Review of China Miéville's "Perdido Street Station"

(Written: March 10, 2010)

WARNING: This review probably contains some (but not many) spoilers.

OK. Where to begin. This steampunk book swallowed me for 3 weeks. Its language eloquent, gory, eery, bloody, so particular, so intricate, so twisty, violent and... beautiful. Some passages took my breath away.

"The god to which [the monastery] was consecrated died. Some people come at night to honour the dead god's ghost. What tenuous, desperate theology".

This is how the whole book is written. If you are a man of a simpler language, beware. This book needs a dictionary next to it. It's very pleasant to indulge in such rich, wild tongue. The author treats his reader as a very smart reader, therefore the book has some figuring out to do.

The characters... the mythological creatures made alive. A new world complete with its own days of the week and month names, their own continents, cities. It's complete with rules, laws, "there is no spoon" kind of reality. Their reality - is their own. At times I thought I was overwhelmed, at times I didn't want to see so much of the city. (There are a lot of descriptions of places). The last sentence of the whole book a bit killed it for me. It felt like it was from a different novel all together. It so didn't belong at the end of this one, that I'm rewriting it for myself and will consider THAT to be the true ending sentence.

I've always been a fan of stories that are true to life and this book is one of those. It's not a fantasy that's idealized, romanticized, it's not made pretty or pink or fluffy. It doesn't have a good end, it doesn't have an end at all - it just continues as life would. No one wins in the end. But something happens with you, the reader.

There is so much unexplained, but it's very congruent with the world the author created. People were "lost" and tears were shed. The sexual dance in the air... it was so pretty and ugly and "forbidden" and lustful... and beautifully written.  At the end of the book I felt really sad, I wanted the characters to win... (sigh)

So... I will close off with another excerpt from the book:

"The dream-poison of the slake-moths is sinking slowly through aether and on into the earth. [...:] It drifts like polluted snow through the planes that entangle the city, on through layers of materia, leeching out of our dimension & away".

Isn't that just beautiful?

4 stars