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I recently bought Perdido Street Station on the strength of the first chapter and the rest of it did not disappoint. I was blown away, frankly. Reminded me a lot of the first time I read William Gibson, in that those authors reminded me why I ever used to enjoy science fiction or fantasy novels by incorporating so many qualities I'd grown to expect these genres to lack, and Mieville does the same with his own blend of the two. Like Gibson and Pulman, I find myself tearing through Mieville's prose much more quickly than I do with most writers, but it stays with me, too. And it gives me the irresistable urge to get the next one.
The easiest joke to make about Mieville's style is that he must get a lot of use out of his thesaurus, but I think he actual uses the technique of repetition-with-synonyms to great cumulative effect. In PSS he seems to have an infinite number of ways to tell you that the city is dirty, until by the end you really feel the sense of how oppressive the grime can be.
So obviously he's amazing at world-building, but I think what takes PSS to another level for me is the emotional wrench: terrible things happen to people you've kinda grown to like, and it's mostly there fault. Maybe it's Mieville's politics that gives him an edge and make him stand out from the usual fantasybeard shit: of course Pulman's writing has this polemical bite too, and so did early Gibson (the problem I had with Pattern Recognition is that while the prose was more delicious than ever, Gibson and his protagonists seem to have lost a bit of their edge - he's become too cosy, to the point where resistance to branding is seen as a neurotic condition rather than a survival strategy - but I digress...).
Anyway, so ultimately I reckon Perdido Street Station is a book about complicity. Isaac is willing to make dodgy deals to get research materials (and his research is pretty nasty even if you only care for animal rights as much as I do), he doesn't ask where things come from, and things go horribly wrong. Lin is willing to volunteer her artistic services for a crimelord and not worry about the ethical implications or consequences, and things go horribly wrong. I think the way Mieville treats their little bohemian community is very interesting: he has a fondness for it, but wants to make the point that you may think you can have a cosy (middle class) life of art and sexual deviancy, but the state will fucking come for you in the end, so you better do more than pay lip service to resistance. But at a more basic level, by the end of the book, Isaac doesn't just have a political awakening, he makes a realisation about complicity. There's a very specific line that jumped out at me, which I'm going to mangle to avoid spoilers, it's something like: But if to withhold his help was to condemn ********, then to offer his help was to condone it. And that, Isaac realised, he would not do. He's learnt to think about what the consequences and moral implications of his work can be, and to take this seriously. Admittedly the cost is horrendous. But again, that's one of the things that makes Mieville - in the words of Jack The Bodiless - "Like what would happen if Gaiman stopped being tossy and wrote as well as he sometimes threatened to do during Sandman" - he's not afraid to follow through and do terrible things to his characters. He's not cosy.
I'm just under 200 pages into The Scar, and it may be even better. Old school 'Lithers may remember we once had a thread about which world from sf or fantasy we'd live in: I'm kinda tempted by Armada, even though I suspect it may turn out to be Mieville's cautionary illustration of how left-wing utopias can go awry... |
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