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Looking For Jake: Stories by China Mieville
01/10/2005 . Source: Jennifer Howell 
pub: Del Rey/Ballantine Books. 315 page enlarged illustrated paperback. Price: $14.95 (US), $21.00 (CAN). ISBN: 0-345-47607-7. Macmillan. 303 page hardback. Price: £17.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-4050-4830-1. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.delreydigital.com and www.panmacmillan.com
It was always going to be hard to predict exactly what 'Looking For Jake', China Mieville's first collection of short stories, would be. Consider his published novels to date: the fashionably weird urban horror of 'King Rat' via the baroque and intricately grotesque fantasy of 'Perdido Street Station' and 'The Scar', up to the politicised and spiky continuation in 'Iron Council'. The stories in 'Looking For Jake', most of which were published separately and date back to 1998, put something of a new perspective on Mieville's work and influences.
It's a perspective where London, as always, looms large like it has done in 'King Rat' and, more subtly, lurking somewhere behind the inspiration for New Crobuzon. In the case of 'Looking For Jake', it's always a London where things have broken down, be it society or reality or both, as in the title story and 'The Tain'. Of course, the trouble with using London like this is that recently, reality can be frequently more disturbing than anything the imagination can come up with. Its status quo is notoriously hard to permanently disturb: these stories were all written prior to July of this year and perhaps come with the idea that, back then, anti-war/anti-hunt/anti-anything demonstrations were the only things that really fed a sense of general unease. It's a complicated additional nuance to stories that are already complex, in and around their original appearances and cultural influences.
The title story, 'Looking For Jake', stands as a neat companion piece to the novella that closes the book, 'The Tain'. In both stories, a lone character survives in a post-apocalyptic London haunted by creatures that could have come right out of BasLag. The first person narrator of 'Looking For Jake' is obsessed with trying to find his best friend after a mysterious entropic malaise has descended on the city, tearing away the fabric of reality. Like Saul in 'King Rat', he gets off a train into town and finds the world has changed. All the familiar patterns broken down into 'a very inexact apocalypse', where people constantly vanish into thin air and the city slowly winds down to an unlikely and bizarre conclusion. Its main strength as a story lies in a wealth of fabulous and grotesque imagery, from watching the fireworks on Bonfire Night in a Kilburn tower block to watching 'trains go by with the howling faces in all the windows, too fast to see clearly' on the Underground. Weird flying creatures roost in the Gaulmont State bingo hall and a household cavalryman charges maniacally through the streets like a medieval knight.
It vaguely yet deliberately echoes TS Eliot at one point and succeeds in such high allusions for most of its length but in this collection, it's also another variation on a very similar theme.
'Foundation' shifts the focus neatly and tautly to a 'house whisperer', who seems able to coax buildings into telling him their weaknesses. A veteran of the first Iraqi war, there's a reason he has the skills he has and an ever-increasing price he has to pay that mounts without him even realising. An affecting little piece, this has even more impact when the Acknowledgements reveal that this was inspired by real, almost unbelievable, events from that war (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,895124,00.html ).
'The Ball Room' stands apart from the other stories in this collection, probably because it has two co-authors in Emma Bircham and Max Schaeffer. A tale of a haunted children's play area in an Ikea-ish store is suitably creepy, not to mention a little Bradburyesque in its depiction of ordinary things going disturbingly awry. It's the modernity of it all that really sets it off, using CCTV tape to great effect, although never would I have thought the simple sound effect of balls moving, 'pudda-thudda', would creep me out quite so much. I especially loved the resolution of this one: neat, symbolic and immensely satisfying.
'Reports Of Certain Events In London' varies between amusing, intriguing and trying to be overly clever as far as I'm concerned, featuring as it does 'China Mieville' as the protagonist and narrator. Yep, it's the same one as is writing the book...
It revolves around him receiving someone else's mail by mistake, and discovering a secret society that keeps watch on vagabond London streets that mysteriously appear and disappear in time and space throughout history, as these streets apparently do in cities all over the world. It's a nice concept and amusingly presented as a collection of bickering notes, letters recorded sightings and ends on some wonderfully odd imagery.
