the rudimentary nature of storytelling. We may be able to judge her choices, but that is because, as we are told, “it was all a very long time ago, so that many tales that have nudged you to such a reading had not yet been written” (56).

There is also an issue of ownership of the tale: in a market that is, arguably, driven by reader demand for sequels and continued worlds, Pryn considers, “it was the teller’s tale; the teller ought to know what happened in it, for all her multiple versions” (15). This attitude carries over to Pryn’s reception of Gorgik’s guided tour. She accepts the version of the city he narrates for her, yet notes: “Occasionally the huge slave’s monologue had seemed to coincide with the real market they walked through; more times than not, however, it seemed to exist on quite another level” (55). Gorgik sees a promising young musician, pretty and talented, where Pryn sees a young woman, shabby, ill-kempt and not quite in touch with the world. Both Gorgik and Pryn are making story, but—atypically for quest fantasies—Gorgik’s authority and role as a leader/counselor does not give him the authority to force his story upon Pryn; it is her freedom to resist that allows her to apparently switch sides at various points in the tale. She does not. It is rather that others view her as a pawn, to be engaged and captured; in Carroll’s terms, she is in fact a Queen, self-directed and ultimately only on her own side.

In a pastiche of the quest tale, many of Pryn’s tales are “abbreviated” into a lengthy narrative of what might have been told in another kind of tale:

Were this another story, what we have told of Pryn’s adventures till now might well have been elided or omitted altogether as unbelievable or, at any rate, as uncharacteristic. In that other story Pryn’s next few weeks might easily have filled the bulk of these pages.

Such pages would tell of a dawn’s waking in the public park.… They would describe the two young women Pryn met working there [in the market] who dissuaded her from her plan for the next day: to go to the New Market and ask for a job as a bucket carrier. (188)³⁴

Instead of listening to Pryn’s experience day by day, we are allowed, for a while, to have been there, to have seen it happen. The diegetic ellipsis is used here to divide the Real from the Unreal, the true fantasy from the mundane life; the unity of the epic is broken. Delany does not tie us to his character with handcuffs, but he acknowledges the presence of such detail in other such novels. At the same time, the structure offers another function. Given that Delany’s historical narratives of invention are always questioned and permeable, in that first short paragraph, and others like it, he builds his world out of denial. This is not this kind of story, it is another.

The epistemological ideologies of fantasy are challenged and challenged repeatedly in Neveryóna (as they will also be in The Scar). The storyteller claims to have invented a syllabary (9); Belham and Venn seem, between them, to have invented so much that one comes to wonder if they were indeed contemporaneous geniuses, or if a variety of inventions have come to bear their mark as a kind of catchall. Yet even that claim is challenged as we hear that this wonder “humankind will know and forget” (153 and again from another speaker on page 306): inventions are repeatedly reinvented, continuously disappear and reappear, so that there may be nothing new in the world. But we also hear that this is a tale told to account for the spread of knowledge. And tales and their telling are a rooted part of the system of knowledge. The making of double soup becomes first magical and then believably a thing of magic. The astrolabe that Pryn carries travels in the opposite direction, to stand first as a tool of mystical power, and later to be denied even the status of tool, or key, map, or coded message. The revealed knowledge endemic to the quest fantasy is denied; the nature of knowledge becomes transmuted. History does not carry power in quite the same way it does in other quest fantasies: most specifically, it does not carry authority. People find it difficult or undesirable to keep the past organized unlike the Scholastic and impermeable histories passed down in many quest fantasies. Tratsin, a carpenter, does not wish his memories of a suppressed rebellion to be to passed to his child; memories such as these are restrictive, not empowering. A lost battle in the past is not an incentive to fight more in the future. A fallen empire, its monasteries and courts emptied, will not suddenly spring up, revived. Knowledge must be invented, not found in old books. This fantasy world is built looking forward, not backward. Yet it is still built using the same components we have seen elsewhere.

The narration of fantasyland when done poorly is often didactic, but even the most creative writers find it difficult in this form to avoid impressing upon the reader an authoritative interpretation of their world. An interesting test case, because it is so otherwise divorced from the usual quest fiction, is the work of China Miéville. The Scar (2002), in which the protagonist is running away from her own society, while as elegantly written as Perdido Street Station (2000: see chapter 2, this volume, where is it discussed as an immersive fantasy), requires that much more be explained. Bellis Coldwine, the protagonist, acts as our guide to the world, whereas there is no such role in Perdido Street Station, and the descriptions are of what is seen, rather than what is. The result is that The Scar is less baroque; because the baroque functions best in the taken for granted, the immersive: while overdescribed in the quest fantasy, its function is to create landscape rather than tone.

