Garuda for him is a ‘bird-man cool’

It was fantastic for the fantasy-fiction aficionados of the city with China Mieville, reading out from his latest book, The City and The City, at the British Council.

The writer had a roomful of eager audience — all well acquainted with Mieville’s characters — listening almost breathlessly, the silence broken only by giggles at his frequent, weird humour.

Mieville describes his work as weird. But going entirely by the audience reactions, it feels much more than ‘weird’.

They find patterns, connections, political aspirations and more; and at the end of the book, they are left with what the author calls a “genuinely insoluble moral dilemma”.

Mieville “loves monsters”, sans borders. For instance, the Indian mythical bird Garuda appears in his fiction, albeit as a monstrous bird-man. Garuda’s character is far from what Indian stories sketch. This revamping of hitherto known mythological characters is something Mieville does often.

“I steal monsters from everywhere, misunderstand them, and then literalise them,” he quips. To him, it is an aesthetic naivety, akin to “forgetting what we know”. His Garuda is “just a bird-man cool”. 
Mieville is far from writers who live the characters of their stories. He is always clear that they do not exist.

The City and The City is, at its root, a detective fiction, “written partly as a present to my mother who loves crime stories”, he says. He has often heard readers being outraged at the end of some detective tales. “They say, ‘it cheated me!’”, hence, this book is partly his attempt at writing a detective novel that “doesn’t cheat”. And, he finds it more disciplined than his earlier writings.

He sees a secret side to every city. “London has it. So do others. An alternate Bangalore, an underground Chennai,” he says, adding that his book tries to bring out the “other city traditions”.

This London-based writer has been an active member of the
left-wing Socialist Workers Party since his teenage. His political leanings creep into his fiction which, he says, is accidental, for he is outspoken about his stand anyways.

Besides fantasy fiction like Perdido Street Station, Iron Council, The Scar,Un Lun Dun — his first novel for younger readers — and his collection of short fiction, Looking for Jake and Other Stories, he has written on Marxism and international law. Mieville’s works have won him the Arthur C Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award twice.

The writer is in Bangalore as part of Lit Sutra, a programme of cultural relations through reading and writing organised by the British Council.

After the reading, Mieville was in conversation with three young Bangalore writers, Deepika Arwind, Joshua Muyiwa and Poorva Rajaram, followed by an equally animated discussion with the audience.