Important Information

Title: Perdido Street Station

Author: China Miéville

Publisher: Ballantine / Del Ray

Cover art: flawless… perfectly captures the mood and style of the book

Length: 710 pages in trade paperback

Rating

6 out of 7 (Immensely strong writing)

“Fans of this epic fantasy will reread this classy tale many times over in years to come.”

--Internet Book Watch

If you first read the book and then this quote, you would realize that this fellow did not finish the book and perhaps didn’t even start it. It is not epic fantasy at all—it is certainly speculative fiction but as far from the epic fantasy that Tolkien invented as one can get. It is also not a tale. It is allegory and metaphor so sharp and so original it nearly requires a new category; and it is so brutishly real—every scene trembles with the flaws of its characters and oozes with their various bodily fluids—that to call Perdido Street Station classy is to call the Sahara verdant.

“Earthy, sometimes outright disgusting—imagine your toilet being backed up by diamonds—but, amazingly in a book of this length, flawlessly plotted and relentlessly, stunningly inventive: a conceptual breakthrough of the highest order.”

--Kirkus Reviews

“Relentlessly inventive” describes the reader’s reaction perfectly. Miéville’s imagination is a challenging maelstrom and demands that the reader meet it step for step with all of his concentration—and the inventions never stop. “Exhilarating” and other synonyms are popular terms for reviewers but here such terms are accurate because keeping up with Miéville is very hard and it is in some ways sort of dangerous. Skydiving, we suppose, is exhilarating, but many, many people never experience it because they lack the courage. Reading Perdido requires a similar sort of courage. Describing a toilet backed up by diamonds is absolutely inspired.

Miéville has come a long, long ways since his first novel, King Rat. This book is superb on many levels and surpasses King Rat in skill and importance by a full order of magnitude. Harold Bloom, one of the greater literary critics of the latter 20^th century, claims that books are influential because they are uniquely strange and require their readers—especially other authors—to continually return to them like a powerful, compulsive, gravitational force. The term strange, in the Harold Bloom sense, describes the catalyst that allows a work of literature to threaten greatness. We always thought, before Miéville, that such strangeness was something rare, particular, and required many, many years of polishing to manifest in even one character or one moment. Reading Miéville is like hitting a “gusher” of such strangeness and having it shoot into the sky uncontrollably. Or rather, imagine yourself desperately thirsty and trying to quench your thirst by facing up into the Niagara Falls. The power of this book comes from, as Kirkus describes, this sort of  “relentless inventiveness” which is really the strangeness that Harold Bloom describes.

From the first pages of interior monologue from an unnamed, undescribed, and unknowable character to the subsequent chapters of humans, non-humans, machines, economies, geography, and climates, the world is never so much described as offered through part of the normal experiences of the resident characters who note them only in passing. The restraint Miéville shows is impressive; rarely is an author able to create a world so completely and then only imply it through such nuance.

The plot revolves around the efforts of non-hero yet heroic Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin (the first of many names that will knock the reader sideways). He is the best the corrupted, stinking city of New Crobuzon can offer in the way of paragons of virtue—chapter one opens with him sleeping with a non-human girlfriend (she is part insect) and rooting small parasites from his body. He will play all the parts of the idealized but mad scientist, privileged politico, heroic and oppressed rebel, savior, fortune’s-fool heroic lover, and flawed Everyman. He will play them all with enthusiasm, conviction, and even (impossibly!) some grace. He is one of the most intriguing characters invented since Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant and immensely more likable.

It is the horrific nature of much of the strange inventions that prevent this book from reaching a 7 rating. In the final summation, despite the shocking, enthralling inventiveness, the book is still a horror novel. It is a book about people attempting to save themselves and others from a terrible, incomprehensible menace—it is the very paradigm of the horror/thriller. Yes, Miéville touches on the highest themes of love, duty, and loyalty, however beauty is entirely absent in this book and the motivations of every creature are thoroughly grounded in self-preservation. This is one of the most wonderful thrillers we have ever read, but thrillers which are written only for the adrenaline rush cannot finally be a life-changing work.

Still, the book is so magnificent in so many aspects, we cannot help but award one of our highest possible ratings.

Perdido Street Station will find an enthusiastic audience probably in many translations. It has many similarities to some of the finest creative works of Japanese anime which are completely unfettered by conventions, realities, or rules and should do particularly well among those fans. It has wrenched itself so violently away from convention that its force will be felt across many genres, audiences, and authors. Yet its unrelieved corruption and ugliness will prevent it from reaching across generations. Our highest compliments to Miéville yet his book does not change nor improve the lives of the people living on this planet and so fails to attain our highest rating. It will burn so very brightly for a long period of time, but then fade.

Readers looking for something new and different, fans of anime, those familiar enough with physics to imagine and enjoy the impossible born from the theoretical, and enthusiasts of dire monsters threatening populations will read and reread Perdido Street Station many times over. The imaginative force by itself is spectacular and should not be missed by any reader of speculative fiction. This book will be a feast for any reader starving for the original and the thrilling.

The matter under discussion is ugly. In the entire city of New Crobuzon, there is nothing beautiful, nothing grows, and no one is at peace. The absence of Mother Nature is felt only as unconscious longing and that longing mostly generated from the reader rather than the character. The colors of the world are, almost without exception, unrelieved soot. There is a rather bewildering penchant for all the characters—from the educated elite to the sewer villains—to use the worst profanity available in the modern English. This is not an easy read and certainly not for the squeamish. People rise to a challenge in order to reach George Orwell’s 1984 and they will do the same here.