Perdido Street Station

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 show more 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. show less

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville After a couple of chapters you can smell this book.

His evocation of the city is so overwhelming and powerful that you can feel that you know this place. It is seedy, run down and dangerous. It stinks, it is decrepit and corrupt and yet it is intriguing and also surprisingly inviting. The characters he draws fit so well in this place that everything that flows from there just seems natural even though they are different species.

The story going on here is one of fiction, parable and love. It is a formidable piece of work that either you will cope with or not, it will not be the fiction that fails. It may not be for everyone either. If he used different races instead of species it would have show more subtly changed the essence and made it maybe too recognisable, too near to home. One species killing another may be palatable but one race killing another not so. Empathy changes when we cross that barrier. And yet, at the same time, the main female character is so sexy and desirable even though she is not human.

At one point I wondered if this was science fiction or fantasy or dystopian, or maybe all of these but by then it didn't matter one iota. By that time I could already see the characters and knew them well. The advantage of stories constructed like this is that ideas can be introduced that would flounder in other forms of fiction and the total difference from our "normal" is a more effective mirror than realistic fiction.

I loved it and devoured it steadily.

At around 640 pages it is big enough to get your teeth into, go on treat yourself. show less

4.5 Stars. I will confess that this book dragged at times, and there were points (though few), where I felt the plot lost naturalism. But what an adventure! This is fiction of the mundane and the fantastical. Admirable zeal produces monstrous results, which are only remedied by the most unlikely and contrary of alliances. The characters demonstrate admirable conduct and cruel rapacity, often within pages of each other, while still remaining internally cohesive. In so many other books, everything falls back into place after the defeat of the "Big Bad". Not so here. There are no easy answers or quick fixes, no plaudits or adoring crowds when the story ends. The protagonists, if this is the right word for them, played at desperate stakes, show more and they finish the book scarred mentally, emotionally, and physically. It made the book better, and empowered the story with real consequence. I finished this book feeling rewarded for investing my time into it, and awed by the author's vision. show less

A magnum opus of grimdark fantasy, steampunk squalor—a hero’s journey through Hell. New Crobuzon is exquisitely, meticulously detailed in its every ghetto, slum, fetid sewer, decrepit building, midden, and rotting garbage heap; in its every drug addict, whore, thief, petty bureaucrat, torturer, and craven tyrant. Its main characters are complex, flawed, and believable, even as they work thaumaturgy or create sculptures with glands from the back of their insect-like heads. The heroes’ “quest,” if you will, is to rid the city of a (literally) nightmarish menace, but the plot is as complex and convoluted as the grimy back alleys of New Crobuzon. As dark and dismal, and long, as this story was, I couldn’t stop reading and was show more sorry to part ways with it. I’ll be reading more of Miéville, particularly the Bas-Lag novels. show less

Perdido Street Station feels like a deeply realistic novel with fully human characters set in a hallucinatory world inspired by a bad acid trip.

There are people. There are also bug people with heads of insects, cactus people with spines, little flying people, giant intelligent multidimensional spiders, monstrous moths, and the ReMade--people surgically altered in horrible ways as punishment for crime. There's politics (always my favourite part of China Mieville books)--corrupt ruling classes, unions and strikers, ineffective opposition parties, underground newspapers, centrists and radicals, capitalists and workers, and every kind of cynicisms in bold display. And there's a slacker scientist who is paid an obscene amount of money by a show more bird-man whose wings were sawn off in retribution for a terrible crime, in order to return him to flight, which opens multiple cans of many and varied types of worms, each more horrible than the last.

It's a really good book and a good story, depending on your tolerance for fabulous inventions, such as a city entirely contained within the ribcage of an enormous prehistoric beast. show less

this was a brutal, brutal world! not gory violent, but very barbaric. its the type of sci-fi world that i tend to avoid, except the ideas brought up in this book were very interesting and tantalizing! it touched on speculative science, but also a lot of philosophy, sociology, and art...and....magic?? did i mention there was a drug that lets you dream other people's dreams??

the plot was also a bit chaotic, in a ridiculous way...i had the feeling that the author was throwing everything plus the kitchen sink into the mix...except that the writing did manage to keep it all together...i think. and then the final act tied the loose ends and sub-plots satisfyingly (?) enough that i decided to give it an extra half star.

this story will stay show more with me for a while. an in spite of my ambivalence, i see how this won awards (including the arthur c. clarke). i'll be reading the second book in the series...but not soon. show less

To describe Perdido Street Station in its own parlance, this sci fi/gothic horror/steam punk novel is pulchritudinously packed, an oozing pungent mass of ideas with vertiginous details dripping from its core and complex thought forms bulging from its pages. To summarize the sprawling plot in a few lines, our hero is a rebellious scientist in the city of New Crobuzon, a squalid, dizzyingly weird urban center populated by numerous species of bizarre creatures. Isaac receives a commission from a half human/half bird “garuda” who is seeking to fly again after his wings were hacked off in punishment for a terrible crime. Isaac unwittingly unleashes terrifying soul-consuming monsters in his quest to help the garuda and must try to destroy show more them before they systematically consume the minds of all New Crobuzon’s inhabitants.

Mieville will likely send you scurrying to Google to unpack the origins of the sentient beings in his work (and to the dictionary to decipher his vocabulary words.) Which may or may not be fun depending on your tastes. The creatures I could identify are based on myths and religions from around the world. The Vodyanoy are aquatic creatures of Slavic/Norse tales. Garuda are bird-like demi-gods of Buddist and Hindi mythology. And the eeriest (to my mind), are the Khepri, who have human bodies but heads that are scarab beetles and hale from the beliefs of Ancient Egypt.

Mieville’s ability to conjure a startlingly inventive world is prodigious and the plot line of Perdido Street Street is gripping. But the pacing of the storytelling can be as gelatinous and dense as New Curbozon’s slimy backwaters. Towards the culmination of the novel (and this is no spoiler), an important plot points hangs on an effort to lay cable throughout the city. Mieville takes no fewer than fifteen pages to describe the process. Fifteen? It’s writing like this that drags out the story and tempts one to skim until things pick up again. I *could* put it down, in fact I had to stop reading many times to reenergize and prepare to hack again through the lengthy descriptive passages.

I found the end of the story deeply disappointing, but I’m sure others would strongly disagree. Even with these serious flaws, Perdido Street Station enthralls. I found myself thinking of it as I was falling asleep and mulling it over again in the morning as I woke. I’ll need a long break before I read another of Mieville’s novels, but there is no doubt in my mind I’ll be back to the world of Bas-Lag. show less