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Perdido Street Station, or Why Tycho Was Too Kind About China Mieville
Neuroskeptic
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So I just finished China Mieville's Perdido Street Station.
I didn't like it.
Spoilers ahead.
First off, the writing. From everything I'd read about Mieville, I was expecting PSS to be hard: complex, intelligent, ornate & dense prose. Even Tycho, in his post attacking him, seemed to admit that Mieville was a hyper-intellectual author. Which would have been great! That's what I wanted! But Perdido Street Station wasn't.
Mieville uses some hard words, yes, but other than that, the writing is simplistic and utilitarian. The words are long (except the 'four letter words'); but the sentences are short and almost every one starts with "The", "He", "She", or a name: The cat sat languously on the dilapidated mat. He thought, Fuck this shit!
There's one particularly lazy passage which takes up almost a whole page. It's about "The Weaver", and honestly it consists of about 10 short sentences of the form "The Weaver did X". Mieville clearly can write much better than that. Some passages (namely Yagarek's interludes) are excellent, but they're the exception.
It's "fantasy", the world is not especially fantastic. The 'magical' races that are all humans crossed with X: Bird-people! Frog-people! Ant-people! Even Cactus-people. That's not imagination; it's hyphenation. Then there are demons from Generic Sword & Sorcery Hell, there's Skynet... although to be fair, the main enemies are pretty good, and the Remade are genuinely disturbing and could carry the story on their own but were relegated to the background.
New Crobuzon's clearly the most interesting part of the setting, and yes it's cool - but rather than showing us how wonderful and magical it is, by telling wonderful stories set in it, Mieville just tells us about the city. At enormous length. Page after page of urban geography interrupt the narrative, almost as if PSS was originally two books - a story, and a Guide to New Crobuzon - that got mixed together at random.
There are also a number of ridiculous sections where Mieville describes some really boring and irrelevant process at huge length - like how a bunch of guys lay some electrical cable (they carry the end of it from A to B!). As a result, the book is far too thick, given that the core story is just not very long. My copy is over 800 pages; it could be - and therefore should be - more like half that. I'm not trying to be funny: this book could be greatly improved with a pair of scissors.
Speaking of which, dialogue. Or rather, monologue. Character after character, hero, villain and support, love nothing better than long set-pieces explaining their plans, theories and motives; all of them speak with much the same voice when they do this (it's the same voice Mieville uses for *his* narrative exposition), no matter who they are, and it really grates. If you exclude those bits there's little actual conversation, and this makes the characters difficult to empathize with. Like with New Crobuzon, rather than *showing* us what the characters think, in the form of their actions, Mieville just has them rattle off an executive summary.
The nadir of this is near the end where the book's Big Idea (I think?), something about the relation between the conscious and the subconscious mind, reason and dreams, is - quite literally - reduced to a set of algebraic equations, and explained in the style of a freshman physics lecture. And it still doesn't make sense.
On the characters: Yagarek and Lin were both interesting, but neither were given much attention. On the other hand Isaac was everywhere, which was a bad move because he's a jackass: unlikeable, obnoxious, supposedly a genius yet remarkably stupid when the plot requires it, and every other word he says is "fuck" (other characters swear too much as well, but Isaac is the worst offender).
As for the plot, it was... OK. It takes a long time to get up to speed and then proceeds, in a linear way, to the obvious conclusion, like a slow train. There are plot holes that are explained away in a really lazy way (the bit where someone explains why periscopes and double-mirror arrangements aren't being used is just insulting. "For some reason we can't explain, it's only safe to look at them in one mirror.")
It does get better towards the end. There's one very funny bit where a bunch of Generic Fantasy Adventurers are described as basically a bunch of psychopathic mercenaries who go around breaking into tombs for "gold and experience". Yagarek, the most compelling character, stopped moping and actually contributed to the story. The Glasshouse was the most memorable part of the city.
But the final chapters were very disappointing. Yagarek's interesting subplot is cut short by what can only be described as a case of Rape-us Ex Machina. Lin is bumped off unsatisfyingly, leaving Isaac with nothing to do but pack up and run away! Everything else ends up back like it was at the start of the book. The city has been saved, but I wasn't even happy about that because it's been repeatedly described as a fascist den of squalor and misery. To be honest I was rooting for the Slake Moths.