In The Scar, these intense moments of description are almost always employed when either Bellis Coldwine, or Tanner Sack, the protagonists, see something new. They are moments of alienation, rather than impressions of familiarity. But they are marked for us: “Later, when she thought back to that miserable time, Bellis was shaken by the detail of her memories” (7–8). Reverie here is a device that deliberately impresses memory onto the traumatized; Tanner, at moments of stress, is told in the first person: “All black on black but still I can see hills and water and I can see clouds. I can see the prisons on all sides bobbing a little like fishermen’s floats. Jabber take us all I can see clouds” (17). This is not the smooth, narrated reverie we have seen elsewhere. Miéville uses these moments to demonstrate the fragmented nature of observation; to demonstrate that what we see is not a painting, but abstracted, a personal construct.

Alienation is one of the keys to what Miéville achieves. In most quest and portal fantasies, the process of the novel requires the protagonist to become ever more comfortable with the fantasyland that she has entered. Yet Bellis Coldwine never does. Her alienation is expressed; explicitly; her culture shock is profound (see page 78 for an example). This alienation enables Miéville to give to Bellis the role of describing the world she can never take for granted because she cannot engage with it. Thus we never see Armada through the eyes of Shekel, who has adapted, become immersed, but predominantly through the eyes of Bellis, who learns much of what she knows through books (predigested, reported, alienated description); and secondarily through the eyes of Tanner, whose own understanding is distorted by gratitude. It means Miéville can mostly avoid the conversations that explain the landscape or the politics of Armada (although he does have two, one with Carianne, and another with Uther Doul) and instead present it in negatives, the things that Bellis encounters and is repelled by or does not understand.

Consequently it is those scenes in which neither Tanner Sack nor Bellis Coldwine appear that are written most like those of the classic quest fantasy. For example, “Below the waist, the crays’ armoured hindquarters were those of colossal rock lobsters: huge carapaces of gnarled shell and overlapping somites. Their human abdomens jutted out from above where the eyes and antennae would have been” (41). Here Miéville has no choice but to simply describe, to pause the action while the characters are outlined. He has no one in place to mediate for him. In contrast, when Bellis observes the inhabitants of Armada, the Cray are simply “sluggish on their armoured legs” (79). We see what she notices, and only what she notices. Yet Miéville manipulates this rhetoric. Much later, he uses a moment of removal, a moment where there is no observer with whom we are identified, to deliver vital information. As Captain Sengka hefts a box containing a message, we are told of “the worthless little necklace that justifies the jewellery box; and beneath that box’s velvet padding … a heavy disk the size of a large watch”: the compass that will guide New Crobuzon to Armada. For a moment, Miéville breaks the illusion that we hear this tale from Bellis. We know more than she; it is a classic moment of recognition, but one that is denied to the “hero.”

For at the center of The Scar might be, but is not, our protagonist, Bellis Coldwine. Miéville has created a protagonist who is almost entirely marginalized from what is actually happening. Much of this marginalization is achieved by the careful construction of one of the most solipsistic “heroes” since Thomas Covenant. The construction of the lengthy missive—recipient unknown—that punctuates this tale, is a focus of this solipsism. Sent to a reader in New Crobuzon, it would have maintained the internal integrity of the club story. Presented to Carianne, however, to another witness, it becomes, in the end, one of many challenges to the impermeable narrative of the quest fantasy.

But before all this, Bellis must rethink her own place in the narrative. As Covenant believed that his own fevered brain generated a world around him, Bellis seems incapable of believing that it is not her story being told. Her anger at Johannes Tearfly when she realizes that her ship was hijacked in order to collect him, is in part a result of her sense of displacement from the center of the narrative (96).

Whether New Crobuzon is invaded, whether the Armada turns around—all are rephrased in her mind in terms of saving her city, and how far she will be taken away from home. She is incapable of abandoning a map of the universe that places New Crobuzon at the center even while she is capable of admitting its flaws and self-delusions (in a moment that reminds us that at least an element of this world is known to Bellis). We cannot understand “The accounts of the Money Circle and the Week of Dust,” because Bellis does not explain it nor does she receive an explanation. For a moment we are estranged twice: once from the world of Armada; second, and more conclusively, from the fantasy in which Bellis is immersed, her personal frame world of New Crobuzon.

