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Perdido Street Station by China Miéville ISBN 0-330-39289-1 PAN Books (2000) People were amazed when Perdido Street Station arrived on the shelves of the bookstore. It was some kind of fantasy, an unknown kind, something new. It was shocking in a way, and yet led towards a dream world where everyone would like to take a look. How perverse a society can be. When Fantasy doesn't contain elves and a mediaeval world, it is no longer recognised as fantasy. But Miéville just writes his kind of fantastic story, a fantasy that is clearly steampunk. Let’s be short about the storyline. It’s not much and it’s not new. Heroes who are not born as heroes set out to free society from evil monsters. Heroes win. That’s all. It’s not a book you should read for the intelligent plot or twisting storylines. But the simplicity of the plot makes it easier to roam into the richness of the setting, which makes reading more than worthwhile. Unfortunately for non-native English speakers, Miéville’s vocabulary is as rich as his setting. He paints the setting and the characters in a myriad of different colours, with a lot of shading in a clair-obscure style, like Rembrandt, and he does it with words. Many words in the book are not taught in schools and hardly ever heard in movies or on TV. Many words sound like he has gathered them from ancient novels, just like his style of writing. It definitely gives the book much of it’s flair, but those who do not know English good enough and don’t want to read with the dictionary in their other hand should try to get a translation. The story takes place in a large city in another country, on another planet (Bas Lag). The place is nicely mapped in the novel. It’s incomparable to a real place on earth, it’s a world on its own. It takes a lot of your imagination to dive into this strange new world, but you will be rewarded with a truckload of new ideas. Nothing is like in any other novel I’ve read before, nothing like any movie I’ve seen. The city, New Crobuzon, has many different regions, all tied together with a network of skyways and railways and a highly interesting political structure with many intrigues. The dark side of the city is clearly visible in the story. The city is inhabited with many races, new races, that are too weird at first sight, but made believable by giving them sufficient background, culture, life. There are humanoid races that are in fact insects and plants. There are humans too, but they are not dominant. All in all, the city makes a great place to do some role playing with astonishing races. The feel of the city is, in its architecture and atmosphere, Victorian. It’s a metropolitan place, huge, with rich details and beauty, but behind the facades a lot of unlucky, poor beings, trying to make a living in this city. There is art, but also crime, love, and perverse sex, beauty, and pollution. The way it is described makes the city very vivid, as if it were a real place. This is partly due to all the details in many topics Miéville shows us, but also due to a lack of details. There are many places, ideas, beings named without a proper explanation, as if either it is common knowledge or just not known, an urban myth... At the end of the book, you know what happened to the heroes and the monsters, but you might have many questions about the place left, not riddles that are left over by the story line, but more some nagging curiosity what the heck this place is, how it came into existence, how it survives, and what it’s future will be. The review is unfortunately not the place to tell about all fantastic ideas in the 867 page novel. But the city is not the only thing that makes the book at least partly steampunk and mostly gothic. There are steam powered engines in it, and steam powered semi-intelligent programmed robots - but also engines that run on chymie or magic. What’s more, a lot of these mechanic tools, mostly household appliances, have been reprogrammed and due to a kind of virus get their own life, which proves to be crucial in the story. Fighting with the machines against evil is a clever part of the storyline. At some point, you might even think it is about modern machines fighting the old evil, dreams, myths, an analogy with our modern world, but the story never stresses this part... the story is just too weird to jump to such conclusions. All in all, if you want to read a good story, take another book. If you want to extend your fantasy in steampunk/gothic, go read it and enjoy your trip. If you liked it, there is a second book places in the same universe: The Scar. © Yaghish 2004 |
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