Something For The Weekend
Posted by Niall Harrison
17 February 2012
A long essay by Joel Burges at Post45 on "Loving Mieville's Sentences":
From the first to the final novel of the Bas-Lag trilogy, style modernizes and contemporizes in moving from omniscience to free indirection. It is as if in the course of the trilogy Miéville’s sentences pass through the sequence of modernist innovations in prose that both unsettled the authority of the nineteenth-century narrator and gave rise to techniques that brought the language of fiction asymptotically closer and closer to the consciousnesses of characters. Run through the stylistic machinery of modernism over the course of the trilogy, Miéville’s sentences come out on the other side of those innovations resembling the sentences of a range of contemporary novelists from Toni Morrison to Cormac McCarthy.
