Customer Reviews

Perdido Street Station

5 star:		(158)
4 star:		(78)
3 star:		(53)
2 star:		(42)
1 star:		(31)

 

 

If you are looking for the unusual, the bizarre, for unforgettable images, this is the book to get. Mieville's city of New Crobuzon is a phantasmagorical tapestry of weirdly modified humans, from cactus to bird to frog to ant-men, a technology that is an equally crazy quilt of steam power, magic, electric-powered clockwork for heightened psi-powers, a political structure that could come straight from Stalin's Russia complete with deals with an all-too-real Satan and a world-thread artist spider known simply as the Weaver, a trash-heap conscious computer, and intimations of a history and wider world that is even more fantastic.

Beyond the incredible scenery is an almost Victorian moralistic plot, where the protagonist is forced to deal with the consequences of his innocent-seeming research into methods of restoring flight to a criminal garuda bird-man. His fight against the slake-moths that were inadvertently freed as a result of one of his investigations forms the main story line, and slowly builds to an (almost) exciting story line. However...

Mieville's style is very densely descriptive. In the beginning of the book, this is excellent, as it paints a very dark, depressive, intimate picture of the city and its inhabitants. As the plot unfolds and becomes more pressing, though, this same style and repeated images become an obstacle to getting the story told. At the very moments when tension has been raised to high levels, we step out for two to three pages at a time for more descriptions, effectively destroying the pacing of the story. I think this book could have been considerably improved by some heavy cutting of this material in the latter stages of the book.

There are places where the plot could have been tightened. At multiple points, the Weaver saves our hero from impossible situations, an effective deus-ex-machina device as the Weaver can apparently do almost anything (except defeat the slake-moths single-handed). Although this is consistent with Victorian-era plotting, it really doesn't belong in a modern novel. Thematically the book also falls somewhat flat, with overly simplistic value/action/consequence matings, almost reminiscent of something out of Dickens.

A brilliant, off-beat, dazzling setting; an exciting adventure tale; but marred by too many words and too little depth.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. China Mieville spends endless thousands of words painting pictures in this novel. Detailed and elaborate descriptive prose is weaved throughout the book, describing in great detail every aspect of New Crobuzon, the city in which the story takes place. And while I admire the great effort Mieville goes to in order to bring the city to vivid life, in the end I felt that Perdido Street Station suffered for it.

Momentum built in the story is repeatedly lost when a long descriptive passage is encountered. The focus on the characters and events is often lost, and I found myself feeling as if the prose was an intermission to the story, rather than a part of it. Ultimately, the story and the prose compete with each other so much that I couldn't really gauge whether the story was very good at all.

Would I recommend Perdido Street Station? Well, that depends on what kind of writing you like. If you enjoy lots of adjective-laden phrases painting verbal pictures, you'll probably like the way Mieville portrays the environs of his gritty, surreal, bizarre city. If you're looking for a good, entertaining story, you might be disappointed as I was. Perdido Street Station isn't bad - it's just not for everyone.

Fantasy can to be said to examine human nature by way of myth and archetype, while science fiction does the same with technological possibilities; and horror explores human nature by route of our deepest fears. Perhaps what is most unique about "Perdido Street Station" is that it does all three, being at once of all those genres and at the same time refusing to be so neatly pigeonholed. For the fantastic elements blur into science, and the horror is present throughout.

The palpable atmosphere of the bloated and decadent New Crobuzon is one of the book's major strengths; and it reflects an irony that soon becomes apparent in Mieville's writing. Using the most beautifully wrought language, he creates a vision of hell to curdle the imagination. One is tempted to look away, but is inevitably sucked in by the seductive melody of his prose--melody that is paradoxically used to create dissonance.

