Perdido Street Station anyone?

[Stewart]

One of the most improtant genre novels to be written in a decade, and my favorite author currently. Perdido Street Station IMHO, is a legiitmate genre masterpieces.

Well, I finished the novel at the weekend - finally! - and it really was a book of two halves. It started well, we were introduced to characters, and their lives became out focus. Then, all of a sudden, a bunch of slake-moths are released and the scope stretches to focus on the city and the action rather than the characters. Everyone becomes involved and we lose our intimate connection to the protagonists.

It was incredibly drawn out so that small spaces of time were dragged over pages which added nothing to the tension. The story, at the beginning, was shaping up nicely and when the slake-moths escaped the book just went downhill into a really depressing chase which, despite the implied timeframe and the importance, seemed leisurely as the narrative failed to excite.

As I said, the opening sections were well written and set the scene perfectly. We find out that the city is a dirty place, all filth and nefarious characters, but by the time we get to the final 200 pages China is still telling us what a horrible place New Crobuzon is; we get the idea!

His use of words became annoying. When I read a book I don't expect anything to pop out and sound alarms in my head but there were a number of words that appeared so often I got bored of them: extraordinary, onieric, and all possibilities of thaumaturgy. He seems to only know one shade of brown without actually saying brown, too. Dun.

Characters were boring also, despite being interesting ideas, although the cactus people made me think China was having a laugh. Stupid things.

I suppose its redeeming features are that it's not a quest for the Sword of Whocares and there is some interesting invention in there although getting it onto the page and cutting this I-want-to-be-Mervyn-Peake crap might make him a better writer.

I've not read The Scar or Iron Council - maybe one day I will, but I'll check out his books further down the line to see if he has improved.

The prose is only matched by the likse of Peake and Wolfe.

And that's his problem. He's trying to hard to be Peake.

 

[direstraits]

Stewart, did you feel that the rubbish heap robot thingee is a little too much of a stretch for you also (you know, being in IT and all )?

ds

 

[Stewart]

Stewart, did you feel that the rubbish heap robot thingee is a little too much of a stretch for you also

It was a fantasy novel so I was willing to stretch my beliefs to accommodate it. I just thought the book was unnecessarily verbose, the second half was just a dull chase, and there was no conclusion to the secret romance of Isaac and Lin.

 

[Ainulindale]

Besides I completely diasgree with you on every point you make, that's just a matter of sujective opinion, and we are of course all welcome to them, I do want to ask about this:

and there was no conclusion to the secret romance of Isaac and Lin.

What more of a conclusion did you want?

 

[Stewart]

What more of a conclusion did you want?

I would have liked he relationship to have been made public to see the real reaction of New Crobuzon's citizens to such a pairing rather than their anticipated reaction. Fair enough, she's quadrospazzed by the end but I wanted to know what the city thought.

 

[Ell]

Perdido Street Station was moving up my TBR list, but based on what I'm reading here, I may give it a pass. Earlier in this thread, Litany mentioned that it wasn't necessary to read PSS before The Scar. I'd really like to give Mieville a go, but can't see wading through something if Il end up with the same conclusion as Stewart. There are too many other books calling my name. Should I skip PSS and go straight to The Scar? Or should I forget about Mieville entirely?

ell

 

[Ainulindale]

Ell,

It depends on what you enjoy, Stewart didnt like it, but many people consider Mieville (and when I say many people I don't mean the popular BS attributed to mainstream authors in general and in fantasy) consider Mieville to be one of the best at the craft currently. It's really subjective, for instance I don't agree with anything Stewart is saying - but of course he is welcome to his own opinion.

The Scar can be read without reading Perdido Street Station, and I have found most people find it more accesible, and it easier for fans of mainstream works to get into then PSS which is generally held by genre critics as something close to a modern fantasy masterpieces. I enjoyed both, as I enjoyed Iron Council as well, and currently reading his new collection Looking for Jake.

It's all about taste.

 

[Wabbit]

Perdido Street Station was moving up my TBR list, but based on what I'm reading here, I may give it a pass. Earlier in this thread, Litany mentioned that it wasn't necessary to read PSS before The Scar. I'd really like to give Mieville a go, but can't see wading through something if Il end up with the same conclusion as Stewart. There are too many other books calling my name. Should I skip PSS and go straight to The Scar? Or should I forget about Mieville entirely?

ell

I have read a couple of people saying that they liked Perdido more than they liked his others. Having said that, I pretty much agree with all that Stewart said.

 

[Stewart]

I've tidied up my review:

Perdido Street Station (Miéville, China)

I’m not one for fantasy, the thought of the genre immediately brings to mind hordes of orcs, objects with magical properties, and characters who are either good or evil with no middle ground; of course, for this, Tolkien has to shoulder some of the blame. So, it was, with much concern that I took on board the recommendation of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, a fantasy novel that breaks with the stereotypes and thrusts us into a bleak world where science and magic work inharmoniously together, mutants go about their daily lives, and cities are powerful autarchies where even the slightest whisper against the government may lead to you joining the desaparecidos.

It begins with Isaac and Lin, a mixed species couple (he’s human and she’s khepri, an insect hybrid) whose lives change when both receive contracts of work. Isaac is asked by a mysterious visitor to restore his power of flight, while Lin is employed by the local mafia boss to craft his sculpture, an artform in which insect sputum is her medium. As they work at their respective jobs Isaac unwittingly unleashes his research specimens upon the city of New Crobuzon, an event that affects him in a number of ways, and with his friends he sets out to right his wrong.

At 800 pages Perdido Street Station is no breeze, but one can’t help feel that it is drawn out, stuffed with adjectives, and as tedious a read as life in New Crobuzon. It would certainly have benefited from large quantities of editing, but there are some who would argue that it’s a homage to the style of Mervyn Peake. The story, for the first two hundred pages, was nicely taking form, but, when the slake-moths Isaac was researching escape, the novel slides downhill into a depressing chase, which, despite the implied timeframe and urgency, seemed leisurely and unexciting.