I didn't like it.
Spoilers ahead.
First off, the writing. From everything I'd read about Mieville, I was expecting PSS to be hard: complex, intelligent, ornate & dense prose. Even Tycho, in his post attacking him, seemed to admit that Mieville was a hyper-intellectual author. Which would have been great! That's what I wanted! But Perdido Street Station wasn't.
Mieville uses some hard words, yes, but other than that, the writing is simplistic and utilitarian. The words are long (except the 'four letter words'); but the sentences are short and almost every one starts with "The", "He", "She", or a name: The cat sat languously on the dilapidated mat. He thought, Fuck this shit!
There's one particularly lazy passage which takes up almost a whole page. It's about "The Weaver", and honestly it consists of about 10 short sentences of the form "The Weaver did X". Mieville clearly can write much better than that. Some passages (namely Yagarek's interludes) are excellent, but they're the exception.
It's "fantasy", the world is not especially fantastic. The 'magical' races that are all humans crossed with X: Bird-people! Frog-people! Ant-people! Even Cactus-people. That's not imagination; it's hyphenation. Then there are demons from Generic Sword & Sorcery Hell, there's Skynet... although to be fair, the main enemies are pretty good, and the Remade are genuinely disturbing and could carry the story on their own but were relegated to the background.
New Crobuzon's clearly the most interesting part of the setting, and yes it's cool - but rather than showing us how wonderful and magical it is, by telling wonderful stories set in it, Mieville just tells us about the city. At enormous length. Page after page of urban geography interrupt the narrative, almost as if PSS was originally two books - a story, and a Guide to New Crobuzon - that got mixed together at random.
There are also a number of ridiculous sections where Mieville describes some really boring and irrelevant process at huge length - like how a bunch of guys lay some electrical cable (they carry the end of it from A to B!). As a result, the book is far too thick, given that the core story is just not very long. My copy is over 800 pages; it could be - and therefore should be - more like half that. I'm not trying to be funny: this book could be greatly improved with a pair of scissors.
Speaking of which, dialogue. Or rather, monologue. Character after character, hero, villain and support, love nothing better than long set-pieces explaining their plans, theories and motives; all of them speak with much the same voice when they do this (it's the same voice Mieville uses for *his* narrative exposition), no matter who they are, and it really grates. If you exclude those bits there's little actual conversation, and this makes the characters difficult to empathize with. Like with New Crobuzon, rather than *showing* us what the characters think, in the form of their actions, Mieville just has them rattle off an executive summary.
The nadir of this is near the end where the book's Big Idea (I think?), something about the relation between the conscious and the subconscious mind, reason and dreams, is - quite literally - reduced to a set of algebraic equations, and explained in the style of a freshman physics lecture. And it still doesn't make sense.
On the characters: Yagarek and Lin were both interesting, but neither were given much attention. On the other hand Isaac was everywhere, which was a bad move because he's a jackass: unlikeable, obnoxious, supposedly a genius yet remarkably stupid when the plot requires it, and every other word he says is "fuck" (other characters swear too much as well, but Isaac is the worst offender).
As for the plot, it was... OK. It takes a long time to get up to speed and then proceeds, in a linear way, to the obvious conclusion, like a slow train. There are plot holes that are explained away in a really lazy way (the bit where someone explains why periscopes and double-mirror arrangements aren't being used is just insulting. "For some reason we can't explain, it's only safe to look at them in one mirror.")
It does get better towards the end. There's one very funny bit where a bunch of Generic Fantasy Adventurers are described as basically a bunch of psychopathic mercenaries who go around breaking into tombs for "gold and experience". Yagarek, the most compelling character, stopped moping and actually contributed to the story. The Glasshouse was the most memorable part of the city.
But the final chapters were very disappointing. Yagarek's interesting subplot is cut short by what can only be described as a case of Rape-us Ex Machina. Lin is bumped off unsatisfyingly, leaving Isaac with nothing to do but pack up and run away! Everything else ends up back like it was at the start of the book. The city has been saved, but I wasn't even happy about that because it's been repeatedly described as a fascist den of squalor and misery. To be honest I was rooting for the Slake Moths.