The characters are introduced by degrees, so that they have time to sink into the reader's awareness before disaster strikes. This is a rare accomplishment, given that Mieville chose to make his main characters so potentially incomprehensible to us. Isaac is in love with a woman whose head is an insect--an idea that could have backfired terribly had Lin been any less vivid a personality than she was. As it is, that concept in itself is difficult to accept, as it defies reproductive logic that a race of women with insectile heads should exist; nevertheless, Lin is someone the reader comes to care about, and Isaac is a colorful and wholly original spin on the mad scientist stereotype.

It is difficult to tell if Isaac is in fact the main character, or if it is Yagharek's story after all. Through Yagharek's eyes the world is different than it is through Isaac's; more personal since his story is told in the first person; and the lyrical quality of his narrative, together with his desperate quest, binds the story in the form of a sad, twisted parody of an epic. In the end the story circles back to Yagharek, transcending political concerns to explore the universal problem of identity.

Those who are very sensitive to horrific imagery and even horrific concepts might do well to avoid this book. While Mieville writes without emotion, the events that occur do the work for him. The catastrophe that eventually overwhelms New Crobuzon provides no means of escape, not even death. The surreal quality of this book and the way in which it pierces to the deepest and most instinctive of human fears--the utter loss of identity--makes it less of a story than a lush, fantastic nightmare. And like a nightmare, very likely to stay with you long after you've awakened.

I'm often surprised at how often I find myself on the other side of popular opinion. If I hear enough good things about a book or a movie or a CD, I will try to experience it with positive expectation. I hope to like it. I want to like it. But too often, it seems, I am the only person who walks away feeling cheated, like the artist has simply played a colossal joke on me and used public opinion to lure me into a trap.

Or maybe I'm just paranoid.

Whichever it is, I have fallen prey to the lure of China Mieville's "Perdido Street Station". I even helped trap myself, having read the author's "King Rat" and loved it. But Perdido Street is an exploration without discovery, hype without a product, a whack-arsed fantasy for non-linear thinkers.

Neither of the main characters' stories intrigued me in the slightest, not that of Isaac, who is tasked with returning flight to an angelic birdman whose wings have been torn from his body, not Lin's story, of an insect-headed artist pressed into sculpting the likeness of a crime-boss.

As much as Mieville tries to instill the story with meaning and depth, I was still left wondering what it was all about and why I should care. And to add insult, the author has abandoned the beautiful language of "King Rat" and taken a contemporary tone.

This book is too long, too much weirdness for weirdness' sake, too forced.

If I had a dime for every time Mieville used the words "exudations," "palimpsest," and "femtoscopic"... every mention of bodily excretions... and every time his similes and metaphors made use of bodily excretions and wounds... I would be a rich man indeed. The plot is all over the place, the characters sketchy, and the (never-ending) details of Mieville's world so overwhelmingly nauseating that reading this book was a test of fortitude. He also seems to basically give up about eighty or so pages towards the end. Nonsensical details and new characters pop up out of nowhere, and Mieville side-tracks the narrative into tiresome tangential details. This book really seems to serve as an excuse for Mieville to show off New Crobuzon, constantly reminding us that he's named every street and come up with an endless array of bizarre, unlikable species to inhabit the place. On top of this, looking beyond the over-used steampunk trappings, his creations are sometimes just plain ridiculous. The handlinger sequence, when you really picture it, is just plain silly, e.g., a blindfolded guy flying around upright and shooting fire from his outstretched tongue with a dog strapped to his back. Come on!

I honestly don't understand the acclaim that this book has received. It's a mess. After finishing the last page, I wanted to fling the book across the room.

China Mieville's style here is impressive, invoking Dickens, Lovecraft and the 19th century in general. That and the brilliant creation that is New Crobuzon must've been what wowed the critics.

That said, I can't believe the fatal flaws in storytelling and characterization generally slipped under their radar.

I felt there were too many characters in play. One significant figure doesn't arrive until the last 20 pages! And I lost track of the villains; Vermishank, Motley, the slake moths, the mayor, etc. Some players meet abrupt ends, and some disappear for literally dozens of pages. My favorite character is given a major subplot early on, only to vanish for half the book!

