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Perdido Street Station
by China Miéville
(US edition: Del Rey, $18.00, 710 pages, trade paperback [no US hardback];
February 27 2001. UK edition: Macmillan, £16.99, 717 pages, hardback;
published 2000.)
China Miéville's Perdido Street Station is an unlikely
amalgamation of disparate influences, an alchemical potion striving
to  transmogrify
ink, paper, and imagination into literary gold. It has more than a dash
of Dickensian urban pathos. It is imbued with the subtle empathy of
magic realism. It borrows and transforms elements of history with the
brashness of 1990s steampunk fiction. It is baroque, in style, language,
and architecture, explicitly evoking Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.
It is British and punk and urban--and all at once industrial, Victorian,
modern, and postmodern. It blends science, the magic of fantasy and
myth, and alchemy to create a strange, beautiful, and frightening world.
Perdido Street Station is the story of a taboo love affair between
a loud and eccentric human scientist, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, and
Lin, a khepri (a humanoid with a head-sized scarab for a head), who
is a sculptor of exceptional talent. It's also the story of Yagharek,
a garuda (bird-like humanoids), and his quest to regain his sense of
self. It's a picturesque trip through the many subcultures and boroughs
of New Crobuzon, a city-state where bizarre species coexist both peacefully
and tensely. It's a tale of crime and corruption, of conspiracies and
solidarities, of passions and betrayals, of monsters and torture, of
discoveries and mysteries, of adventure and terror, and, ultimately,
of hope and transformation.
That ultimate transformation, like so much in this novel, has ambiguous
implications. Perdido Street Station is a huge novel, and its
setting is so peculiar, its story so vast, and its many characters so
diverse, that its ambiguity is endemic. And that's one of the novel's
strengths. It demands active participation from the reader's imagination.
It's a rich, multilayered treat, delicious to bite into--and it bites
back ferociously.
Originally published, in slightly different form,
in The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 2 June 2001.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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