Neuroskeptic on
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Though I do feel like the point is kind of that New Crobuzon is a city of people uniquely able to exploit each other, and it really should be wiped out.
TylerJ on League of Legends (it's free and fun!)
While I don't disagree, I'm not sure why that's the point. "A bunch of mostly un-likable people trying to save a city that doesn't deserve saving, won't appreciate their efforts, and is basically fundamentally horrible" doesn't strike me as a compelling topic for a work of fiction. I imagine it works to the extent that it does because, mostly, the book isn't actually about the story. It's a fairly straight-forward, uncomplicated tale used as the thread that holds together an exercise in showing the reader all of his work in world-building.
For contrast, Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork is also a fundamentally corrupt city populated by people whose primary occupation appears to be screwing one another over at every opportunity. Typically his stories set there either center around people who are, at least at some level, good despite the city's depravity. Usually these people don't start out good, since very nearly no one in Ankh-Morpork is, but they end up there eventually. Or at least something that can be broadly described as 'good'. Also, typically, they're stories about saving the city from itself. Does it deserve it? Probably not. But the characters are altruistic enough that you want them to prevail and, when the scope of the story is beyond just staying alive, you can identify with their hope that their efforts will force the city to be less awful.
Perdido Street Station (and keep in mind that I read it when it came out, so the details are pretty hazy) didn't give me the impression that New Corbuzon was going to get any better for the characters' efforts. It wasn't going to get worse, either. The whole story was just a thing that happened; which can be okay if there's an arc to the characters, but I don't recall there being much in the way of change in any of them, either. Which just reinforces the sense that it's less a story and more an excuse to showcase his Steampunk Squalorscape.
Awesome things - the Weaver, people whose blood dried into armor etc.
Terrible things - his characters, blatant communist leanings intruding on story, inability to get anything done expeditiously.
As for the blatant "communist" leanings: It's a steampunk setting. Unions are a part of the history that subsumes and alters. An important part. Workers in that setting are organizing because their class system and justice systems suck.
I host a podcast about movies.
I did like the Weaver, like I said I really liked the Remade, and Motley. Actually the book could have been great if it was just Isaac vs Motley over Lin, with the government fighting the moths as a menacing backdrop.
I much preferred it, but I still found it only 'pretty good', not 'amazing' like a lot of people say he is. The prose is a lot better in TC&TC, the dialog's much improved, although the characters are still weak. However he still goes into too much detail about minutae (I remember a large chunk of TC&TC devoted to customs regulations...) and like PSS I was quite enjoying the story once it got going, but I was really disappointed with the ending.
I get the feeling that he's a writer who starts a book because he wants to showcase a certain world, not because he wants to tell a certain story. This would explain why the endings are weak, it seems like he's just exhausted the world at a certain point and so he calls the narrative to a halt, even if it's unsatisfying.
PSS isn't that bad with it, but if you read Iron Council, it's ridiculous and gets in the way of the story.
You should read The Scar.
I host a podcast about movies.
Why not? What makes it not a good story?
And I'm not seeing why the characters aren't likeable and the city is as "fundamentally horrible" as any city of that time period.
How is it intruding on the story?
I mean, the story is most certainly, obviously written by someone well familiar with Marxist philosophy, but it's not like the book ever stops to preach at you about it. It just incorporates those ideas into it's setting, the same way judeo-christian ideas are incorporated into a ton of stories.
Likewise the dockworker's strike doesn't advance the plot much and (for me) it broke immersion, because it was so obviously a 'real world' phenomenon (trade unionism) incongruously appearing in a fantasy setting. I mean, sure, you can make a case that it's plausible that there would be trade unions in New Crobuzon. But that doesn't mean it ought to be in the book. I'm sure there are toilets and toilet paper in New Crobuzon too but it would still be breaking immersion to write about them because it's a fantasy novel.
The dystopian elements in PSS give an air of post-scarcity economies, but the economies are presented as similar to London in the pre-1900s. There are helper robots and magic, but it doesn't seem like there are actually jobs? Yet the city is filled with people and presented as a working, industrious city. I find that lack of history for the city (and world, really) as a pretty glaring omission, given the focus on the larger city issues.