The basic mechanics of the story suffer a similar fate. As Mieville bounces from character to character, plot threads are introduced, dropped, and mostly resolved (if at all) in a very unsatisfying way, especially after 710 pages of waiting to see how things turn out. In the end (spoiler alert), the remaining villains vanish from the stage, Isaac's apparent main goal is suddenly abandoned, and the heroes limp off into the sunset after horrible losses. I wasn't expecting "happily ever after," but the ending seemed half-baked indeed.

A final note: Mieville is fond of the words "stink," "stench," "greasy," "filth," and scatalogical terms I won't type here. Halfway through the book, I found myself thinking, "Okay, New Crobuzon stinks. I get it."

Overall, there's a lot of potential here, and genre crossover appeal, but I prefer tidier storytelling.

An increadibly detailed world, and the description of it is captivating. However, at times, this detailed world described with such rich language gets jarred by something being added for the sake of conveniene. It would be more forgivable if it wasn't also saddled with a plodding plot that doesn't start to really start until about 150 pages in, then goes down many dead ends while throwing out red herrings here and there with truely interesting potential.

The product of a staggering imagination and a gift for language. But even in the end, I wished it had lost 100 pages or so before getting to me, and I honestly couldn't see me recommending to anyone who hadn't expressed an interest in it already.

In the city of New Crobuzon, polution and grime reigns supreme. To borrow Stephen King's expression, it is a city that has "moved on". The city is a sprawling mass, disected by poluted rivers, overshadowed in parts by the skeletal ribs of some forgotten half-buried giant beast, and in the center of the city looms the towering hub of Perdido Street Station. From the hub, railways branch out over the city past the corrupt government where deals are made with the Ambassador of Hell himself, past intimidating militia towers, through bulging dumps where long-forgotten machinery is cast aside and partially working factories belch plumes of poisonous smoke into the air, past both rich and poverty-stricken neighborhoods of New Crobuzon's citizens, through the markets and shopping districts, and out into the wild forests beyond the city. The government is corrupt, and the city's militia keeps its undercover presence known througout the city. Crime bosses hold sway in different parts of the city, often with unwritten government cooperation. Through the corruption of New Crobuzon's powerful elite, the various average citizens live their day-to-day lives somewhat untouched. There are humans, there are khepri who are insectoid-human in appearance, there are a race of water-shaping amphibians (who I can't help but think of Chet from Weird Science in their appearance), there are the remade who were punished for crime and are now fused with machinery or animal parts or any herendous combination you can dream of, there are the cactus people, and there are little flying devil-like creatures who aren't the smartest race and have names like Tea-for-two. Outside the city are other races including the flying desert nomads the geruda, who are magestic flying warriors with the appearance of a human with great wings and a falcon-like head. In the city there is art, sex, drugs, underground newspapers, serial killers, and science. The technology is caught in different generations. There are constructs (robots with specific purposes), data computers ran by punch cards, machines ran by boilers, and many complicated devices made of jumbled copper tubing, glass tubes, and wiring. There are no automobiles or similar technology, and weaponry consists mostly of flintlock guns.

Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is a scientist with a reputation. He keeps contact with his old university colleagues and despises them at the same time. His passion is his secretive relationship with Lin, a khepri artist. That is to say, his passion is Lin when he's not working on his true passion, which is crisis theory. Isaac's work is once more interrupted when he is hired by a geruda castout who has lost his wings. Isaac's task, make him fly again. Little does Isaac know what this job will cost him, because before it's all over, Isaac, Lin, and all his friends are in the crosshairs of the government, a powerfull crime lord, and a strange cult. Like all the citizens, high and low, they are also in danger of losing their minds and lives to a terrorizing moth-like creature, who was accidentally released by Isaac himself. The slakemoth feeds on emotion and sucks your entire mind from your body, to even look at the creature is death. It hovers above the city adding to the pollution above the city, and unlike the smog from the factories, the slakemoth's polution drags the city into a daily living nightmare.

