Perdido Street Station

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.