Book Review - Perdido Street Station (China Miéiville)

Hello people, today I review a 2000 novel from China Miéiville, Perdido Street Station.

Perdido Street Station takes place in the city of New Crobuzon in the fictional continent of Bas-Lag. Here, a renegade physicist named Isaac dan Grimnebulin is approached one day by a strange refugee: a garuda (a humanoid bird-of-prey) named Yagharek who's been stripped of his wings as punishment. Yagharek seeks Isaac out to help him regain the power of flight, an offer that appeals to Isaac's curiosity and antipathy towards authority. However, Isaac's experiments inadvertently unleash a terrifying threat on the city that could leave all its inhabitants worse than dead . . .

Perdido Street Station is an incredibly rich and inventive novel. Miéiville has clearly had a lot of fun designing this bizarre alternate society, full of strange creatures and cultures. The garuda are just one distinct group in this city. New Crobuzon is also comprised of humanoid beetles, cacti, frogs, and other even more bizarre and terrifying entities.

Our protagonist Isaac starts off as a jovial if slightly selfish antihero. He's appalled by his former University's ties with the brutal city regime, yet uses his own underworld connections to acquire apparatus discretely. He gladly helps Yagharek to learn how to fly again, mostly so he can make a name for himself by making a breakthrough in physics.

Isaac also shows a level of foolishness and pomposity, such as when he blithely wanders into a garuda settlement with no consideration for their customs, resulting in him being forcefully ejected. This can also be seen in his interactions with Yagharek, where Isaac's overly-friendly demeanour comes off as a bit forced and insincere.

However, this drastically changes halfway through the story when events take a disturbing turn. Isaac becomes a darker and more desperate character in the light of his own personal tragedy, and the impact his experiments have on the city. Like King Rat, we see Miéiville start off with a relatively light tone only to completely beat down his protagonists. Towards the end, Isaac has become so embittered he's barely recognisable as the same person at the start of the book. This should not be taken as criticism however, but rather an indication of Miéiville's mercilessness towards his characters.

Another important character is Lin, a khepri (half-human, half-beetle) and Isaac's artistic girlfriend. Lin's embrace of a career in individual expression has alienated her from her home community, while her race makes her an outsider in the human community as well. Miéiville introduces the reader to khepri history and society by using Lin's experiences with it. Through Lin's defiance of their ways, Miéiville gives a sense of the tension between human and khepri.

Another exiled figure is Yagharaek, a disgraced garuda who was stripped of his wings for some past transgression. He embodies the “noble” warrior trope, remaining a solitary, silent figure for much of the book, and rarely even interacts with Isaac. Miéiville instead uses inner monologue to convey Yagharek's thoughts and motivations to us. Personally, I'm not a big fan of this device, especially when they diverge into lengthy poetic descriptions (as happens here), and wish Yagharek's character had been conveyed to us more through his actions.

Yagharek's stolidness makes for an interesting contrast with the growing insanity of the plot. He's not so much a figure of sanity, but due to his silence and deliberate removal from events, Yagharek conveys a sense of being “outside” the chaos – even if his request to Isaac indirectly causes the horror in the first place.

However, Miéiville viciously subverts this depiction in the latter stages of the book. I won't spoil it here, but it's a development which paints Yagharek in a very different light and left me having to reconsider a lot of my impressions of him. His eventual fate also left me full of questions and a very mixed emotional response, but in a way that the author clearly intended.

Miéiville provides a window into the violent struggle between New Crobuzon's secret police and the underground press through the character of Derkhan Blueday. Derkhan, a former activist and hard-left journalist, gets caught up in the madness caused by Isaac's experiments and, like him, becomes a much harder person by the story's end.

The secret press aspect doesn't relate directly to the plot, but it does flesh out the world of New Crobuzon more. It also adds to the themes of governmental oppression and its consequences, which is important as the government's shady practices are as much a cause of the story's main catastrophe as Isaac's carelessness.

Like with King Rat, Miéiville writes with a strong sense of place and a feel for atmosphere. He works hard to convey the mood and atmosphere of the city, focusing as much on the psyhcological impact the crisis has on the city's population as he does on the direct victims. While the story isn't short on action, the apocalypse that befalls New Crobuzon is of a rather insidious variety. The “nightmare epidemic” and the use of body horror adds to the surreality of the story's crisis.

There are a host of other weird entities in this book that I won't say too much about here; you really need to read this book to get a sense of some of these oddities. The Weaver is perhaps the most distinctive, with its terrifying yet dreamlike presence. While it plays an important role, the Weaver's origins and motivations are largely left opaque; its truly alien form of thought and reasoning is a major plot point. The Weaver's inclusion demonstrates how New Crobuzon, for all its depth and variety, is merely one part of a vast and weird universe.

In short, this is a weird, compelling, sometimes frightening and other times heartbreaking book.

The one issue I have (which some readers may also have) is its length, coming in at just under 870 pages. The book unsurprisingly drags in parts where the plot slows, and Miéiville can become a little too caught up in describing the place or scene.

All that said, Perdido Street Station is still an extremely rich and multi-layered book. It's the type of story that's so vast it's easy to miss things on the first go, making for rewarding rereads. Highly recommended.