Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
Publication date: March 2000
Publisher: Ballantine Del Rey
Format: Paperback
Buy it here: Amazon, The Book Depository

Goodreads Description

The iconic first Bas-Lag novel from an award-winning author.

The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the centre of its own bewildering world. Humans and mutants and arcane races throng the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the rivers are sluggish with unnatural effluent, and factories and foundries pound into the night. For more than a thousand years, the parliament and its brutal militia have ruled over a vast array of workers and artists, spies, magicians, junkies and whores. 

Now a stranger has come, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand, and inadvertently something unthinkable is released. 

As the city becomes gripped by an alien terror, the fate of millions depends on a clutch of outcasts on the run from lawmakers and crimelords alike. The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground. Battles rage in the shadows of bizarre buildings. And a reckoning is due at the city's heart, under the vast chaotic vaults of Perdido Street Station.

When people ask me what this book is about, all I can say is: just read it.

It is rare when a novel is strange enough to warrant its own genre, and this is certainly one of those rare pieces! It dances a fine line between horror, sci-fi, dystopia and yet never fully fits neatly into any one of those categories. Yet one thing pervades each of its themes… it is utterly - and wonderfully - bizarre. Perdido Street along Mieville’s other works belong to the New Weird sub-genre, which is apt when you consider the subject matter, but to explain too much is to ruin the story so I’ll be intentionally vague when I describe the plot.

The book starts with a beautiful description of the approach to the corpulent and corrupted industrial, clockwork nightmare city of New Crobuzon (think Victorian London but EVEN MORE grim and fantastical), and a Garuda (a nomadic bird race from the harsh deserts) on a quest to find a brilliant scientist to help him get his wings back. In his quest to regain his flight, they manage to unleash an unspeakable terror on the unsuspecting denizens of the city.

To call said denizens colourful would be an understatement. There are surly cactus people, scarab-headed Khepri, impish cockney Wyrmen, eccentric extradimensional spiders with eclectic tastes for inanimate objects, waterbending frog people and so much more! Despite this strange mixture, each seems incredibly relatable, and dare I say it? Human. And each is well-written and fascinating in their own regard - despite their oddities and foibles, it never really feels like Mieville is trying to write Weird for the sake of Weird, and I think it is a testament to Mr Mieville’s writing that I often found myself relating more to something utterly alien than many of the human characters.

This is not to say that the human characters are not in any way flawed! One of our main characters, the awkwardly-named Isaac Dan Der Grimnebulin, part scientist, part left-wing political agitator (try saying that when you’re drunk), is wonderfully flawed and grapples with his many moral dilemmas in a thought-provoking and realistic way.

I will point out now that China Mieville is a self-professed Marxist which is something that I sit entirely opposed to, and it does show in his work, but thankfully never enough to become pervasive. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of sometimes less than subtle hints about the oppressive fascist nature of the New Crobuzon government and the moral righteousness of the almost exclusively left-wing main characters, as well as the violent faceless militia (POLICE China, they are called POLICE! Calling them militia implies they are state-sanctioned vigilantes, which judging by their organisation and the fact they have a separate military structure, they certainly are not) but these minor annoyances aside, it would be negligent of me not to mention the beautiful writing style.

Mieville does a fantastic job when setting the scene, and it is to his credit that even when describing something that defies logic, he can still paint a clear picture. Although there are some parts later on when the descriptions begin to ramble and really affect the flow of the action, however the city is painted beautifully even if the “corpulent and corrupt” metaphors feel a little overused.

And those moral dilemmas… Wow. There are a couple! Kill an innocent man to save many, trust a possibly malevolent sentient AI to vanquish a common enemy, or there’s the one at the end which is the final emotional sucker punch in a book chock full of them. I get the impression that Melville is trying to tread the moral grey areas and make the reader agonise over what they would or wouldn’t do, but from my perspective many of the decisions seem fairly clean cut, although that probably says more about me as a person than it does the writer.

The pacing does vary throughout, from moments of intense action and horror, to slower meandering slogs through the city. These breaks in pace are fairly frequent, but because of the rich vibrant world the author has created, it rarely feels like a chore and I personally relished a chance to learn more about the city and its convoluted political and social structures - which I am sure that someone smarter than me will be able to draw a parallel with real life.

This is not a book for everybody. It is a fairly niche market and some of the subject matters can be difficult to read, made all the more vivid by Mieville’s fantastic writing style. This is not simply a story of a quest between mismatched friends. It is a brutal slog through the underbelly and bowels of a vast, oft malevolent, city. People will die. People you care about (as well as one or two you won’t care for), but for all it’s wonder and steampunk imagery, it is rarely pretty. I would not call it unrelentingly grim, not by any stretch, but expect a less-than-optimistic change of pace about halfway through, and then get ready for the moral dilemmas, heartache and even more wonder as the world opens up.

Most importantly, enjoy yourself as you get lost in New Crobuzon.