by Stefan Ekman
Fitzhenry Park is a center of magic in the midst of city culture. Widdershins mentions how fairies need to “replenish” themselves from wild nature, which they call “the green and the wild” (Widdershins 40); and one of the novel’s main plot threads concerns the animosity that has arisen between the fairies and the animal people who refuse them access to “the green and the wild” outside the cities. When the two parties are in need of a common ground for a meeting, the obvious choice is Fitzhenry Park because, as the Faerie queen’s captain explains, it is “in the city, so we have access to it, but there’s enough of the wild and the green in its borders for the green-brees [animal people] to feel comfortable” (Widdershins 365). The explanation makes the connection between the magical domain and wild nature perfectly clear, and even if it is not as explicit as in Trader, it illustrates how the park is not all tame nature. Other stories similarly describe how the magical and natural domains intersect in Fitzhenry Park, mainly through the variety of magical beings that live in or frequent the park. Bodachs, a kind of Celtic Faerie creature, help identify the pimp who has taken Lesli (“Ghosts” 211–12); gemmin, genii loci that safeguard a place’s happy memories, have been seen dancing there (“Winter” 161–62); and the park is a haunt for Bones, a recurrent character and an animal person. He and his girlfriend Cassie can be found there telling fortunes; but it is also in the park that Bones imparts knowledge of the magical domain to Max, and it is from the park that he sends Max’s friends to the Otherworld (Trader 137, 245, 252 et passim).
An intriguing example of how the three subjugated domains overlap in Fitzhenry Park is provided through the part of the park called Silenus Gardens:
Deeper in the park, centered around a series of statues depicting a satyr lipping a syrinx and three dancing dryads, was a small hilltop surrounded by cherry trees in full blossom. The area […] had been funded by a rich Crowsea patron of the arts in honor of the poet Joshua Stanhold. The benches here were marble—the same stone as the statues—and the air was sweet with the heady scent of the blossoms.60
From this description, the gardens seem to be a case of tame nature, under the control of culture’s hegemony. There is a link between Silenus Gardens and the magical domain, however. In The Dreaming Place (1990), Cassie tells a friend how she feels hidden away from the world there, and how no one has ever been mugged or hurt in that part of the park. “There’s magic places in the world,” she continues, “places where I figure whoever’s in charge […] decided that there was only going to be good vibes and this is one of them.” She finishes by adding that Newford is lucky to have two such places, the other being an “old house in Lower Crowsea” (Dreaming Place 24). The gardens thus combine the notions of magic, nature, and art, not only through their statues, the dedication to a poet, and Cassie’s observation that the place is magic, but also through the association to the “old house on Lower Crowsea.” It is not clear from the context in The Dreaming Place, but the house she refers to is the Kelledy residence, another location where art (in this case, music), magic, and nature meet. It is a place to feel safe and happy.
Where Silenus Gardens is a magic place of good feelings, the largest bubble of wilderness is, at least superficially, quite the opposite. Nowhere in Newford does the intersection of the three subjugated domains become as obvious as in the Tombs, the haunt of runaway children, street people, and drug addicts as well as a wide range of beings from the magical domain. The Tombs is part of a large area originally intended for gentrification, but the investors pulled out, leaving “a mess of empty buildings and rubble-strewn lots.”61 Maisie acknowledges that Fitzhenry Park might give some people a sensation of countryside, but to her it is the Tombs that is “just like a wilderness”: it is “like a piece of the city gone feral, the wild reclaiming its own,” a reversal of the tamed greenery of the park (“Waifs” 15–16). Although the Tombs is “about as far from the green harbor of Fitzhenry Park as you could get in Newford,”62 both the blight and the park suggest a connection between culture and wilderness. In the park, wild nature predates city culture, whereas the Tombs was once under cultural control—part of the city—but has now turned into wilderness. There are also connections between the two bubbles in the magic domain. While there are gemmin in the Tombs as well, they are forced to leave because of the area’s negative memories (“Winter” 162); but other fairies live there, like the bogans that nearly start a war between fairies and animal people in Widdershins, and even though they work in Fitzhenry Park, Bones and Carrie have their squat in the Tombs.
There are also several notional links between this area of feral nature within the city and the wilderness outside Newford. In the winter, the snow is left undisturbed on the ground until it melts in the spring, something common only outside cities (“Winter” 153). The area has derived its name from serving as the dumping ground for old car wrecks (“That Explains” 109), and cars are not the only things people dump there. Packs of feral dogs once thrown from passing cars hunt at the Tombs; the reader is told how unwanted dogs are “returned to nature” in the same way both in the Tombs and in the countryside. Even the descriptions of the Tombs link it to the wilderness outside. Not only is the area frequently referred to as a wilderness or jungle; unlike the rest of the city, the physical architecture in this part of Newford tends to be more fully described. Streets, dilapidated buildings, squats, even empty lots are described as having a physical presence that is just as important as the people there. The same applies to the wilderness outside the city—its physical locales are described in detail. The Tombs is a bubble of wilderness, of feral nature, within the city’s culture.
