Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
After wading through Metamorphosis, I needed a fluff break. I read one book (that should remain nameless) because its premise was unusual, the love interests are a psychic woman who sees out of the eyes of a serial murderer as he kills and the male cop who is trying to catch him. Mixing romance and serial killers didn't work for me. I kinda squinted my way past the sex scenes and all the clichees-- and it was hard to find anything not clicheed-- so I pretty much squinted around the whole thing.
A few hours later, I was back virtually wandering the Kindle Store's stacks, looking for a better-written romance. I found An Ordinary Fairy, about a small town in Illinois and a photographer on location there who stumbles on the town's biggest secrets, starting with discovery that the town's grumpy hermit flies on insectoid wings to exercise her waggy-tailed, barking chocolate lab. Fun! Characters and prose are nice.
And then I thought I'd try another China Mieville, Perdido Street Station. FLUP! If you felt all the oxygen disappear around you, that was me drawing breath, preparing to vent forth
Based on The City & The City and Perdido Street Station, a reader might get the idea that China Mieville writes porn for city planners. Each of his cities is meticulously imagined as a living entity, its shaping forces, its politics, its sensory qualities, all a manifestation of every concept and character in the respective books. I sense that the child named for a country was never satisfied with the maps drawn on the foreleaves of his fantasies-- they didn't dig deeply enough into the transformative identity/ environment relationship. As an adult, China has corrected this oversight. It's a good thing for all of us, city planners and the rest, that he's gone 4 dimensional with his maps.
Perdido begins with a Rembrandt-ian vision. He redundantly uses images and bleak words to rough in the city like a painter layers on darker and darker hues. Just at the point where you think it's time to clap the book shut on its darkness, you are treated to the brilliant, simple, tenderly told vision of a naked man eating breakfast with his naked lover, who just happens to have, instead of a human head, a bug attached to her neck. The way China tells it, it's normalized, and even beautiful. Some fresco painter said once that he could work with using purple for flesh color as long as he had control over the surrounding colors; he could make it work. That's how China rolls, too. His city-building normalizes a thousand impossible things.
Lin, the bug lady, is probably every guy's dream brilliant sarcastic independent artist lover, she just happens to hold things to eat with one set of mandibles, and she just happens to use sign language with her insectoid headlegs. (I don't think blowjobs would be missed, given her special orifice's ability to extrude complicated sculptures from the back of her head.) Isaac Dan Der Grimnebulin, her lover, is the brilliant but undisciplined scientist who's working on a zillion things at any given moment, inter alia working for academia while hating it, his talents just awaiting for a call lofty enough to ignite his potential.
As the characters move in their world, we get a sense of the complicated legal and black market relationships in New Crobuzon. It's like the movie, "Brazil," on steroids cut with krokodil, cause the bureaucracy is that menacing. Even its penal system is something out of a Bosch painting. Among the many aliens, there are Remade people, people who've been surgically altered so as to never forget their crimes-- e.g. a woman who smothered her baby for crying has his arms grafted to her face.
So, Grimnebulin's higher purpose strides in wearing a cape. It's an eagle-guy from the desert, huge wings, formal speech patterns, all the wisdom of Alexandria's missing library. The cape falls away and his back is a mass of scar tissue. He says he removed his wings, one tiny knife-blade width at a time, for the crime of choice theft. He doesn't elucidate, though Isaac desperately wants to understand. The eagle-guys' culture and penal code are all but unknown, but even the reader sees the extent of his penance. Surely he should be forgiven? Eagle guy says he can't help it, though the terms of his sentence are that he never fly again, he wants to. Can Grimnebulin help? How could Grimnebulin not? A noble guy? Flight?
Grimnebulin puts out the word on the black market that he wants anything that flies, hoping to find the best solution. In amongst fantastical things China dreams up like flying snakes, and all sorts of birds and butterflies, Grimnebulin also gets a caterpillar. It turns out to be, um, pivotal.
Meanwhile, Lin the artist gets the commission of her life when the mob kingpin asks her to sculpt his likeness.
All hell breaks loose once the caterpillar emerges from its cocoon. People begin losing their minds. The mob kingpin thinks Grimnebulin is trying to steal his drug business. Grimnebulin harnesses crisis energy. The corrupt government declares martial law....
