Mieville, China: Perdido Street Station
Perdido Street Station
Writer: China Mieville
Genre: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror
Pages: 623
Funny story about my reading this novel: back in October, a good friend of mine sent me a list of books to pick our book-of-the-month for November. There were some heavy hitters on that list: Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and obviously, China Miéville. I did what I always do: I go to Amazon.com, read the samples, and go with my gut with what appeals to me the most.
Well, my gut lingered on Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, so I picked it, with some hesitation. I remember Miéville’s name coming up during my Odyssey workshop, but not remembering anything in context to the name, I sought out my classmates and asked them about Miéville’s work and what I should expect.
Something to keep in mind is my weakness in writing: setting. Loads of description. I tend to hate it. I tend to skim over it to get to the good parts--story, character. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that in my own work, setting and description thereof lacks.
My Odyssey peers told me that Miéville had an interesting style. That he tended to focus on his setting and the stories that happen are an excuse for the writer to explore this world he’s created. This sounds disparaging, and I don’t mean it to. It told me that this was a writer’s interests were my polar opposite. Someone whose gift lay in world-building, description, and setting. No doubt, this was wonderful stuff, but I had a feeling I may become frustrated in looking for the things I need to sustain me while reading. I decided I needed to prepare myself for Miéville’s way of storytelling.
So I changed my mind about the book-of-the-month, went with Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, and never regretted it since. But I couldn’t help but giggle when my mentor gave me Perdido Street Station as one of my required reads for my first term at Seton Hill. It seems I was meant to read this book, so I jotted it down, and finally geared myself up to read it.
My mind is still reeling from the experience.
I think the primary reason for my reading this book was to see science fiction, fantasy, and horror all work seamlessly in one single book in an fresh, original way. Well Miéville’s got that hands down. I couldn’t decide until the middle of the book where I would classify it in the genre list, because for every thing that made me categorize it in, say, science fiction, along came another to make me classify it in horror, or fantasy. Finally, I remembered a handy little moniker called “New Weird” which perfectly describes this style of novel. And when I say perfectly, I mean perfectly. It’s really hard to tell where one genre ends and another begins, and the reason behind this is the setting.
Which, whether my mentor knew it or not at the time, is the secondary reason for my reading this book.
The funny thing about Miéville is that nearly every time I heard his name, it was alongside another famous world-builder, and that world-builder is Tolkien. Whatever the comparison people make, one thing is very clear: I haven’t read such a complete, rich, whole setting since Lord of the Rings. That’s saying something: as much fun as the Harry Potter books are--and by no means should it be said J.K. Rowling is a poor world-builder--I always get the impression things are relatively made up as the writer goes. With Middle Earth, and now with New Crobuzon (the setting where Perdido Street Station takes place), it’s obvious this is real place that you just haven’t found your physical way to yet. When people cry for realism in fantasy, this is what they want: worlds with real, diverse people with rules that affect everyone. Worlds where you know other stories have taken, are taking, and will be taking place while you’re reading the main event. Worlds where there are honest-to-god consequences and where problems can’t be easily solved.
New Crobuzon is so complete and weird that it’s really hard to focus on it. Can you--unless you live there--focus on the scope and grandeur of New York City, the melting pot of everything and anything in the United States? New Crobuzon is that complex, that diverse, that weird. Science co-exists with a kind of magic you find in fantasy, which co-exists with horror both fun (there’s an Ambassador of Hell) and truly chilling. And the characters--the creatures!-- that populate this city rival those of Tolkien. Not to compare the two though (each is their own, separate thing), but these are creatures you won’t find in other fantasy novels, because it didn’t occur to writers to write them (I won’t go so far as to say that Miéville was the first, because I simply don’t know). All too often writers (myself included) rely on stereotypes of creatures and characters we’ve already read or seen in books and movies, leaving little room to really explore the imagination to find what else we can come up with. There’s a beetle-type people called khepri (surely Miéville was channeling Kafka when he created this race), frog-like people called the vodyanoi, a people called the cactacae, and a bird-like race called the garuda. And yet, despite this plethora of races (and humans are there too), the reader gets the impression there’s more yet to be found. That is how complete this world-building is.
What fascinated me the most, though, was how Miéville incorporates each and every single race into the story. And yes, thankfully, there is a plot. There’s strong characters too, so while I know the rumors are probably founded, they don’t hold true to this book.
Yes, there are passages that seem unnecessary and could be cut. Yes, there is some definite rambling about setting that I know I personally could do without. But the plot it pretty tight. Every loose end comes together by the end of the story, and the final section is so heartbreaking that I’m still trying to decide if I’m mad or not. It’s not that I didn’t want the story to end, but I grew to empathize with each character that by the end, it hurt to see what they went through and what came of it. The ending doesn’t negate the story by any means, but it does make the reader realize that everything happened based on a single action, and had that action not happened, the characters wouldn’t be in the shape they end up in. And I know that I personally have to wonder: was it worth it, for them? Not a single character comes out of this story unscathed (if they come out alive); everyone changes.
That said, once the reader is far enough along in the book (less than halfway), you can start putting the plot together, see where the story is going. And even in that sense, things happen that a reader would never expect that add yet more layers to an already multi-layered and complex story. Mostly, this works. Nothing ever comes across as deus ex machina (which is completely ironic, given one of the sub-plots), and every moment is treated with a gritty sense of realism I’ve come to really want out of speculative fiction.
This is a great book. Not my favorite: it didn’t compel me like, say, Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, but it did thoroughly fascinate me. And it gave me more than I wanted to think about in terms of world-building, other races, and originality. This is mostly a good thing, and while I applaud every person who breaks the mold, I also understand that as writers, we have to write what fascinates us. Sometimes those things are the usual; other times, it’s something so foreign that we can’t wait to spring it on the world. Whatever the reasons for creating, what’s in the story must fit into the story. It must serve the story and be an integral part. I think it’s safe to say that Miéville does this, and it’s a lesson I’m taking to heart.