This scene of urban blight attracts the more sinister inhabitants of the magical domain, such as the monstrous couple who kidnap Harriet in “Pity the Monster” (1991) and the murderous Rushkin and his equally malicious numena in Memory and Dream. The dark spirit in From a Whisper to a Scream is particularly associated with the Tombs: it is there that the pedophile Teddy Bird is killed, only to return from the grave driven by the need to sexually abuse his daughter. A voodoo priest attempts to exorcise Bird’s spirit at a crossroads among the deserted lots, and it is in one of the derelict houses that the final confrontation between the spectral Bird and his daughter takes place. Among the benevolent spirits from the Tombs can be found the ghosts encountered in “Waifs and Strays” (1993) and “Dead Man’s Shoes” (1993), and numerous other representatives of the magical domain appear among the “night people” there in a great many of the stories. The resulting portrayal is not one of bleak slum but of true wilderness, with predators as well as prey, a place of great variety that contains good as well as evil and beauty as well as ugliness.
A final example of how nature, magic, and alternative culture intersect is not a bubble of wilderness but a bubble in the social structure. In Newford, art spans the three subjugated domains. A vast majority of the protagonists and recurring characters belong to the city’s artists: musicians who subsist on busking and occasional small live performances, painters who work as waitresses to subsidize their art, and more or less well-published poets and writers—true artistic creation, the text repeatedly suggests, has magical properties. Minor bubbles defined primarily by art have already been mentioned (such as the Kelledys’ home and Rushkin’s studio), and others are prominent in various stories, for instance the Tree of Tales.63 A bubble of art that clearly presents the connection between art, magic, and wild nature is the artists’ colony Kellygnow in Forests of the Heart. The rambling old house and the surrounding cottages are inhabited by sculptors, painters, and writers, whereas the properties around the colony belong to representatives of city culture and city control: “stockbrokers and investors, bankers and the CEOs of multinational corporations, celebrities and the nouveau riche” (11). In the forested grounds of the house, there are even huge, towering oaks that “were thought to be part of the original growth forest that had once laid claim to all the land” (12). At Kellygnow, a variety of people and s
pirits belonging to Newford’s magical domain converges: in one of the cottages lives a woman who never ages; the house is protected by a genius loci, a protective spirit, fled from Ireland;64 a pack of homeless genii loci regularly haunts the grounds; a curandera, or magic healer, from Arizona models for the artists and supplies them with amulets; and it is there that the Green Man is eventually conjured forth. Through the bubble of wilderness that is the Kellygnow estate, characters even pass, intentionally and unintentionally, into the Otherworld. The artists’ colony becomes a focal point for the domains that challenge the mundane “day people” society.
The Newford stories make clear how the hegemonic culture in Newford contains its own opposites. Bubbles of wilderness abound in the city—areas of nature that culture cannot control, or of which it has relinquished control. An alternative culture of “night people”—the homeless and abused, as well as the artists and musicians—ekes out a living hidden and unseen. Similarly unseen and unwanted, fairies and spirits, ghosts and magicians try to withstand the ravages of a blind culture. Rather than being a city surrounded by wilderness, as is Minas Tirith, Newford turns the image around and presents an internal wilderness of alternative culture, magic, and nature within the city, a wilderness that is both portrayed as a threat to culture and presented as its ultimate hope of survival.
BLURRED BOUNDARIES: CONFLUX IN NEW CROBUZON65
Perdido Street Station (2000) is China Miéville’s second novel and the first to be set in the world of Bas-Lag. The novel’s setting is reminiscent of a mid-nineteenth-century industrial city that is, according to Miéville, “clearly analogous to a chaos-fucked Victorian London” although it also “contains other cities—Cairo in particular.”66 Steam provides the main source of power, but advanced mechanics, chemistry (chymistry), and magic (thaumaturgy) play important parts in the technological makeup of the society. The city, New Crobuzon, is also the setting of the short story “Jack” (2005) and—partly—of Miéville’s fourth novel, Iron Council (2004), while his second Bas-Lag novel, The Scar (2002), is set mainly in the floating city of Armada.
In Miéville’s stories, categories mix and dissolve. The publication of Perdido Street Station sparked a discussion about how it blurred the boundaries between fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and critics have explored other ways in which Miéville’s texts have mixed categories.67 Rich Paul Cooper observes how styles, and thus voices, as well as generic elements blend in the Bas-Lag novels.68 Christopher Palmer points out how, in Miéville’s descriptive language, opposing qualities meet only to interact or overlap, rather than remaining opposites.69 Joan Gordon investigates the notion of hybridity in Perdido Street Station.70 Whichever categories we turn to, the Bas-Lag stories have found a way to conflate, blur, or mix them up. The texts not only refuse generic description, they reject the very notion of clear-cut categories. As has already been pointed out, a city is a place where nature and culture meet. At the same time, a city is a place of cultural control. The city limits provide a clear demarcation between the wilderness outside and the controlled inside. In New Crobuzon, any meeting between the two domains calls their separation into question.