In Perdido Street Station, Mieville's strength is in setting and character. Getting thrown into the "Steam Punk" genre, Mieville's setting still comes off as unique. The grimy imagery is thick throughout the novel, to the point of making you feel like you need to wash your hands after setting the book down. The characters feel real and are empathetic, and definitely flawed. The dialogue is good, and Mieville has several funny expressions and variations of them, such as "Jabbers arse", "Oh sweet Jabber", "Godsdamn!", and "Yhag, old son! Where have you been?". His technology and science is entertaining and I liked the imagery of the punch cards, copper tubing, bottles, boilers, etc.

Where China fails, is plot. The setting and characters are beautifully written. The plot comes off lame in the end. The first half, dealing with his relationship with Lin, his task of making the geruda fly, the underground resistance to the government, all had great potential. Once the slakemoth is released, the story becomes like "Aliens" or any other man vs. predator story. It all ties together in the end, but the slakemoth definitely becomes the main plot point. China's lengthy descriptions of confrontation with the beast spin into a bad action novel, and I found myself getting bored with it. For those of you who have read it, I found the Weaver's inclusion in the story an annoyance, it just took me out of the novel. China must have a thing for spiders because I was equally annoyed at The Spider in King Rat. For the plot to come down to hunting a slakemoth, did the book really need to be 700 pages?

I recomend Perdido Street Station for the incredible atmosphere and good characters. It's gritty, not black and white, has language, sex, drugs, all the good stuff. Where it fails big-time (in my opinion) is plot. China had all the setup for the makings of a good plot, the scientist and his friends, the corrupt government, the crime bosses, the cult, but instead the focus turned into man vs. alien. If you like that kind of thing, this is your book. If you don't, you may want to think twice.

3 out of 5 stars.

_Perdido Street Station_ is an odd blend of fantasy and science fiction that succeeds as genre fiction. If you are a fan of the _Dragonlance_ novels, or almost anything else published by Wizards of the Coast, this novel should prove an entertaining read.

However, it is not literature, and I am surpised that it is touted as being so. I wonder - have the critics actually read the book, or just given it a decent skim? Mieville's tale is mostly a page-turner, less because of his writing or characters (all of which are unlikeable) than the desire to just see how the damn thing ends. I will grant Mieville five stars for overall imagination and fantasy vision, but penalize on the following points:

* Point one - poor writing. Mieville is lauded for his descriptive power, and I think this is fair. One really gets a feel for New Crobuzon - the cesspools are open, the rivers (named Tar and Canker, get it?) are foul and filthy, the streets are heaped with garbage (literally refuse, and figuratively the inhabitants), the buildings are decrepit... yes, New Crobuzon really is a pile of s**t. Got it. Mieville lays on with sweeping, panoramic vistas of the city. A cinematographer could hardly do better, and that is a compliment. One reviewer claimed that he would "read an atlas" if written by Mieville, and I believe that adequately sums Mieville's talent as a writer.

Unfortunately, Mieville is not an especially good writer otherwise. His diction (word-choice) is terrible, and suggests a deliberate consultation with a thesaurus in the effort to bloat up his novel with obscure, important sounding words. To illustrate this point, let me say that he seems to have fallen in love with the words "bathos," meaning an anticlimax; "culs-de-sac," the plural form of cul-de-sac (there are apparently no "dead-ends" in the city, just culs-de-sac); and "judder," to shake violently. He trots these words out like show ponies or talentless grandchildren. I hope never to read the words bathos, culs-de-sac, or judder again; I know I will never use them. While I certainly have nothing against obscure, important-sounding words, there is a time and a place for them, and a steam-punk sci-fantasy novel needs to use them judiciously or well. Mieville does neither.

