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specs 's review for:
Perdido Street Station
by China Miéville
I read this in reverse order of the New Crobuzon books (after The Scar) and I'm glad. I'm not sure I would have read a second Miéville book if this had been my first. Perdido Street Station was...fine.
Miéville has a glorious imagination and you can feel how much he loves every dirty inch of New Crobuzon. And my god, the *planning* that must have gone into this world to make it feel so lived in. Miéville was sold to me as an author who writes dialogue and information dumps in a very realistic way. He'll list off three different races or mention a famous battle, but you don't get it explained to you at that moment because that's not how people actually talk. If it's important to the plot, he'll loop back around chapters later and give you more information about the Vodyanoi or the Scaramundi Riots or whatever, and in the meantime you have just kind of bob along in the narrative current, letting weird fantasy shit flow past you, trusting that anything important will be explained later. And that's a frustrating way to read a book this long.
Most of the things I loved about this book were ideas or vignettes or scenes where he's clearly having a lot of fun exploring a concept or a cool visual moment. There were things in here that I hadn't seen before in fantasy or sci-fi: the communicatrix who could physically embody someone while being a conduit to communicate with them; the mid-air fight between the slake-moths and the Handlingers; everything about the Weaver; the khepri's sexual dimorphism; Lin's weird cult past; the bit where the voices of the damned aren't the echoes of a demon's voice, they *are* the demon's voice. But these were mostly rewards for slogging through the rest of the book and I'm sad that for me, these were the high points of the book as a whole.
Long stretches of it just weren't fun to read. And I don't believe that everything we read should be wall to wall fun, but how delighted I was by the gems (the Council using a hollowed out body as an avatar! The whole concept of the Remade!) really put the rest of the book into sharp contrast.
And then there's the two thorny characters I keep coming back to & don't quite know what to do with: Yagharek and Lin. Yag's crime reveal really feels like both a cheap rug pull and an excuse for making a clumsy point about rape and how rape is (it turns out) bad. Ha, you got me, Miéville! I sympathized with a rapist because I didn't know he was one! Sure taught me a lesson about something or other. It's just...clumsy.
And Lin's fate also feels cheap to me. Which maybe is the point? (smart people do stupid things all the time, get over it and welcome to reality, wake up sheeple etc etc.) But ugh, man. You make a brilliant male scientist and a brilliant female artist, she gets kidnapped and physically abused and traumatized to the point of no recovery so that you can make a point about how caring and broken male scientist is? Sigh. Okay. Also her turning to face the slake moth was set up as something she couldn't help but do because of her creative and inquisitive nature, which again: cheap.
Or maybe Miéville isn't trying to make any point at all, and maybe that's the problem (for me, a person who had mixed feelings about this beloved book). If your starting premise is that society and civilization are savage and chaotic and brutal then I don't want to read a book that posits that right out of the gate and just keeps doubling down. I want the premise to be complicated or upended or redeemed somehow and Perdido did not accomplish that. It's beautiful and dark and weird and harsh all the way through, which for me was too much of the same thing for too many pages.
Miéville has a glorious imagination and you can feel how much he loves every dirty inch of New Crobuzon. And my god, the *planning* that must have gone into this world to make it feel so lived in. Miéville was sold to me as an author who writes dialogue and information dumps in a very realistic way. He'll list off three different races or mention a famous battle, but you don't get it explained to you at that moment because that's not how people actually talk. If it's important to the plot, he'll loop back around chapters later and give you more information about the Vodyanoi or the Scaramundi Riots or whatever, and in the meantime you have just kind of bob along in the narrative current, letting weird fantasy shit flow past you, trusting that anything important will be explained later. And that's a frustrating way to read a book this long.
Most of the things I loved about this book were ideas or vignettes or scenes where he's clearly having a lot of fun exploring a concept or a cool visual moment. There were things in here that I hadn't seen before in fantasy or sci-fi: the communicatrix who could physically embody someone while being a conduit to communicate with them; the mid-air fight between the slake-moths and the Handlingers; everything about the Weaver; the khepri's sexual dimorphism; Lin's weird cult past; the bit where the voices of the damned aren't the echoes of a demon's voice, they *are* the demon's voice. But these were mostly rewards for slogging through the rest of the book and I'm sad that for me, these were the high points of the book as a whole.
Long stretches of it just weren't fun to read. And I don't believe that everything we read should be wall to wall fun, but how delighted I was by the gems (the Council using a hollowed out body as an avatar! The whole concept of the Remade!) really put the rest of the book into sharp contrast.
And then there's the two thorny characters I keep coming back to & don't quite know what to do with: Yagharek and Lin. Yag's crime reveal really feels like both a cheap rug pull and an excuse for making a clumsy point about rape and how rape is (it turns out) bad. Ha, you got me, Miéville! I sympathized with a rapist because I didn't know he was one! Sure taught me a lesson about something or other. It's just...clumsy.
And Lin's fate also feels cheap to me. Which maybe is the point? (smart people do stupid things all the time, get over it and welcome to reality, wake up sheeple etc etc.) But ugh, man. You make a brilliant male scientist and a brilliant female artist, she gets kidnapped and physically abused and traumatized to the point of no recovery so that you can make a point about how caring and broken male scientist is? Sigh. Okay. Also her turning to face the slake moth was set up as something she couldn't help but do because of her creative and inquisitive nature, which again: cheap.
Or maybe Miéville isn't trying to make any point at all, and maybe that's the problem (for me, a person who had mixed feelings about this beloved book). If your starting premise is that society and civilization are savage and chaotic and brutal then I don't want to read a book that posits that right out of the gate and just keeps doubling down. I want the premise to be complicated or upended or redeemed somehow and Perdido did not accomplish that. It's beautiful and dark and weird and harsh all the way through, which for me was too much of the same thing for too many pages.