Waste is a constantly recurring theme in the description of New Crobuzon’s environment, becoming a brutal demonstration of the city as a culturally dominated place. When Yagharek, a garuda (eagle-man) exiled from the desert, enters the city in a small boat in the prologue to Perdido Street Station, it becomes clear that New Crobuzon is a city radically different from the clean, white sterility of Minas Tirith or the modern, social space of Newford. To the former desert dweller, the dirty, industrial metropolis is “a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding” where “[f]at chimneys retch dirt into the sky” (Perdido 1).71 His entry into the city is described in terms that call to mind the descent into a polluted hell, employing imagery of death and disease to describe the urban decay. The garuda travels on a Stygian river, through a foul-smelling warren of rotting buildings and slime-besmirched brick banks. The water “reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling” as it carries along the waste of the vast population (Perdido 3). Although this view of the city as a hellish place of pollution, sewage, and waste is emphasized especially in the parts narrated by Yagharek (who is the first-person narrator of the prologue and epilogue and of the brief interludes between the novel’s eight parts), it informs the portrayal of New Crobuzon primarily throughout Perdido Street Station and also to some extent in Iron Council.
In New Crobuzon, pollution is the most obvious sign of how culture invades and dominates the natural domain. As the megalopolis is about the size of present-day London,72 and given that New Crobuzon’s technology for cleaning industrial and household waste and sewage is on a par with London’s in the heyday of English industrialization, it is hardly surprising that the metropolis suffers from elevated levels of air and water pollution. As we have seen, the portrayals of the city more than acknowledge the pollution; they foreground it, turning it into one of New Crobuzon’s most conspicuous features. Frequent descriptions, powerful imagery, even evocative names help place the focus on how culture’s waste products dominate the physical environment. The two rivers that meet in the city center are called the Tar and the Canker, clearly indicating how polluted and pathogenic they are. These are rivers filled with floating trash, their riverbeds a sludge mixed with rusting metal (Perdido 298). Appropriately, the black waters of the Tar, on which Yagharek enters the city, are said to trickle rather than flow (Perdido 19; see also Perdido 606).73 The Canker is somewhat cleaner, but its name, too, is a telltale sign of how the river is changed by the city; when the water is subjected to chymical and thaumaturgical effluence from the Scientific Quarter, the arcane and chymical slop mixes randomly into “bastard elixirs” that can change, enchant, or kill those who encounter them (Perdido 24, 607). The Scientific Quarter is also a source of airborne pollutants; but the New Crobuzon air is mainly polluted by the many factories whose smokestacks puncture “the membrane between the land and the air” and disgorge “tons of poisonous smog […] as if out of spite,” and by the smoke of millions of household chimneys that turns the air above the rooftops into a stinking haze (Perdido 64).
There is never any doubt that the air and water in the city are turned into an unclean, unpleasant, unnatural “second nature.” A constant flow of waste resulting from the customs, behaviors, and material objects that the members of New Crobuzon’s society use to cope with their world (to return to Bates’s definition of culture) maintains the changes even in these fluid elements, turning them into a vivid demonstration of cultural domination. At the same time, the negative connotations of the language used to describe this “second nature,” not so much tamed as cowed and bullied into submission, reveal how undesirable this domination is. Pollution is not a necessary, if regrettable, by-product of an industrial, urban lifestyle; it is a disease deliberately passed on, “as if out of spite,” to the environment. Even when nature escapes cultural control, it cannot easily recuperate from this disease. The image of disease keeps recurring even when nature reclaims parts that culture has lost or relinquished control of, as in the case of the abandoned, dilapidated docks that have become “massive stinking troughs of malarial slime” (Perdido 129). In the city, even nature becomes part, to some extent, of this ambience of filth and disease. Trash is whipped into the air by the wind (Perdido 58); slimy, mold-encrusted sewers, ecosystems in themselves, empty the waste of millions of people into the rivers (Perdido 419–20, 425); garbage is piled into dumps that have grown to a geological scale. The “second nature” of pollution is not nature changed according to the desires of culture; it becomes its own domain of waste and trash, neither culture nor nature but a disease that affects both, a dirty smear that hides the border between them.
The two domains are even less distinguishable when examined in terms of the shape of the land itself, as the natural and cultural landscapes shift
into and imitate each other. The natural landscape, a result of geological, meteorological, and biological factors, is changed by the city into a cultural landscape as “[t]he natural inclines of the land [are] all forgotten by New Crobuzon” (Iron 59). This cultural landscape, or cityscape, is sometimes reshaped, in turn, into another sort of landscape, a land in whose shape the cultural and natural merge. The clearest example is that of the “trashscape” (Perdido 446). The rubbish dump of the factories and docks along the river Tar has become a “landscape of ruin and refuse and industrial filth […] in a speeded-up parody of geological process” where the “rejected matter settled and shifted and fell into place, affecting some shape, mimicking nature. Knolls, valleys, quarries and pools bubbling with fetid gas” (Perdido 314). The natural landscape, the plain on which New Crobuzon is situated, has been transformed and fallen under cultural control, but has then escaped that control in a “parody of geological process” that has reconfigured the land into a trashscape with its own canyons, caverns, and reefs of rubbish (Perdido 446–47). Neither nature nor culture is the agent behind this reshaping; it is the refuse itself, culture’s rejected matter, that forms the trashscape.