We sit in his home, between English oil portraits that must be two centuries old, and carvings and sculptures from the country of his birth. Is Morrison hopeful? An optimist?
‘I’ve been thinking about it myself,’ he says gravely, his voice still strongly accented after all these years. ‘In a sense, I’m an optimist. But it hits and completely, constantly kicks at this optimism, you understand?’
The ‘it’ is everything.
‘It’s like a big angry wolf having it over here. And it’s not prepared to move, and sometimes its legs will go, but slow.’ He mimes the animal moving, leaving a little space, a little hole, an exit. ‘And people will say, “Ah, we’ve got it!” And then chop, it goes again.’ His hands come down, the wolf’s grasp closes.
Outside, north London gets on with its dark. There’s an apocalypse more wintery than Martin’s conflagration. At the end of all things, Fenris-wolf will eat the sun. Its expression will be of nothing but greed, and it will look out at nothing.
Lionel Morrison doesn’t sound despairing. But he does sound tired.
‘Every time you do something and nothing goes any further, it eats at you,’ he says. ‘It starts this bitterness.’ He says the word slowly. ‘And I think this is one of the most terrible things that can take place ... many become hopeless ... it just breaks them down, and they think, “No, I want nothing more to do with this.” And then you find others who think, “Well, doing this and nothing happens? Well, let us just wait for things to – for chaos, really, to take place.”’
I owe sincere thanks to all who were so generous with their time and help. In addition to those who spoke to me and whose words are quoted in this essay, I am deeply grateful to Neil Arnold, Brenna Bhandar, Mic Cheetham, Rupa DasGupta, Rupert Goold, Maria Headley, Stewart Home, Simon Kavanagh, Victoria Northwood, James Nunn, Dean Robinson, Max Schaefer, Jesse Soodalter, Alberto Toscano, Rukhsana Yasmin, all at the New York Times and all at The Westbourne Press.
China Miéville
London, 2012
China Miéville is the author of various works of fiction and non-fiction. His novels include The City & The City, Embassytown and his latest book, Railsea. His non-fiction includes Between Equal Rights, a study of international law. He is three-times winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and has also won the Hugo, World Fantasy and British Science Fiction awards. He lives and works in London. chinamieville.net
ISBN 978-1908906-14-4
eISBN 978-1908906-15-1
Published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by The Westbourne Press
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A shorter version of this essay was first published in The New York Times Magazine in March 2012. This full text is available at londonsoverthrow.org
© China Miéville with The New York Times Company, 2012
Images © China Miéville except for Jonathan Martin’s London’s Overthrow on pages 12–13. London’s Overthrow photograph reproduced by kind permission of the Bethlem Art and History Collections Trust
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