Book Review: Perdido Street Station | China Miéville

A magnificently sprawling novel, a tour through the city of New Crobuzon, a palimpsest of muck and filth and vice.

Once again, a book I own. These scans come from my copy.

This is Miéville's second novel. It is also his longest. For those who are unfamiliar with Miéville, he is a writer - of novels, short stories, and comics - as well as a political activist and academic. He is also a Marxist. As I am not familiar with Marxist theory, this is not something I intend to talk about much.

As for genre, it falls into the New Weird. And what is that? Well...

The New Weird, as it is called, is perhaps the successor to weird fiction. The original weird fiction was a style of the late 19th and early 20th century, a subgenre of speculative fiction distinguished by its unique blend of fantastic, supernatural, mythical, and scientific tropes and ideas. Here's how Lovecraft defined it:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

It is, I submit to you, not the clearest explanation, but perhaps a listing of writers whose work falls under the label will clarify somewhat: Edgar Allen Poe, Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith. (There are, of course, many others, but I suspect those will be the most recognizable.) I suppose you can make a reasonable argument towards that all, whatever their fantasy and sci-fi trappings, contain some aspect of horror to them, some aspect of going beyond the explainable and understandable.

The New Weird is a term which refers to the resurgence of weird fiction by way of authors like Miéville and others. But it seems - from my understanding - to be a somewhat different beast. Whereas an element of horror was, by Lovecraft's reckoning, absolutely integral, it seems less integral to the New Weird - though some aspect of discomfort is, it seems, generally present, some way of turning the familiar into the unfamiliar.

It is a stew. If I may borrow a word I saw Miéville use a number of times in Perdido Street Station, it is a palimpsest - drawing from fantasy, sci-fi, horror, mythology, even literary fiction at times, blending these into a unique whole alongside a healthy dose of the author's own imagination and invention. There is something weird about it, which, I suppose, is the whole point.

Even so, there seems to be little agreement on what constitutes a weird tale beyond a general agreement of the familiar becoming a source of discomfort. Or something like that, anyway.

Warning: This review contains spoilers.
My first exposure to Miéville was via his novel Un Lun Dun, a young adult fantasy novel I read a couple years ago which I suspect would've been better suited for a ten-year-old. That said, my grounds for reference are skewed: my ten-year-old smaller brother is at a 10th-grade reading level (ages 15-16) if not higher. By the time I acquired Perdido Street Station I could barely remember reading it.

So when I came to read Perdido Street Station last week I approached it as though it were first novel of the author's I was reading.

I loved it. It's a fantastic story, well told - Miéville's prose, some would say it is purple (many adjectives, usage of obscure and/or archaic words, pretentious) - I counted "palimpsest" no less than four times and a variety of other fascinating words - but I rather think of it as colorful and unique, a deliberate stylistic choice. Here a quote from Miéville on the subject of prose: (Full interview linked.

I think for a lot of people who don’t read pulp growing up, there’s a real surprise that the particular kind of Pulp Modernism of a certain kind of lush purple prose isn’t necessarily a failure or a mistake, but is part of the fabric of the story and what makes it weird. There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose.

And my, is it a sprawling novel! There's a lot of stuff happening. The main plotline, the slake-moths, doesn't truly get going until a third of the way in, shoving aside a bunch of other stories and occasionally resolving them by means of horrific death.

There are really two twin hearts to Perdido Street Station, and the first of these is New Crobuzon itself, a roiling city built around the jutting ribcage of a long dead massive, ancient beast. The book reads almost like a walk through New Crobuzon. It is very much about the filthiest and poorest going up. Muck, vice, and crime are all present here. At times, the city becomes almost a character in and of itself, and Miéville describes it vividly, really bringing to life this macabre metropolis.

The other heart of it is Yagharek, the catalyst for the entire tale. Yagharek is a garuda, a race of flying creatures residing in a great desert. Yagharek has lost his wings after committing some crime which is unspecified until the very end and comes to the main character - scientist Isaac der Grimnebulin - about getting some method of flight back.

His interludes, in italics through the novel, popping up here and there, are sad and beautiful. His transformation from ashamed half-thing to someone new is breathtaking to observe, all the more so because it is in many ways a side tale. At the very end his crime is revealed, and it is one despicable to both us the reader and to his tribe, albeit for different reasons.

If I say that New Crobuzon and Yagharek are the twin hearts of the novel, I don't mean to say that everything else is ancilliary. The slake-moths are an exciting plotline, though the resolution may, to some readers, come off as a touch of authorial cheating, reliant as it is upon the Weaver, which had previously appeared only once.

A magnificent subplot comes in with Lin - an artist and Isaac's lover - who is hired to produce a statue of the criminal ganglord Mr. Motley. Tragically she is removed from the plot three-quarters of the way in and returns only to be lobotomized. It's an unfortunate way to lose one of the female characters - of which there are only two, and of which Lin is by far the more interesting. In my opinion, it's a genuine shame to lose her in such a way.

Beyond this there are, running parallel, the ineffectual Mayor Rudgutter, and the militia of the city's dictatorial government; the Construct Council, a bunch of clockwork machines which have attained sentience; the Runagate Rampant, a left-wing newspaper which is the primary source of opposition and dissent within the city. Nevertheless, these are all, relative to the slake-moths, less significant.

All of this detail - and this is without talking about the various races within the city, from humans to the vodyanoi to the various other xenians (a term referring to non-human species) - make New Crobuzon feel alive, a city with a long, weighted history upon its shoulders.

It's a beautifully weird novel. A little messy, yes, but a marvelous, fascinating, engrossing read.

I will say, though, that this maybe isn't the ideal novel for a first-time Miéville reader. Maybe. I don't know what would be, since I've only read this (if I discount Un Lun Dun, which I am) of his works, but... something else, I guess? I don't know. If your tastes run into fantasy, science fiction, and weird (likely funneled by means of Lovecraft), then this is undoubtedly a book worth reading.

Nine incomprehensible threads of the worldweb out of ten!