Perdido Street Station
Far be it from me to criticize my generous and wise patrons, on whose behalf this essay is written, but I suspect that Perdido Street Station is not, in fact, the best way to start with China Miéville. Jack Graham tells me Un Lun Dun is superlative, and a lot of people seem to plug The City and the City, each of which are, notably, about half as long as Perdido Street Station. Indeed, at a glance, Perdido Street Station appears to be the longest of Miéville’s works.
It is not, certainly, that the book is too long, although its length and the at times willfully undisciplined nature of its plotting can be frustrating. One of the book’s most interesting characters, Lin, the insectoid partner of the protagonist, essentially drops out of the plot halfway through and reemerges at the end just in time to be violently lobotomized, a move that is both disappointing in light of the fact that she’s one of two significant female characters (and by far the more interesting and fleshed out of the two) and just plain frustrating. An action sequence towards the book’s end is resolved in part by the sudden appearance of a quasi-mythical figure mentioned early in the book, but basically ignored for the middle half of it, making his appearance jarring in the extreme. And the book’s primary plot, a group of horrific creatures called slake-moths that are stalking the dreams of New Crobuzon, doesn’t really start up until a third of the way through, causing all prior plots to be set aside until the last chapter, at which point several of them have been resolved by dint of the relevant characters having died horribly at some point.
It is, in other words, a profoundly messy book. Even this is not quite a flaw; its messiness is tangibly an artistic choice. I’ve not looked into interviews or anything, but it would not surprise me to discover that a draft or at least fragments of Perdido Street Station predate Miéville’s first book, King Rat; it has the characteristic sprawl of a first novel, desperate to get every bold idea and sweeping theme that’s been stewing in his brain for twenty-eight years into a single book. But I’ve an obvious soft spot for mad ambition, or at least a well-developed enough sense of irony to recognize that I really oughtn’t criticize another writer’s sense of literary hubris.
Because, of course, there’s a real pleasure to messy sprawl. The clarity and depth of a tidy novel is certainly a pleasure worth indulging in, but the messy novel, with all its implications and half-elucidated ideas that leave the reader wondering if it’s they or the author who is actually playing with a given theme. And Perdido Street Station is particularly well-poised to take advantage of this. It is a book grounded in weird fiction, after all, full of fantastic creatures existing at a strange and deliberately hazy junction of magic and science.
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