Perdido Street Station (Bas-Lag, #1)

by China Mieville

In the squalid, gothic city of New Crobuzon, a mysterious half-human, half-bird stranger comes to Isaac, a gifted but eccentric scientist, with a request to help him fly, but Isaac's obsessive experiments and attempts to grant the request unleash a terrifying dark force on the entire city.

• ISBN10: 0345459407
• ISBN13: 9780345459404
• Publish Date: 29 July 2003 (first published 24 March 2000)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 11 October 2023
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Del Rey Books
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 623
• Language: English

Reviews

[nannah]

DNF @ 34%

What a wordy and sluggish book!

The prose is very evocative, but it's so descriptive it's pretty much purple prose. So much so that by 100 pages in, the story/plot hasn't evolved yet, and by 200 pages, there still really isn't any urgency. Things are interesting, sure, but where's the need to keep going? Where's the need? The motives (beyond curiosity, that is)? There's only so much adding a new creature every 50 pages can do.

There's also some animal death/violence that isn't so fun to read. And reading the word "autistic" as an adjective was the killer here. I had to put it down as a DNF.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Perdido Street Station is a slow burn, so slow in fact that people would find it really boring. China Miéville has spent a lot of time thinking about the world of New Crobuzon in great detail and then goes on to explain every aspect of it. While it does get rather technical and scientific, Miéville’s writing style was enjoyable enough to keep me going (a lesser writer I would have quit 300 pages in). The stunning settings of the seedy New Crobuzon, along with the well-crafted writing was the saving grace of this book.

New Crobuzon is a beautiful city, mixing many elements of Steampunk and Fantasy to create the authors very own version of London. After reading China Miéville’s book The City and The City, I knew that this author did define the weird genre; his imagination of the interlocking cities was so complex it was hard to keep up with it all. Then I came to Perdido Street Station and not only was the city overly thought out, all the creatures and the science behind it all was. I’m not sure how this author does it and I don’t think I would ever want to spend a day in the brain of China Miéville.

The Characters are so flawed, it was actually a joy to learn more about them and everytime they try to ‘do-the-right-thing’ you just know that they don’t know the bigger picture and the consequences of their own actions. The social aspects of this world thought out too, in fact I think the author knows more about the scientific, social and political aspects of New Crobuzon than he does of England and the world.

The two major plots within this book played out rather well and I think if I enjoyed Fantasy novels more that I actually do, I might have enjoyed Perdido Street Station a lot more. For me this book could have used a good editor to thin it out without losing all the proses that Miéville expertly uses. The 880 page paperback was really uncomfortable to read, I think I will stick to an e-reader for the next big book I tackle.

[empressbrooke]

I don't normally include spoilers in reviews, since I want them to be useful to people who are wondering if they should read the book, but I have too many specific thoughts on this one to keep it spoiler-free.

The first thing that pops into mind about Perdido Street Station is that Miéville went overboard with the idea of, "Show, don't tell." Miéville shows everything down to the tiniest detail. This made it take a very long time to make it through all 600 pages, and I ended up spending much more time with this book than I ever envisioned. Which was fine, it was well-written, but at the same time I rather relieved to be done.

The plot was interesting; it starts off being about scientist Isaac trying to help a de-winged creature fly again. This turns into a horror story about brain-sucking giant moths after one of the specimen Isaac is studying escapes. Thrown in with it are some bits about a humanoid bug woman who is commissioned by a mob boss to make a sculpture of him, some political drama involving the militant government, and mechanical cleaning robots who gain intelligence. For the most part, everything ties together in the end, and all the different plots are relevant to each other. Except one: Lin the insect woman.

What was her purpose? She was a main character in the beginning, we saw many scenes from her point of view and learned about her life and her motivations, and then she just disappears and is presumed dead by Isaac for most of the book. What was the purpose of building her story so much before dropping her almost completely? It made no sense to me, especially when Isaac unexpectedly finds her in the end, tortured by the mob boss but alive, only to have her permanently lose her mind to the giant moths a couple pages later. She served no true purpose to the plot, she didn't motivate Isaac to do anything that he wasn't motivated to do otherwise - except maybe one thing, which ties into my other complaint:

In the final pages of the book, Isaac discovers that the de-winged creature he had been helping, Yagharek, had his wings removed as punishment for raping someone. In some ways, the scene played out well. He's conflicted, because Yagharek has become his friend who risked his life to kill the giant moths and save the city, but at the same time Isaac is repulsed by the crime. In real life, you hear a lot of people say that a rapist couldn't possibly have committed the crime, because he had done other things that were good, and he was someone's friend. Miéville, to my relief, understood that these good deeds don't cancel out or preclude someone from committing a terrible crime. However, Isaac seems to need Lin's torture to push him over the edge - in the abstract, it was horrible that his friend raped someone, but it took Isaac imagining how Lin got some of her injuries to make him abandon Yagharek. Which means that A) Isaac isn't empathetic enough to feel the same amount of outrage for the rape of someone he didn't know even after spending the entire book trying to save the city from creatures that were violating people, and B) Lin, despite being a rather strong and interesting character in the beginning who had her own storyline, was really nothing more than a female sacrificial lamb to motivate a decision Isaac made in the final pages. Which is a tired, tired trope.

Other parts of the end of the book were odd, too - Isaac and his companion, Derkhan, were feeling disgusted by their need to sacrifice a dying man to capture the moths; however, despite the multiple paragraphs describing their horror at their actions, they managed to kill members of the city's militia with no thought whatsoever. Also, a notorious serial killer who had been mentioned very briefly hundreds of pages prior for some reason shows up and helps them out. At first I thought we were going to discover that Lin had been Remade into this killer, but no, he just showed up, helped Isaac killed some militamen, and disappeared again without ever saying a word. Eh??

I'll wrap this up, as I realize it's not the sort of review I normally write. In a novel that was as well done as this one, the absolute pointlessness of the buildup, disappearance, and then sacrifice of Lin's character, as well as some random other problems, is really confusing.