Perdido Street Station (2000)

This is an unforgettable journey into a dark world. New Crobuzon is more complex than Middle Earth, more mysterious than Delaney’s Bellona, as great a castle of thought as Peake’s Gormenghast. The main characters rise from the muck like the landmarks of the city. Its impossible supporting characters populate the story like the city’s dead end streets and alleys. Now that I have escaped, I realize I should not have been surprised that the characters that inhabit this city are as dirty and flawed as the streets and buildings themselves. I had hoped for a happy ending, but this is fantasy, not fairy tale. Still, my visit leaves me wanting to know more about what others saw on their travels through. ( )

Like Charles Dickens on acid.

OK, this won't be for everyone, but I loved it. Yes, I toyed with the idea of quibbling, with weasel words about how I might have shaved off half a point, if the option had been available, because it can be a teeny-tiny bit over-inflated, at 700 pages. A tad self-indulgent, at times, as the plot vanished in a maelstrom of loving excursions into the crumbling neighbourhoods of New Crobuzon, and sidebars about its weird and wonderful citizens. A little gross, for the delicately-minded ...

But ... worth every page, and every difficult passage, and every time you have to flip back x-pages to remind yourself, who the heck is Jack Half-a-Prayer again? just for the privilege of spending time in the imagination of China Miéville.

Miéville's great talent is spinning narrative gold from the highest of high concept Big Ideas. Every single one of his novels has, at its heart, a Big Idea that make your eyes go crossed when you try to answer that question posed by loving friends and family, What's it about? Oh, please. How long do you have?

What I think I love best about Miéville is that he understands the power -- and the proper usage -- of metaphor. Once you hand yourself over to his epic imagination, trusting that you are in safe hands, his narrative wears those metaphors lightly -- it's easy to go for long pages forgetting that New Crobuzon is a twisty, turny fun-house mirror image of London (just look at the map at the beginning of the text, if you doubt me), and that the deeply disturbing and perverted politics of New Crobuzon is a pretty accurate metaphor for what's been going on for years in our millennial world. It's easy to go for long pages marvelling at the residents of New Crobuzon -- the frog-people, the eagle-people, the bug-headed people, the cactus-people -- without stumbling over the question of what they "represent." Until, like one of Miéville's slake-moths, the ideas and imagery worm their ways into your brain, and you are left turning the possibilities over ... and over ... and over ...

Miéville says it himself, putting the words in the mouth of his most interesting (and tragic) creation, Lin, the bug-headed Khepri:

I see clearly as you, clearer. For you it is undifferentiated. In one corner a slum collapsing, in another a new train with pistons shining, in another a gaudy painted lady below a drab and ancient airship ... You must process as one picture. What chaos! Tells you nothing, contradicts itself, changes its story. For me, each tiny part has integrity, each fractionally different from the next, until all variation is accounted for, incrementally, rationally. ( )

Couldn't get into this book at all. I gave up after 30%. It just seems like every minute detail of the world was being described for 20 pages before we got 1 page worth of story. ( )

As I read it I kept thinking that Mieville’s writing reminded me of some other author, and then it hit me: this is what J.K. Rowling would write if she was on drugs! Seriously, they both share an amazing capability to create other realms; worlds that you start to envision and feel transported into the moment they begin telling you about it. But while Hogwarts was fantastical, New Crobuzon is psychedelic.

And, if Perdito Street was a painting, it would be The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch - although I might be giving too much credit to Mieville with this metaphor. What I mean is that I was entranced and disgusted by this book in the same proportions. There was something about it that was fun and cartoonist, but at close look revealed itself to be nauseating and soiled. In Bosh, and in J.K. Rowling, I perceived a message of some kind though. In Mielville’s writing I didn’t as much. He was just having too much fun at showing off to me, the reader, what he as the writer could make come to life.



I really, really wanted to love this book. As it is, I liked it fair enough, but it came miles from “I loved” .

Do I recommend it? Well, I don’t “not recommend it”. There are all kinds of tastes in books, he is just not mine - at this moment.
( )

Maybe it was just me, maybe I missed something important somewhere along the way, but I couldn't keep track of what was going on half the time even when I tried going back over sections. It felt to me more like a series of short stories haphazardly strapped together and roughly attached to a central plot than a cohesive book. The characters were good, and the writing itself was beautifully prosaic at times, which was something of a saving grace for the story for me at least, but there just was something missing for me and the whole thing was just foggy. ( )