Just finished "Perdido Street Station" and now I have all these feelings.
Venting spoilers ahead:
I just don’t…I don’t know what to feel. It was amazing, truly. Poetic and disgusting, brilliant and fantastic. But…but…how do you deal with and what do you feel for a book that even though it so strongly takes a stand against ultimately deals exclusively on the theme of rape?
I fucking adored this world Miéville created for me. It was absurd and beautiful despite the stench, the horror and the decay. And there were so many amazing characters in it, not always perfect executions but enough to tease me into wanting the world and them to be explored at greater length.
But no matter which way you turn this was a story about rape. About how the government raped their people, about how capitalists raped their workers, how the nightmare creatures raped the dreamers’ minds and in juxtaposition you had two of the more explored characters Lin and Yag who both embodied different sides of the same theme. Hell even the architecture of the city helped drive home the point.
When I was reading it I got unusually upset and worked up a few times. I felt a frustration that seldom appears this intensely even during the most dreadful of horror stories or the darkest of dystopians. But it wasn’t until those last twenty pages or so that I realised that it was probably the theme of the book that got to me as much as anything. Yeah yeah yeah, I’m a bit slow on the uptake. Everything just became so overtly clear towards the end when plot slowly fell away to reveal the face beneath.
The world was impressively vivid, so is Miéville’s prose and the theme is a very strongly anti-rape one, but the theme is still one dealing with rape. So yeah, I don’t know what or how to feel, but I do feel a lot of things.
I just don’t…I don’t know what to feel. It was amazing, truly. Poetic and disgusting, brilliant and fantastic. But…but…how do you deal with and what do you feel for a book that even though it so strongly takes a stand against ultimately deals exclusively on the theme of rape?
I fucking adored this world Miéville created for me. It was absurd and beautiful despite the stench, the horror and the decay. And there were so many amazing characters in it, not always perfect executions but enough to tease me into wanting the world and them to be explored at greater length.
But no matter which way you turn this was a story about rape. About how the government raped their people, about how capitalists raped their workers, how the nightmare creatures raped the dreamers’ minds and in juxtaposition you had two of the more explored characters Lin and Yag who both embodied different sides of the same theme. Hell even the architecture of the city helped drive home the point.
When I was reading it I got unusually upset and worked up a few times. I felt a frustration that seldom appears this intensely even during the most dreadful of horror stories or the darkest of dystopians. But it wasn’t until those last twenty pages or so that I realised that it was probably the theme of the book that got to me as much as anything. Yeah yeah yeah, I’m a bit slow on the uptake. Everything just became so overtly clear towards the end when plot slowly fell away to reveal the face beneath.
The world was impressively vivid, so is Miéville’s prose and the theme is a very strongly anti-rape one, but the theme is still one dealing with rape. So yeah, I don’t know what or how to feel, but I do feel a lot of things.