Mieville's writing also suffers from horrendous dialogue. The characters speak as if written by teenager obsessed with film-noir. Some have obvious cockney accents; others use words like "moolah," "capiche," and "gangster-ese." Some mutter to themselves in an obvious attempt to clue the reader that SOMETHING BIG is imminent: "Could he have... no, it's not possible... crisis engine? ... is it... could he have... ?" One even moans, "What have I done? What have I done?" when the monster is finally unleashed on the city. Okay, that was funny in _Young Frankenstein,_ but in this novel it is so heavy-handed as to deserve an award for terrible dialogue.

Final word on Mieville's writing style: description, though often repeated (and repeated and repeated and repeated...) is quite good. You really see what Mieville is talking about. Bravo, sir! Diction and dialogue need work. The bathos of wandering into so many conversational culs-de-sac really leaves me juddered. Professional editors are not "that" expensive.

* Point two - internal inconsistencies. New Crobuzon is an alien sprawl, a city-state of decay and filth built around the massive ribs of some long-dead, giant thing. Located on the planet Bas-Lag, the city teems with robots, undead, and aliens (cleverly called "xenians"). So why do the frog-like aliens refer to themselves as vodyanoi (after the froggy water-spirit in Russian folklore), and why are the scarab-headed aliens called khepri (the scarab-god in Egyptian mythology)? If everything is happening on Bas-Lag, and Earth either never existed or is long-forgotten, how did these cultural tropes enter this world?

Also, if this world is full of "real" magic, with zombies and whatnot, why does Mieville feel the need to explain all the details of "crisis theory"? Crisis theory is the chaos theory of Bas-Lag (very trendy), but does it really need pages of technical description? It's not real! I'm not interested in the mechanics of crisis theory! It adds nothing to the plot or the understanding of the characters! It comes off as if Mieville is bragging about how clever he is - it is authorial intrusion of the grandest, most ego-tripping kind, and I'm surprised the publisher allowed it.

Also, Mieville's idea of artificial intelligence in a steam-punk, analog engine (complete with on-off switches!) is stupid at best, offensive at worst. The little cleaning machines and doodads that work in Bas-Lag are driven by punch-cards (ala UNIVAC) - like player pianos or Chinese abacuses. The idea that they could "get" artificial intelligence - and the lengths to which Mieville defends his hypothesis - is absurd. Hey, there's already magic in New Crobuzon, how about this: "Magic did it." It is by leaps and bounds a more satisfying explanation.

Less world-shattering than these horrible flaws, though by no means less inconsistent, is Mieville's handling of the main character, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin. Mieville establishes and continually reinforces the fact that Isaac is middle-aged and overweight. He's portrayed as a kind of bench-sniffing hack, a tweedy, amoral academic who beds undergraduates and writes essays for the jocks. Exercise? Never heard of it. Fried dough? Keep it coming. And yet, Isaac must have unlimited hit points and a +5 saving throw modifier, because he shrugs off everything. He crawls through sewers without getting Tetanus, and climbs flights of stairs without having a coronary. See point three below for more details...

Final word on Mieville's internal structure: one can hardly expect a writer to keep everything consistent in a novel. Little details get lost. Okay. But once you have established certain parameters (we're on an alien planet, magic works, robots are basically 1970's-era calculators, etc.), you had better stick to those rules.

* Third point - deus ex machina. This is by far the most unforgivable of the book's considerable flaws. In the old Greek plays, whenever the hero would get inescapably trapped - surrounded by tigers, or attacked by demons, for example - another actor would descend on a swing and rescue the hero. This actor might be Hermes, or Apollo, or Zeus; maybe just passing by and decided to interfere, or maybe the hero's quest is just too important for the gods to let fail. Whatever, the "god in the machine" would save the day, and the hero's quest would continue.