'Familiar' feels overly like one of the monster-perspective segments from one of the New Crobuzon books, but transplanted to modern day London as a male witch creates and then discards a familiar made from his own flesh and then really lives to regret it. As Mieville's monsters are wont to do, it grows and learns and lots of gory fun is had by all...echoes of Frankenstein abound but it's overly nasty for my taste and too short to carry much weight.
I'm fairly sure that 'Entry From A Medical Encyclopaedia' felt more relevant in its original setting, the anthology 'The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric And Discredited Diseases'. As it is, it's a curio here, weighed down with footnotes about a brain disease that is spread by repetition of a 'wormword' that burrows into your brain.
'Details' is the outright HP Lovecraft homage of the collection: first published in the anthology 'The Children Of Cthulhu', it concerns a woman who has developed the ability to see patterns in the fabric of the universe. It's only when the patterns start looking back into her that things get really disturbing...
Creepy, nicely oblique and segueing neatly into 'Go Between', in which a man is used as a reluctant courier by an unknown agency for mysterious objects. It starts off as intriguing as the objects turn up in the oddest places, such as the middle of a loaf of bread being sliced and veers into convincingly logical paranoia when he is informed his services are no longer required and only then decides to do something about it.
'Different Skies' would work better if you haven't read Bob Shaw's classic SF short 'Light Of Other Days' or, indeed, any MR James ghost stories. An elderly man buys a haunted window in Camden Market that seemingly has a ghostly view that doesn't match what's actually outside. There are some nice musings on growing old and an efficiently authentic narrative voice, but the threat is perhaps too amorphous to truly unsettle, with an ending that falls somewhat hollow eventually.
'Tis The Season' was an amusing little satire in 'Socialist Review' last Christmas that offers a decidedly rare lighter note into this collection. In a world where Christmas is truly privatised, one man gets caught up in a demonstration by some radical Christmasarians taking back the season...
Featuring such classics as the Gay Men's Radical Singing Caucus ('We're here! We're Choir! Get used to it!'), it's funny, sourly-sweet and somehow doesn't feel like anything China Mieville has written before. Compared to 'An End To Hunger', it's all sweetness and light of course, as a hacker takes offence at a corporate charity donation website and targets them, until the website starts to bite back. It's a darkly humorous and unsettling take on big business trying to 'give back'. By any means possible...
'Jack' is the New Crobuzon fix everyone's been waiting for and manages not only to add some intriguing background to the established world (which feels downright cosy and familiar at this point, compared to most of the other stories), but just about works as a story in its own right. It did also make me think that maybe another couple of this type of story wouldn't have gone amiss in making 'Looking For Jake' feel a little more rounded. As it is, 'On The Way To The Front' is the much-hyped graphic-short, drawn by Liam Sharp, and left feeling distinctly slight. It also highlights how much of Mieville's descriptive power lies in his use of language. The graphics are fine, but the story is too brief to survive on dialogue alone.
Which brings to 'The Tain'. When I read this initially last year, it felt fresh, original and more than a little brutal. The twisted narrative still stands, but when read as part of a collection that includes the distinctly similar 'Looking For Jake', the impact is significantly diminished. Which is a shame, as the descriptions of imagos and their histories are still subtly beguiling. It's the ruined and deserted London that fails to shock anymore, as it reaches the point where you expect the abnormal to be the norm. That doesn't take from the fact that it's still a remarkable and well-written concept, it just didn't travel so well.
I can't help but think that enjoyment of this collection is going to depend on which of Mieville's novels were most to your taste. If 'King Rat' or 'Iron Council' appealed more, this will probably be more your thing. Without making sweeping generalisations, the more fantasy-driven narratives (as opposed to politics) of 'Perdido' and 'The Scar' don't really give you an idea of what to expect here and that's fine. It's all good writing and some genuinely new ideas, but I'm left with the fact it made me feel I was missing something that the two middle novels had provided. At the end of the day, it may well all come down to a matter of taste.
Jennifer Howell
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