PERDIDO STREET STATION (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

Published 2001, 710 pages
Characters: B
Writing: A
Plot: A
Pacing: A
Poignancy: A

Perdido Street Station is the most impressive book I've read in a long time.  One of the best, too.  It's not a perfect book, but goddam does it feel good to be blown away by an author's sheer imagination sometimes.  It's why I got into this whole 'reading' nonsense, isn't it?

Last fall, I read China Mieville's The City and the City. It wasn't a perfect book, and the end lacked a certain punch that might have made it truly profound, but it was nonetheless a vividly atmospheric read, dripping with creativity and literary ingenuity.  Perdido is another love letter to Mieville's baroque, labyrinthine cities, somehow both gritty, convincing and surreal at the same time. The two books of his that I've read share a similar impact, but Perdido is bigger, more ambitious, and simply better.

Unfortunately, it's not even fair to give a basic plot summary of Perdido Street Station, as the twists and turns the story takes before settling into its main trajectory are a big part of the fun.  The back cover blurb is wonderfully misleading, but for good reason, so I'll try to mimic it. Perdido Street Station is sort-of about an unorthodox scientist named Isaac, who finds himself forced into new avenues of research when he's hired by a mysterious foreign visitor to research the mechanisms of flight.  Of course, that doesn't begin to explain anything.  In the first hundred pages or so of the book, the story seems poised to go in any number of directions, before finally committing to an eerie, thriller-esque plot. And that plot is fine, but it's not actually what makes Perdido Street Station shine. It's the messiness of the whole thing, the many imaginative tangents Mieville is willing to take for the sake of atmosphere and immersion, and the hundreds of seemingly unimportant details he tosses out along the way.  The man is apparently a fountain of knockout ideas.  Any given ten pages of Perdido Street Station could have formed the whole concept behind another novel, but Mieville somehow finds room for them all here. I cannot stress enough how vividly imagined this book is; it's what I really loved about it.  The Weaver, the ribs, the Construct Council, the moths, the Ambassador, Torque and all the rich history that's dished out just for passing conversation — Mieville doesn't seem to mind whether his creations affect the plot for five pages or 500, they're all inventive and interesting and actually suck you into this impossible city.

Because really, this novel is about the city where it takes place more than any one component of its plot.  All those details and tangents that seem irrelevant, or tangential, are not.  By the end, the city of New Crobuzon seemed more likely and believable a place to me than, say, Detroit.  In another, broader sense — embracing the themes rather than specifics of the story — Perdido is about the state of crisis.  Multiple disparate events, each as unlikely as the one preceding it, all joining impossibly to propel things forward.  Perdido Street Station could have had a very simple plot.  If it was made as a movie, it would seem like a standard genre thriller that just happens to have an interesting gothic backdrop.  Only a book this long and rambling could capture that theme, the sense that chaos often coagulates in unlikely ways, driven by its very unexpectedness.

Of course, as a messy book, Perdido can't be perfect — just really impressive.  I thought some of the plot threads resolved in unsatisfactory ways, and the book is definitely at its best when it's introducing all its inventive ideas, rather than shutting them down toward the end. Still, for a book this dense, it sticks the landing far better than most. The characters are interesting, if not particularly memorable, and Mieville's writing is consistently excellent, matching the tone of this dark-fantasy steampunk sci-fi horror hodgepodge. (A sidenote that I'd like to address, even though it's not directly relevant to the review of the book:  Fantasy novels always seem to take place in some technologically frozen world, where society has remained static for hundreds or thousands of years, never advancing beyond Medieval sciences.  This is rarely explored or mentioned outright, and I'd love to see some more deconstruction of the reasons for this, other than plot-necessity.  It almost makes sense, really: the introduction of 'magic' to a world would confound science, or even replace it. I loved that Perdido Street Station addressed this indirectly, once more tossing off a brilliant idea as if it were nothing. The novel features a society that seems to have integrated what we'd call 'magic' as simply another branch of science, creating an industrial age society that's in many ways as advanced as our own, its wildly multi-cultural society progressing and developing while still laboring under an oppressive authoritarian government.  Once again, it's a subtle, creative blend of ideas, where steampunk technology and old-world ideals lead to slightly-weird union labor strikes as often than surreal adventures.)

I rate Perdido Street Station five out of five Orson-Welles-slow-clap.gifs.