And that doesn't even begin to describe all the cool characters, inventions and ideas you encounter while Grimnebulin tries to help his old son fly again.
Highly recommended.
(One tiny complaint-- there's a section at the end that should be shortened. Laying pipe or wire is not interesting.)
A few hours later, I was back virtually wandering the Kindle Store's stacks, looking for a better-written romance. I found An Ordinary Fairy, about a small town in Illinois and a photographer on location there who stumbles on the town's biggest secrets, starting with discovery that the town's grumpy hermit flies on insectoid wings to exercise her waggy-tailed, barking chocolate lab. Fun! Characters and prose are nice.
And then I thought I'd try another China Mieville, Perdido Street Station. FLUP! If you felt all the oxygen disappear around you, that was me drawing breath, preparing to vent forth
Based on The City & The City and Perdido Street Station, a reader might get the idea that China Mieville writes porn for city planners. Each of his cities is meticulously imagined as a living entity, its shaping forces, its politics, its sensory qualities, all a manifestation of every concept and character in the respective books. I sense that the child named for a country was never satisfied with the maps drawn on the foreleaves of his fantasies-- they didn't dig deeply enough into the transformative identity/ environment relationship. As an adult, China has corrected this oversight. It's a good thing for all of us, city planners and the rest, that he's gone 4 dimensional with his maps.
Perdido begins with a Rembrandt-ian vision. He redundantly uses images and bleak words to rough in the city like a painter layers on darker and darker hues. Just at the point where you think it's time to clap the book shut on its darkness, you are treated to the brilliant, simple, tenderly told vision of a naked man eating breakfast with his naked lover, who just happens to have, instead of a human head, a bug attached to her neck. The way China tells it, it's normalized, and even beautiful. Some fresco painter said once that he could work with using purple for flesh color as long as he had control over the surrounding colors; he could make it work. That's how China rolls, too. His city-building normalizes a thousand impossible things.
Lin, the bug lady, is probably every guy's dream brilliant sarcastic independent artist lover, she just happens to hold things to eat with one set of mandibles, and she just happens to use sign language with her insectoid headlegs. (I don't think blowjobs would be missed, given her special orifice's ability to extrude complicated sculptures from the back of her head.) Isaac Dan Der Grimnebulin, her lover, is the brilliant but undisciplined scientist who's working on a zillion things at any given moment, inter alia working for academia while hating it, his talents just awaiting for a call lofty enough to ignite his potential.
As the characters move in their world, we get a sense of the complicated legal and black market relationships in New Crobuzon. It's like the movie, "Brazil," on steroids cut with krokodil, cause the bureaucracy is that menacing. Even its penal system is something out of a Bosch painting. Among the many aliens, there are Remade people, people who've been surgically altered so as to never forget their crimes-- e.g. a woman who smothered her baby for crying has his arms grafted to her face.
So, Grimnebulin's higher purpose strides in wearing a cape. It's an eagle-guy from the desert, huge wings, formal speech patterns, all the wisdom of Alexandria's missing library. The cape falls away and his back is a mass of scar tissue. He says he removed his wings, one tiny knife-blade width at a time, for the crime of choice theft. He doesn't elucidate, though Isaac desperately wants to understand. The eagle-guys' culture and penal code are all but unknown, but even the reader sees the extent of his penance. Surely he should be forgiven? Eagle guy says he can't help it, though the terms of his sentence are that he never fly again, he wants to. Can Grimnebulin help? How could Grimnebulin not? A noble guy? Flight?
Grimnebulin puts out the word on the black market that he wants anything that flies, hoping to find the best solution. In amongst fantastical things China dreams up like flying snakes, and all sorts of birds and butterflies, Grimnebulin also gets a caterpillar. It turns out to be, um, pivotal.
Meanwhile, Lin the artist gets the commission of her life when the mob kingpin asks her to sculpt his likeness.
All hell breaks loose once the caterpillar emerges from its cocoon. People begin losing their minds. The mob kingpin thinks Grimnebulin is trying to steal his drug business. Grimnebulin harnesses crisis energy. The corrupt government declares martial law....
And that doesn't even begin to describe all the cool characters, inventions and ideas you encounter while Grimnebulin tries to help his old son fly again.
Highly recommended.
(One tiny complaint-- there's a section at the end that should be shortened. Laying pipe or wire is not interesting.)