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language: English
country: UK
year: 2000
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 12.7.24-9.8.24
it took almost a month, but I’ve finally finished China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. it’s too long, I think — it’s so enamored of its urban geography that at times it gets lost; I found myself skimming through some of the city descriptions. perhaps they would have been more engaging if I were consulting the map, but as a rule I refuse as a matter of principle to look at maps in fantasy books. I shouldn’t need to consult a map in order to follow the plot of your book.
in spite of this, I did think it was good, though considering how long I’ve been waiting to read this book I was not as blown away by it as I wanted to be, and I have some significant reservations about it.
it follows, primarily, a scientist named Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin. (I had assumed at first that the “Dan” was a preposition, but based on people’s usage of “der Grimnebulin” it seems that it may just be either a middle name or a second first name. much like The City and the City, this book suffers from a deep onomastic inconsistency and, additionally, a lack of consideration of the fact that the name “Isaac” is weighed down with theological history that doesn’t exist in its secondary world as far as I can tell.)
Isaac is something of a rogue, working intermittently as contract faculty at the university to support his research in a heterodox area of (pseudo)science. when a wingless garuda — bird people — commissions Isaac to help him fly again, a bunch of things are set in motion that lead to the unleashing of a flock of horrifying monsters on the city of New Crobuzon, which Isaac, with help from the garuda and some other friends, must then stop.
the good: I appreciated the attention to the political landscape, including the harrowing strike and strike-breaking sequence, although unfortunately as the novel progressed it rather lost sight of this. (also you can extremely tell that Miéville is a Trotskyist. of course Derkhan runs an underground radical newspaper.) in spite of the meandering, the portrayal of a multispecies urban environment was compelling. the slake-moths are deeply, profoundly horrifying, as they should be, and while I was a bit frustrated with aspects of the resolution of their plot (several plans got shot down so fast that fairly long sections of the novel felt rather trivial / pointless) I thought it was good overall. the onomastic inconsistency aside, the language and style were both aesthetically well-chosen and just very tasty.
the bad: for the first half-ish of the novel, Isaac’s perspective is split with that of his lover, the khepri (= insect people) artist Lin, who has been commissioned to produce a very unusual art piece. for the second half of the novel, Lin is presumed dead, and her ultimate rescue (after she’s been tortured for half the book) half-fails. I did not think this was a very good look! the end result is that the Lin sections, rather than feeling like they were meaningful to the overall plot of the novel, are reduced to essentially filler, just there to accentuate Isaac’s manpain when Lin is summarily de facto fridged. come on. I was really looking forward to seeing how her commission plot would link up with and complement Isaac’s investigation, and then it simply…didn’t.
that’s really my biggest issue, and it was one of the things that made getting through the second half of the book feel like a chore. the other main one was that, once Isaac and co. were busy with their investigation, there were more and more scenes where I just couldn’t shake the feeling that what I was reading was a detailed account / rewriting of Miéville’s Dungeons & Dragons campaign. it wasn’t bad, as such, but it felt like it lost much of the political force that had been present in the first half of the novel.
I’m a bit torn now; early in the book I felt enthusiastic about reading more of Miéville’s work, and on one level I still am, although I don’t know if I’ll be in a hurry to read the other Bas-Lag books if they’re all this long and this slow. but — aside from the slowness — the handling of Lin, as well as the unexpected Yagharek reveal at the end (which I did not love), combined with the abuse allegations against him, of which I was previously unaware, all have me feeling much more ambivalent in spite of the fact that I think Perdido Street Station was pretty good overall.
moods: mysterious, reflective