Part of the reason "The Scar" works better as a novel is that it's contained in a smaller space where the author can discuss the history of the different elements and locations, and then when those elements shift to create the climax of the novel, I'm much more engaged. PSS seems to instead use grand themes to simply instill a sense of "nothing changes in this town" and uses a lot of words to do so.
That's not preaching though. It's just using an idea he's familiar with to enchance his setting beyond then just "it was magic!".
How are trade unions incongruous in a fantasy setting? Especially an industrial-revolution-esque fantasy setting?
Like, you keep saying it shouldn't be in the book, but you've given no compelling reason why not.
The LACK of trade unions or guilds in other fantasy settings is what's far more incongruous.
Honestly, my favorite part about his books is the low magic mixed with plausible settings.
As for New Crobuzon being kind of a shit city filled with kind of shitty people, I felt like that was the point? It's a lot like the real world. I would also say that claiming he just 'hybridized' person+plant/animal is selling him short given the attention to detail that was paid to the physiology and behavior given to the races. Just because they weren't orcs and elves they aren't fantasy? Been too long since I've read it to comment on the specific writing styles but I don't remember finding it lazy. On the other hand I've been so enraptured by all of his books I've read that I chewed through them too fast to pay a lot of attention to the prose. Only thing that I can remember is the swears didn't bother me because it felt like a very natural way for a person to talk.
Anybody else in here read Kraken, I fuckin loved that book.
My favorite was Embassytown followed by The Scar.
Despite its flaws, its still worth the read. I've read several other books of his and haven't regretted reading all of them. The Scar was excellent. Iron Council was ok. The City and The City was on the verge of being Important, but instead was just a regular sort of good and interesting. I'm reading Embassytown right now; he's back to using lots of complicated vocabulary and the voices feel very flat, but its super-original, as always.
I'm not sure why this needed its own thread though; we talk about Mieville in the reading thread all the time, often making these exact criticisms. Yet so many of us keep going back.
Actually, in fairness, maybe those were the incongruous elements and the low stuff was the essence of the book. I dunno. But a lot of things didn't fit together for me.
Kraken would make an excellent TV series, if only because it already seems like it has that sort of episodic pacing. It starts and stops, focusing on different little stories that eventually meander into a conclusion to a story that's half-forgotten by the time you get to the end.
At the same time, though, the world is so interesting to peer into that it really sticks. I want Krakenism to be a thing. I've certainly doodled a few experimental tattoo designs based on their logo's description.
We could always turn it into a thread about popular books that we, a minority, end up disliking? I have people recommend me Stephen Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant on numerous occasions, and every time I have to tell them that I did try to read those books. And I couldn't make it very far because the main character is a disgusting piece of shit. (I'm basically using this thread to bring up my hatred for that character. I really do not like him.)
I also did not enjoy Neal Stephenson's Anathem. You could skip dozens of pages and not miss anything, because he'd spend those pages talking about irrelevant information - how a bridge is built or buttresses- or by throwing around a lot of fake language. It drove me crazy. Perhaps I'm just not sophisticated enough to appreciate his books, but I have no desire to read another one now.
Fuck Thomas Covenant!
That would have ruined the book, not because there's anything wrong with gay slash in its proper place, and not because "gay dwarves don't exist" or anything like that, but because it would be incongruous in that book. It would break the immersion.
Obviously that's an extreme example but I felt a bit like that with parts of PSS. I have nothing against a world which blends gritty political realism and 'high' fantasy, and I think some books do achieve that e.g. Song of Ice & Fire but PSS didn't feel like a seamless blend; the seams were showing.
Maybe if he'd included dour dwarves and graceful elves instead of weird cactus people and bird men you'd like it more. That's not a criticism of PSS, that's just indicating the fantasy books you want to read are those of a certain kind.
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The normal blatantly racist/fascist societies we see in fantasy are just fine, but "communism" isn't?
Curse that red villain Meiville for not conforming to genre norms!
its always interesting to read fiction framed in an unusual way
its almost irrelevant if you disagree with it, its interesting nonetheless to see stories designed from a strongly and very nuanced marxist perspective
This is news to me. Low magic, non-traditional races, gang wars, average joes, and bureaucrats instead of a struggle between good and evil, a meandering journey instead of an epic journey, multiple narrators and no heroes' tale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fantasy
Literally none of that shit matches up. Sorry you dislike it for being something it's not.
