In addition to photography, web development and miscellaneous geekery, I’m a member of a bookgroup. We meet once a month to discuss books chosen originally from the 2003 BBC Big Read top 100 and now from our own selection process. So… I write a blog, I read books… why not combine the two? Here, therefore, is the first in an occasional series of book reviews. Expect spoilers.
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville is the first one to get the treatment and boy, is it a big one. It’s a sci-fi/fantasy/steampunk adventure set in the city of New Crobuzon in the fictional world of Bas-Lag. The one sentence summary? A maverick scientist unwittingly unleashes monsters on the city and teams up with a multidimensional spider and a sentient rubbish dump to defeat them.
OK, there’s a bit more to it than that – my copy is 867 pages long. Therein lies the first criticism. God, could it have done with an edit. Miéville has built his fictional world in detail and wants you to know about it. Long sections read like a social history of New Crobuzon combined with a travelogue – the kind of thing you might expect to find in the travel writing section of your local bookshop. That kind of world building is great for creating a coherent world in which to set your stories. Tolkein did the same with Lord of the Rings, but allowed the history and mythology of Middle Earth to come out gradually and not threaten to overwhelm the plot.
And so we come to the plot. It takes a while to get going, and for at least the first third of the book it’s not clear what direction the story will take before it morphs into a relatively straight forward monster hunt. Certain subplots, involving a strike and an underground paper, could have been left out without really affecting the story and give the impression it might go a very different way. Conversely, there’s something of a deus ex machina near the end when a character previously mentioned only in passing appears from nowhere to rescue the main party with little idea given as to his motivation.
Finally, it has one hell of a downer ending, but one which also raises some of the most interesting philosophical questions in the entire book. It really would be spoiling the plot to discuss it in detail, but it raises questions about crime and punishment, cultural relativism and the possibility of redemption. Heady stuff to end on, and it makes it a good book for a bookgroup to get their teeth into.
Although this review sounds negative, I did think it was worth reading. There is barely a story out there without plot holes, so it’s always easy to find things to criticise in any fiction of this type. Miéville has addressed the issue of the book’s length himself, saying in an interview “I became acutely conscious of structure… I also realized that my tendencies to overwriting (of which I’m very conscious) can be reined in… When Stephen King releases “special editions” of his books, they’re always about 50,000 words longer. If I ever release the definitive, special, improved Perdido Street Station, it’ll be shorter than the original.”
Bear that in mind, be prepared for a long read and overall I think it rewards the effort.
in Books
Nice review Sean. I was pleased to be able to introduce Perdido Street Station to the book group, even though I recognised it wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s long been a favourite of mine but until the last meeting I knew no one else who’d read it, so it was good to be able to discuss it.
So many disparate threads run through the book it’s hard to know where to start reviewing it and if you prefer your literature to be minimalist, this isn’t it. With Perdido Street Station we get a baroque mash up of half a dozen or more tropes given some spicy distinctive twists and thrown happily together into a generous stew. If you don’t like one theme, don’t worry there’ll be something else along in a minute!
It should be a mess, and in the hands of a lesser writer I’m sure it would be but I think Miéville achieves an energy, gusto and chutzpah which against the odds, forces his ingredients to play nicely together and make a weird kind of sense. Just like the ultimate mongrel character of Mr Motley, the crime boss, the whole book with its outrageous mix of different elements manages to live, breathe and menace us.
Oddly enough for a book with so much plot in it (and there is a LOT of plot in Perdido Street Station) I don’t think the plot is the strongest feature. What I really enjoyed when I first read it was the sheer fun of the ride. There are certainly plenty of diversions which in retrospect look unnecessary but I felt I was always being thoroughly entertained. In the strike scene, for instance the image of the river forced into walls of water to block the flow of ships is very vivid, echoing perhaps those traditional pictures in children’s Bibles of the parting of the Red Sea. With a wealth of visual elements throughout, it makes me wonder what sort of a film could be made from Perdido Street Station, although I’m certain Hollywood would change the ending, not to mention the beginning and the middle!
Whilst the style may be overwrought in places for some readers (although I think China makes a good defence of this in the article you linked) we do get to enjoy some terrific little passages. I’d cite as one memorable example the description of the sexual frenzy of the mating dance of the Slake Moths over the nightmare ridden city, which is a wonderfully disturbing piece of lyrical horror writing easily the equal of (or dare I say better than) anything by Lovecraft.
What I ultimately took away from my first reading and relished again this second time round was the sense of the city of New Crobuzon itself as a character; the sordid city “unconvinced by gravity”, with its sky rails and scatological wyr men, its cursed “bone town” suburb, its dirty rivers and khepri slums remoulded with spit into half organic hovels… All that stayed with me after I’d forgotten many of the plot details and came back to me again with renewed enjoyment on re-reading. I like my fantasy reading to take me to strange, wild and weird places which are vividly realised. In New Crobuzon, Mieville has certainly created a classic destination I won’t ever forget. It definitely has a place in my all-time top five landscapes of the imagination (and I must list the other four one day…)
Perdido Street Station was my introduction to China Miéville’s work and I have become something of a fan since; not to the extent that I have read all his novels yet (though one sits on my shelf unread for the moment) but certainly the two following Bas-Lag novels, “The Scar” and “Iron Council”, then “King Rat” and a couple of his more recent standalone works, “The City and The City” and “Embassy Town”. I think he has developed as a writer and one thing I like about his novels is that he is reluctant to “cash in” on the perceived successes of earlier books. There are certainly identifiable features to his style but he always wants to try something different and even the so called “sequels” to Perdido Street Station are quite oblique sequels and don’t recycle much. I do take on board and agree with the critical points raised by your review though, and I think Miéville has yet to achieve his masterpiece. Embassy Town was full of promise but ultimately flawed in some crucial ways and it can definitely be argued that The City and The City is beating you over the head with its central allegory. However, if his ambition often exceed his ability to pull off what he’s trying to achieve, he’s consistently thought provoking and above all fun to read and that’s enough to keep me turning the pages!
P.S. I enjoyed that essay in the link and it’s interesting to read about Miéville’s literary influences, particularly how highly he rates M. John Harrison. Me too. I have thought of picking one of his books for book group but there are difficulties with all the ones I think of… I’m not sure book group is ready for that… Maybe one day!