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beagley 's review for:
Perdido Street Station
by China Miéville
Skilled, amazing writer--filled with wonderful ideas and a diamond-hard commitment that is required to make a great book. But Perdido Street Station won't make my forever list.
Perdido Street Station is almost a Terry Pratchett Discworld book. It's based in New Crobuzon (Ankh-Morpork), it stars Rincewind (Grimnebulin) and along the way we meet Vetinari (Rudgutter) and various sentients of various humanoid races. There's a slow build followed by a madcap dash to complete an unlikely adventure movie mission that somehow ties to deeper ideas like the fabric of reality and what it means to bravely stand with your friends.
The differences from Terry Pratchett? The grit is actually gritty. This book is filled with muck, murder, morally ambiguous characters, and body horror. Rincewind is a classic British loser... his missteps are comical. Grimnebulin is an actual jerk. He isn't a comical caricature of an asshole-- he's an actual asshole. Just slightly less of a jerk than the evil around him. Similarly, we find out that one of the main character's "sinful backstory" is actually a really upsetting sin. And the Vetinari character isn't a tyrant with a heart of gold--Rudgutter is an actual tyrant who abuses power, violates human rights, kills inconvenient threads, etc. This book is hard work. Most of the time it pays off. But it pretends to be a "fun" book, sometimes... and it isn't.
When Perdido Street Station takes you to a new section of town and attempts to "double-down" on this new neighborhood being the TRULY gritty and mucky depths of humanity, or when the book does something horrible like suck out a character's eyeballs or whatever, you find yourself scratching your head. Am I supposed to be upset again? You already did it, China! We're already there! You can't shock me with some new poverty, body horror, or grotesquery when you've already been shocking me for three hundred pages. I'm shocked out.
The book includes numerous "tropes-done-well"... (or satire? sometimes?), of different aspects of nerd culture... there's lots of steampunk fun, and the author cleverly inserts three Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying heroes into the adventure later in the book. The author winks at you. We briefly encounter vampires who aren't vampires, demons from hell, pan-dimensional creatures, steam punk AI, etc., etc., but the book is not primarily a comedy (like Pratchett), so these satirical or trope elements are rather odd for me. I had fun, I compliment the skill-- but it's a bit like the author is mashing Doctor Who episodes together and also wants to write literary fiction.
Anyway, great book. I should shut up. Glad I finally read it. But I can't recommend it.
Perdido Street Station is almost a Terry Pratchett Discworld book. It's based in New Crobuzon (Ankh-Morpork), it stars Rincewind (Grimnebulin) and along the way we meet Vetinari (Rudgutter) and various sentients of various humanoid races. There's a slow build followed by a madcap dash to complete an unlikely adventure movie mission that somehow ties to deeper ideas like the fabric of reality and what it means to bravely stand with your friends.
The differences from Terry Pratchett? The grit is actually gritty. This book is filled with muck, murder, morally ambiguous characters, and body horror. Rincewind is a classic British loser... his missteps are comical. Grimnebulin is an actual jerk. He isn't a comical caricature of an asshole-- he's an actual asshole. Just slightly less of a jerk than the evil around him. Similarly, we find out that one of the main character's "sinful backstory" is actually a really upsetting sin. And the Vetinari character isn't a tyrant with a heart of gold--Rudgutter is an actual tyrant who abuses power, violates human rights, kills inconvenient threads, etc. This book is hard work. Most of the time it pays off. But it pretends to be a "fun" book, sometimes... and it isn't.
When Perdido Street Station takes you to a new section of town and attempts to "double-down" on this new neighborhood being the TRULY gritty and mucky depths of humanity, or when the book does something horrible like suck out a character's eyeballs or whatever, you find yourself scratching your head. Am I supposed to be upset again? You already did it, China! We're already there! You can't shock me with some new poverty, body horror, or grotesquery when you've already been shocking me for three hundred pages. I'm shocked out.
The book includes numerous "tropes-done-well"... (or satire? sometimes?), of different aspects of nerd culture... there's lots of steampunk fun, and the author cleverly inserts three Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying heroes into the adventure later in the book. The author winks at you. We briefly encounter vampires who aren't vampires, demons from hell, pan-dimensional creatures, steam punk AI, etc., etc., but the book is not primarily a comedy (like Pratchett), so these satirical or trope elements are rather odd for me. I had fun, I compliment the skill-- but it's a bit like the author is mashing Doctor Who episodes together and also wants to write literary fiction.
Anyway, great book. I should shut up. Glad I finally read it. But I can't recommend it.