On the other hand lots of low fantasy themes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_fantasy
But I think overall most his books that I've read fit the weird fiction genre pretty damn well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_fiction
This just doesn't make sense to me, unless by 'fantastic' you mean 'in line with other, more traditional fantasy stories'. In which case Mieville's crime is to stray from overly-familiar tropes and plots.
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I think that people are more uncomfortable with communist ideas in fiction because it's still kind of an open question. Everyone knows that monarchy is a bunch of ridiculous nonsense, but there's still a fear/discomfort of any direct criticism of capitalism in any format. Just part of the cultural legacy of the cold war, even 20 years on.
And most fantasy works aren't (actively) arguing in favor of any particular political system. Some people just don't want that.
Furthermore I can't believe anyone's calling anything he's written 'high fantasy'.
It most certainly isn't. Two of those things MAY be high fantasy, but on the whole I'd be inclined to say that none of those things are indicative of high fantasy at all. Context is everything. High fantasy generally takes a top-down approach to monarchies and wars and all that - you know, what Raymond Feist churns out between waking up and eating breakfast. I'd also like to remind you that the ambassador of hell is essentially written in for a joke and an 'oh shit' moment when even Hell says the slake moths are too powerful.
And heaven forbid someone use speculative fiction as a vehicle for ideas that we don't experience in our everyday. If you don't like the marxist ideas in his books I urge you to slow down and pull into a rest area because, Jesus, why not at least consider it for a minute? Is it so distasteful to you that you can't even enter a discussion or a fictitious environment in which it is also present?
I liked the marxism in his books. In Embassytown, the protagonist is raised in a sort of creche reminiscent of The Dispossessed, where parents rotate every week or so. It wasn't how I was raised, but I'll be damned if I'm not intrigued.
IIRC, Iain M Banks caught a lot of shit from certain sections of the US SF community back in the day for his depiction of the ideally communist Culture.
Oh, I see. People like the OP require that their fantasy reading be "comfort-reading" that won't challenge them or make them uncomfortable. I've nothing against comfort-reading - I have a large number of books I keep specifically for this reason.
Yeah, he'd better stay away from Meiville, and indeed pretty much all British fantasy novels - even Terry Pratchett is more than happy to throw a little ice water in our faces now and then (Night Watch, Small Gods, Snuff, I Shall Wear Midnight spring to mind from my recent reading).
Agreed, it makes for a nice change of perspective
Yeaaaaah. Whether or not I knew this or that word you could always tell what Mieville meant. Sometimes with Tycho I can understand every word and think, "But what is he even saying?"
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
I agree with all of this.
I enjoyed the book, but it left me with the feeling that everything that happened was an exercise in failure and stupidity and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This is one of the reasons A Song of Ice and Fire rubs me the wrong way, despite its popularity - every character absolutely must make the absolute wrong decision, character traits not at all withstanding, at the exact right time in order to generate the plot. Both stories could be called "a tale of try-hards, ne're-do-wells, and fuck-ups."
Now, if you know anything about China Mieville, you know that that's kind of his point. He's from the "Real life is shit. People are shit. Worlds in books should be shit and full of shitty people because it's real! Rawr!" camp. I'm sort-of strawmanning him there, but he is part of Michael Moorecock's "The Lord of the Rings is Epic Pooh" camp. He does believe the chief purpose of literature, fantasy or otherwise, is to subversively show readers how shitty the world is. He doesn't believe in escapism very much.
I'm glad I read Perdido Street Station, and I think it rubs people the wrong way because it has a downer ending, but it does reinforce the idea that if you mess with things you don't understand, and get involved with people who are ostensibly bad, you may lose a thing or two along the way.
I, however, am not in the "Hey, man, real life is shitty so bad endings are real, man. What do you want, man, a happy ending? Real life doesn't have happy endings, man" camp. However, the ending in Perdido just fits the story, as all the characters he built are ego-driven morons, and he never portrays them in another light, unlike in aSoIaF where characters who once overthrew a king decide they must always be honorable, forever and ever, and lose all political foresight, and get themselves killed; China Mieville is a much better writer than GRRM, even if he leaves people feeling sort of pissed off at his books.
Well, perhaps not a thousand. Somewhere between two and a thousand, definitely.