Perdido Street Station [Paperback]

Momentum built in the story is repeatedly lost when a long descriptive passage is encountered. The focus on the characters and events is often lost, and I found myself feeling as if the prose was an intermission to the story, rather than a part of it. Ultimately, the story and the prose compete with each other so much that I couldn't really gauge whether the story was very good at all.

Would I recommend Perdido Street Station? Well, that depends on what kind of writing you like. If you enjoy lots of adjective-laden phrases painting verbal pictures, you'll probably like the way Mieville portrays the environs of his gritty, surreal, bizarre city. If you're looking for a good, entertaining story, you might be disappointed as I was. Perdido Street Station isn't bad - it's just not for everyone.

Beyond the incredible scenery is an almost Victorian moralistic plot, where the protagonist is forced to deal with the consequences of his innocent-seeming research into methods of restoring flight to a criminal garuda bird-man. His fight against the slake-moths that were inadvertently freed as a result of one of his investigations forms the main story line, and slowly builds to an (almost) exciting story line. However...

Mieville's style is very densely descriptive. In the beginning of the book, this is excellent, as it paints a very dark, depressive, intimate picture of the city and its inhabitants. As the plot unfolds and becomes more pressing, though, this same style and repeated images become an obstacle to getting the story told. At the very moments when tension has been raised to high levels, we step out for two to three pages at a time for more descriptions, effectively destroying the pacing of the story. I think this book could have been considerably improved by some heavy cutting of this material in the latter stages of the book.

There are places where the plot could have been tightened. At multiple points, the Weaver saves our hero from impossible situations, an effective deus-ex-machina device as the Weaver can apparently do almost anything (except defeat the slake-moths single-handed). Although this is consistent with Victorian-era plotting, it really doesn't belong in a modern novel. Thematically the book also falls somewhat flat, with overly simplistic value/action/consequence matings, almost reminiscent of something out of Dickens.

A brilliant, off-beat, dazzling setting; an exciting adventure tale; but marred by too many words and too little depth.

The palpable atmosphere of the bloated and decadent New Crobuzon is one of the book's major strengths; and it reflects an irony that soon becomes apparent in Mieville's writing. Using the most beautifully wrought language, he creates a vision of hell to curdle the imagination. One is tempted to look away, but is inevitably sucked in by the seductive melody of his prose--melody that is paradoxically used to create dissonance.

The characters are introduced by degrees, so that they have time to sink into the reader's awareness before disaster strikes. This is a rare accomplishment, given that Mieville chose to make his main characters so potentially incomprehensible to us. Isaac is in love with a woman whose head is an insect--an idea that could have backfired terribly had Lin been any less vivid a personality than she was. As it is, that concept in itself is difficult to accept, as it defies reproductive logic that a race of women with insectile heads should exist; nevertheless, Lin is someone the reader comes to care about, and Isaac is a colorful and wholly original spin on the mad scientist stereotype.

It is difficult to tell if Isaac is in fact the main character, or if it is Yagharek's story after all. Through Yagharek's eyes the world is different than it is through Isaac's; more personal since his story is told in the first person; and the lyrical quality of his narrative, together with his desperate quest, binds the story in the form of a sad, twisted parody of an epic. In the end the story circles back to Yagharek, transcending political concerns to explore the universal problem of identity.

Those who are very sensitive to horrific imagery and even horrific concepts might do well to avoid this book. While Mieville writes without emotion, the events that occur do the work for him. The catastrophe that eventually overwhelms New Crobuzon provides no means of escape, not even death. The surreal quality of this book and the way in which it pierces to the deepest and most instinctive of human fears--the utter loss of identity--makes it less of a story than a lush, fantastic nightmare. And like a nightmare, very likely to stay with you long after you've awakened.