China Mieville’s “Looking for Jake”

“Have you guessed yet?” she said.  “What your present is?” She was staring at me, very seriously, very intensely. It made me quite emotional.

I thought of everything that had happened that day, and of my reactions. Everything I’d been through and seen — been a part of.  I realized how different I felt now than I had that morning. It was an astonishing revelation.

“Yes…” I said, hesitantly. “Yes, I think I have. Thank you, my love.”

“What?” she said.  “You’ve guessed?  Shit.”

She was holding out a little wrapped package.  It was a tie.

–‘Tis The Season (Socialist Review, 2004)

Honestly?  I never cared for China Mieville.  I’ve heard people sing the praises of “Perdido Street Station”, and I tried to read it, and…I just didn’t care.  I think that’s the biggest sin a book can commit for me, to leave me just completely indifferent.  At least if a book sucks, I can get righteously worked up over the author selfishly wasting my time.  I managed to get about 70 pages into “Perdido”, and then my dishwasher went off and I went to open the door to dry the few things that might spot, and then…I forgot I was reading the book.  That’s right: I forgot I had been reading it.  That’s how disconnected I was from the characters, the plot, the everything.  That’s frightening.

When I read a recommendation for Mieville’s short story collection “Looking for Jake”, my initial reaction was to say, “Bite me”.  But then I remembered how Sherman Alexie’s novel dragged for me while his short stories entranced and flew, so I decided to pretend to be a good human being and give the collection a chance.  And I really don’t understand how inspiration works, how someone can peter out like a crickbed in the desert when allowed to try to fill 300 pages, but can write a 3000-word burst that’s as moving as a Dürer engraving.

Mieville’s short stories, like a lot of Neil Gaiman’s work, are fantasies worming out of the real world.  I can’t quite figure out what hook he uses to draw me in, and why it seems to be missing from his novels, but then if you spend too much time trying to dissect something, you wind up with a pile of bones and a pile of sinew and a pile of offal, and no one enjoys that, now do they?  So just believe me when I tell you that I’ve devoted the last 3 hours to this collection, and I dread the thought that there are only three more stories left before I reach the point where I won’t have any more to read.

I write these sorts of things as much for my own future reference as for any other reason, so here’s a quick resumé of the stories in this volume:

• “Looking for Jake”:  Something has changed in London, the rules of reality have been bent forever, and the narrator is trying to find Jake after having lost him again.  ‘He was being inexact. That wasn’t his fault. It was a very inexact apocalypse.’
• “Foundation”:  This is something I would have thought impossible: a fantasy story involving the first Gulf War that manages to convey massive psychological trauma without resorting to any clichéd liberal denunciations.  It involves a man who’s known as a “house whisperer”, who can descend to a building’s foundations and diagnose its structural problems.  But this ability only came to him after a moment in 1991 involving trenches and bulldozers and sand.
• “The Ball Room”:  Let’s just say, you’ll never look at Ikea the same way.  I personally have been slowly collecting a cookware set, piece by piece, but now I’m going to be completely creeped out every time I walk through the entryway.
• “Reports of Certain Events In London”:  This one is driving me nuts, because I am certain its structure is based on a much older story: the author, narrating in first person, explains how he received a package of mysterious letters and meeting minutes, and the path it led him down.  I keep thinking Poe, but I don’t think that’s right.  Someone needs to get this damn book, read it, and tell me what it’s reminding me of.  (Oh, the story? Has to do with a society that investigates Viae Ferae, both foreign and domestic.)
• “Familiar”:  You should never invite the supernatural into your life unless you are completely prepared to accept that the consequences, not matter how nauseating.
• “Entry Taken From A Medical Encyclopedia”:  This is actually included in the “Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric And Discredited Diseases”, which I already owned.  It describes ‘Buscard’s Murrain, or Wormword’.  That last word is not a typo.
• “Details”:  Once I hit this story, I did realize that part of what makes his short stories fascinating is how many of them involve situations that could easily be dismissed as mental illness by people on the outside.  A child is one lifeline for a woman who has isolated herself in a room painted completely white.  “If you look at a pattern of tar on a wall, or a crumbling mound of brick or somesuch…there’s a way of unpicking it.  And if you know how, you can trace it and read it out and see the things hidden right there in front of you–the things you’ve been seeing but not noticing, all along.  But you have to learn how…  Someone has to teach you.  So you have to make certain friends. But you can’t make friends without making enemies.  You have to open it all up for you to see inside.  You make what you see into a window, and you see what you want through it.  You make what you see a sort of a door.”
• “Go Between”:  What would you do if sometimes, you got your grocery purchases home, and discovered cryptic vials hidden inside your bread or frozen lasagna, complete with delivery instructions?
• “Different Skies”:  An elderly man installs an ancient stained glass window that attracted him at a secondhand shop, only to discover that it looks out on another time or place.
• “An End To Hunger”:  The narrator, by chance, meets a foulmouthed Turkish antisocial technological genius.  At first he contents himself with building astoundingly brilliant games and uncovering apparently classified information, but eventually a group of mindless pious liberal do-gooders rouse his ire, with tragic consequences for him.
• “‘Tis The Season”: Think the RIAA is bad?  Welcome to a future where you can’t even say “Merry Christmas!” without being sued for trademark violation.
• “Jack”:  “He was making a point, and my good bloody gods but I admired that. … It’s things like that make you see why people respected Jack Half-A-Prayer.  Loved him.”
• “On The Way To The Front”:  A graphic short-short, about the trenches and the Underground.
• “The Tain”:  What if the things we saw in reflections weren’t actually us, but were other entities?  Other entities that were forced by mirrors and glass to conform to what we did in front of them, until finally the stress of doing so drove them insane with hate?  And what if one day, what was a mirror somehow became a gate?

I think that overall, my favorite would be “Different Skies”.  In an odd way, it reminds me of Alexei Sayle’s “The Minister For Death”, though it’s a tenuous connection.  Both involve old men who declare war upon the young, but in “Skies” this happens in response to a very specific (supernatural) death threat, while in “Minister” the protagonist is mostly acting out on his own anger about aging.  But both involve first-person narrators who stop passively existing and start taking control of their destinies; if destruction is looming, better to bring it upon oneself than to just sit and watch it approaching.

OK.  Tired of the vaguely mystical bullshit?  If you’ve stuck all the way to the end of this and need something more akin to real life, here’s a moment from “An End to Hunger”:

“Do you play games, man?” he said. “N64?”

“I’ve got a Playstation,” I told him.

“Playstation licks shit, man,” he told me. “Bullshit digital controls. I’ll give you the ads, though. Playstation ads sing sweet hymns, but you want a fucking analog control stick, or you’re playing once removed. You know anyone with N64?”