Only reluctantly does Bellis ever admit the concerns of others, and she never admits that hers is one of myriad political interests. Miéville is not the first to attempt constructing a quest fantasy from the point of view of a minor character: Robin Hobb, for example, tries this in the Farseer trilogy where her protagonist is precluded by birth from ascending the throne. But somehow Fitz contrives to be at the center of the action. The quest is his even if he does not reap the reward.³⁵

Bellis’s solipsism allows Miéville to undermine the other cardinal rule of the quest fantasy: what one is told, is. As Bellis herself acknowledges at various points within the novel—but without notable effect—her understanding of the world causes her to misplace herself within conversations. She is repeatedly manipulated by those who tell her stories. It is not a coincidence that the longest delivered speeches in the book are those of Silas Fennec, the spy (126–128, 164–167), nor that he is one of the few people to actually use the word “trust,” to imply that he is grateful that Bellis should trust him. Bellis knows that he is lying; the “maggot of doubt” that Droul plants in her mind wriggles because it is meaningful. But Bellis’s understanding of the world makes this nagging doubt of little relevance. She has chosen to believe, “caught up in it” as Doul points out (473), and we, instinctively, believe with her, because the pattern of quest fantasies has taught us to do just that. We too are caught up in the passion and belief of the moment; we insist that there must be a quest, a goal, and that those with whom we travel are part of that cozy conspiracy of companionship.

As an (ignored) reminder that such structures are deceptive, what Bellis learns from Shekel is delivered in the past tense, as reported speech: “Shekel told Bellis about Hedrigall the cactae aeronaut. He told her about the cactus-man’s notorious past as a pirate merchant for Dreer Samher and described to her the journeys Hedrigall had made to the monstrous islands south of Gnurr Kett, to trade with the mosquito-men” (100). In defiance of the conventions of the quest fantasy, diegesis is both more accurate and more important than anything we are told directly by the candidates for narrative authority, Uther Doul or Silas Fennec—as is the reported tale of the anophelli which Bellis tells to us (284–285).

The epistemology of the quest fantasy is also challenged: as much as in any other quest, knowledge is fixed and sealed either in the mouths of the narrative authority or between the covers of books. The sacredness of book knowledge is a given and here it is duly reverenced. The Lovers steal books, make of them communal property. The errors in their filing are lovingly described. Books are searched for because knowledge can only be recreated from what is already written. Thus Bellis’s destruction of the book is all the more shocking, because the convention is that what has been destroyed cannot be re-created, it can only be rediscovered. This convention is reinforced by what the found text says and how it says it. Krüach Aum does not claim invention or originality. Like Gandalf he narrates a history of what was done and discovered in the mists of legend: “I have … found a story to tell, of what had not been done since the Ghosthead Empire and was achieved once more, a thousand years ago” (190). At the most, he is a theoretician who has worked out the equations but never tested them. The dynamic of the novel demands not a reworking of the equations, not a pursuit of the physics that made it possible, but a pursuit of the physicist, or at the least, of his books—a dynamic reinforced when Krüach Aum is described as the one who “fishes for old books in ruins” (287). For all we know, the book at the center of this section is itself a copy of a copy of a copy, made valuable only by a belief that knowledge does not mutate but sits, waiting to be found. In part this dynamic may have been what Justina Robson meant when she wrote that The Scar “has the seeming of subversion but it doesn’t really blow up the foundations” (Robson, e-mail 20 May 2003).

I have grouped The Scar with quest and portal novels, and I have already identified the moment of portal transition, but the quest is harder to pinpoint in this novel. Miéville, like the other writers in this section, is actively denying us the conventional quest narrative, but this time in a much more direct fashion, and in a way that depends heavily upon the conventions of the quest novel.³⁶ The Scar is an anti-quest novel. We are set up, time and time again, to expect that something will be found, a hero identified, a mission launched. And each time we are denied. Shekel does not turn out to be the predestined orphan; the magus fin is precisely that, a maguffin, even though it is perhaps the one moment of undisputed magic (as opposed to alternate science) in the book; and the Scar in the ocean is never reached nor is its power ever quite defined. The Scar may not even exist—we never have a direct view of the chasm.

For many involved, the quest remains opaque, a quest without the power to inspire. As Miéville has argued, the She-Lover is the only character unreservedly inspired by quest-narrative logic, and she is a sociopath, the solipsism of the quest hero taken to the extreme (e-mail 16 January 2003) If there is a true quest narrative in The Scar, one that drives a group of characters in a way we identify as the classic quest fantasy—encounters with various peoples, miniadventures, the search for information, and a clear sense of moral justice, which results in success and which allows the protagonists to return home as heroes—it is one we see only intermittently. This is the Grindylow’s quest narrative. In the final analysis, Miéville has pulled off the very neat trick of writing an entire quest fantasy from the point of view of those—ignorantly—on the wrong side.