It was incredibly drawn out so that small spaces of time were dragged over pages which added nothing to the tension. The story, at the beginning, was shaping up nicely and when the slake-moths escaped the book just went downhill into a really depressing chase which, despite the implied timeframe and the importance, seemed leisurely as the narrative failed to excite.

Miéville shows us that New Crobuzon, a city in the world of Bas-Lag, is a dirty place; grimy windows, littered streets, and scores of nefarious characters. It’s a well realised setting, and not difficult to imagine its soaring towers, its crumbling buildings, the rusted train network, but, by the final two hundred pages, the author still takes many opportunities from the pressing narrative to remind us of the extreme filth and depressive air surrounding the place.

The prose is mediocre, although, having never read Peake, I can’t say whether the tribute is fitting. The author, at times, seems more interested in displaying his extensive vocabulary, but, in an attempt to do so, he finds himself repeating a number of words that actually limits his lexis; ‘extraordinary’, ‘onieric’, and all possibilities of ‘thaumaturgy’ making considerable appearances. And when Miéville wants to describe something as brown then, rather than say it’s brown, he uses the word dun – repeatedly.

The citizens of New Crobuzon are well-crafted and, like the city, utterly loathable. They are also, due to different species, mutations, and immigrants, extremely varied. Aside from the aforementioned humans and khepri, there are winged creatures called garuda, evolved cacti, which I could never visualise without reverting to caricature, and the Remade, those whose bodies have been reconfigured in imaginative ways by the use of controlled magic, are just a few of the types to be found wandering the streets, or, like any society, living ghettoised.

While Perdido Street Station starts well, it devolves into little more than a moth hunt, punctuated with Miéville’s own socialist politics. The climax takes place in the station of the title, the main thoroughfare of New Crobuzon, but it is hard to tell why the book is named after this construction as it only appears in the denouement for approximately fifty pages. All in all, Miéville isn’t a bad writer per se but he is by no means great. Should I wish to read another fantasy novel then I may approach his fiction again, but I will wait until he has a substantial body of work behind him and hope, that with each book, he improves on his craft.

 

[beer good]

I'm not sure what to make of Perdido Street Station. Like the city of New Crobuzon itself, it's built on the corpse of something that came before, and it's bursting at the seems with content but not all of it is all that enjoyable.

For starters, Miéville certainly sets himself a vast task: to create an entire new (well, not THAT new) type of fantasy world, without all the storytelling clichés of the old one - or rather, not in recognisable form. He mixes odd bits of fantasy, sf, steampunk, social realism, hard-boiled noir and silly swordplay as if he's deliberately trying for a fractured image; post-modern fantasy, a jumble where everything has been co-existing for centuries until nobody's sure where one thing ends and another begins, where you recognise the individual puzzle pieces ("One doesn't simply walk into the Glass House", indeed) but supposedly get to see them in different contexts. The story feels lived in, which is a great accomplishment. It towers, impressively.

Then again, towers in fantasy stories tend to come down, don't they?

For starters, you'd think a city teeming with life in many different sentient forms - humans, insectoids (with hot female bodies, for some reason), amphibians, plants, robots, giant extra-dimensional spiders and pretty much everything you can conceive of - would suffer from the tower of Babel issue: languages mixing, changing, characters having trouble understanding each other, etc. Well, Miéville skips right past that and has pretty much everyone speak English in translation, which, fair enough. It's worked for better writers. But then he achieves that alienation towards the reader instead, by writing the whole thing in a verbose, thesaurus-abusing prose that doesn't make him sound half as smart as he seems to think - quite the opposite, in fact. Like Stewart notes above, he consistently uses the same few Big (or just odd) Words, not to add variation, but seemingly just to show off his typing skills.

Which is a bit of a pity, because if you can slog through the endless descriptive mess of 5-syllable synonyms for "stuff China thinks sounds cool", there's both interesting characters and interesting plots to be found here, and... ah, yes, the plots. Plural. There's the wingless birdman who's looking for a way to fly. There's the scientist/magician who promises to help him. There's the scientist's girlfriend (a bug) who's given a commission to spit out (don't ask) a sculpture of a crime boss. There's the corrupt mayor and his secret police force. There's the shat-upon dock workers. And that's before we get to the dream-eating moths, and the Hell embassy, and the parasites, and the household robots plotting to take over the world, and the band of adventurers, and the stories of previous wars that lay waste to entire countries, and the endless intra- and inter-species issues, and ampersand after ampersand... any two of these plots could have filled a good book, but Miéville needs to put them all in there. Which in a way I rather like, since nothing should ever be simple in a megacity, but since he seems unable to focus, the end result is that some of the things he spends dozens of pages setting up tend to either get forgotten (presumably, left for a sequel) or tied up much too suddenly at the end. Every time you feel like you have a handle on the story, Miéville tosses in a brand-new (though derivative) mythological concept, a brand-new (though derivative) character, an entire brand-new (though derivative) plot, and when he's still doing this 3/4 into a rather thick novel it starts to get silly. It's too much, and not in a good way. I start to imagine New Crobuzon more as Ankh-Morporkh than the grimy, dark, Very Serious city its author seems to think it is.

I liked Perdido Street Station, for all its faults. I liked the characters. I liked the description of the city, at least the first 12 times or so. As a 300-page novel about the lives and politics of the inhabitants of New Crobuzon, it might have been a masterpiece. At more than twice that, filled with plots we've seen in different contexts before, and padded endlessly, it's still an interesting read, but you wonder what kind of hell-beast ate his editor's mind.