_Perdido Street Station_ reeks of deus ex machina. Whenever the heroes are surrounded, they're magically teleported away. When the chips are down, they find all the chips they need. Really, I half-expected that if ever one got a sore throat, a menthol cough drop would materialize and force its way into the particular throat. By mid-book I realized that there was no point in worrying about the main characters. Mieville needs them alive in order to move the plot. And I think that is perhaps the gravest flaw of the book - it is relentlessly driven by plot. The characters exist only to make sure the plot moves where Mieville wants it go.

Final word on deus ex machina: the powers that save the characters must also be at work in the real world, because this book should have been relentlessly torn apart by editors, rewritten, and published as fantasy. Instead, it was lifted away from its many woes and placed in the same category as _Titus Groan._ Unforgivable.

So I have taken away three points from five, leaving two. As I said, the book succeeds as genre fiction. Dungeon masters and fourteen-year old boys will love it. (As far as dungeon masters go, I have my suspicions about Mieville. One of his characters sports a "catoblepas hide;" there is a very Warhammer40K-esque warp called the "Torque;" and Mieville even comments on professional adventurers being interested only in "gold and experience." We even see some professional adventurers - all that's missing is the stat sheets, and even those could be guessed fairly easily. So... Mieville... if you're reading this... was it AD&D or Warhammer?)

Final word: I feel that this book does in fact have a socially redeeming value. By referencing Mervyn Peake and other authors, positive critics of this book may unwittingly be leading young readers to real literature. Yes, _Perdido Street Station_ is a gateway book, just a little toot, harmless really, that nonetheless seduces readers into harder and harder stuff. Before you know it, they'll be onto Peake, and then Faulkner, and then there's no stopping them. If they're hooked, I mean really hooked, they'll be making weekly trips to the book-dealer, or better still the library. There is no cure, but it's a sweet sweet ride.

The book had so much promise--a big, sprawling, complicated city as the backdrop; interesting characters; wicked evil monsters. But, god, the meandering storyline; the endless descriptions of spit, snot, mucous, vomit, feces; the excruciatingly detailed passages on fear and pain and torture; the way the point of view shifts... A perfect example is the 3 pages wasted describing an extremely minor character's every move as she swims away from the city, never to be seen again. I was incredulous that this scene made it into the final version of the novel...why? Who cares? It contributed nothing to the plot. Was Mieville's editor on vacation? Maybe the point was that the character gets away from the city, something readers are sure to want to do by then, too.

I loved Mieville's The City & The City for its soaring language, wildly inventive setting, and convoluted plot. But this novel was a wet mess. Considering Mieville's scornful dismissal of Tolkien and his ilk, I think he came pretty close to a dark version of Tolkien's extraordinarily boring Silmarillion--complete with pointless descriptions and backstories, exhaustingly complete geography, and impossibly long names. The novel is an empty, pompous bore (just what a reviewer said of The Silmarillion!) Mievielle's world is like a sick, twisted Dickensian London or evil-twin Ankh-Morpork; his Remade characters are a poor reflection of Farmer's brilliant Riverworld. There are so many more rewarding fictional worlds I could have spent 6 hours in, and I wasted them on New Crobuzon. Arrrgh! I want my time back! I want my money back!

A savvy reader could start making predictions based solely on what could happen next that would be most awful. Remember the badly-written action shows of the 90's, where any poor bastard introduced by the writers who was two days from retirement, or whose wife was expecting a baby, was sure to be dead two scenes later? Perdido Street Station is EXACTLY like that. If you land a great job, it's sure to be the devil who's your boss; any comrade you meet is controlled by your enemies; any choice you must make will be between two equally horrific evils. If anything good happens, you're going to pay, pay, pay. Every character is in hell.

There was no redemption, no love, no honor, no respect, no "joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." There was not the slightest glimmer of humor or humanity. Anything beautiful was sure to be destroyed, every promise broken, every friendship ended in betrayal and death or dwindled into queasy duty. The Washington Post Book World review of the novel said, "There are scenes here that...are impossible to expunge from memory." This is, sadly, completely true.

If this is where Mieville's mind lives, I want nothing more to do with it. This is the last novel of his I will read.