Perdido Street Station is set in the universe of New Crobuzon, a massive city located, at least partially, under the bones of a massive creature, although this book doesn't go into great detail about the creature or what people know about it so maybe that will be covered in a later book. New Crobuzon is a police state dominated by the Militia, an organization with informers and agents throughout the city and who often strike out of nowhere to haul lawbreakers to be Re-Made in the Punishment Factories. Usually the judges prescribe some cruelly ironic punishment such as a thief that refuses to speak has their mouth sewn shut. Which definitely adds to the grim and creepy nature of the setting.
The biggest issue I had with this book was it felt like it took the longest darn time getting to the actual plot, mostly because there were several plot threads that only gradually get woven together. In the beginning of the book we get introduced to Lin, a member of a species that look like humans except they have giant scarab beetles for heads and can produce sculpture through a cement-like spit they exude. Lin is one such artist and gets hired by a local crime boss to create a sculpture of himself. Meanwhile her lover, normal human Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, has been hired by a bird person named Yagharek to fashion a new set of wings, since Yagharek's own wings were cut off by his tribe. And then there's their friend Derkhan Blueday, a writer for a radical and highly illegal newspaper. Plus the cleaning construct in Isaac's lab is acting strangely and the government of New Crobuzon is increasingly worried about some compromising information.
So that was my biggest problem was there were all these different threads and they eventually came together to make a single plotline and made sense in the grander scheme of things but they felt very disparate and it took quite a bit of time before we started seeing how all the different plotlines were joining up. If this book was condensed a bit more I'm certain it would be a much shorter novel and it would probably have a much better pace as well.
The thing I noticed, especially when I kept being amazed that this book was still going is that Mieville gets very Dickensian with his writing. Which is to say, extremely to the point of excessively detailed because Dickens was paid by the word so he would make the sentence as long as he could and go off on tangents and parentheticals just to get more money, Dickensian. On the one hand, this is good because Mieville manages to make his universe feel deep and complex through world-building and making it feel like New Crobuzon is a city with an actual history rather than something he just made up. On the downside, it bloats the book out considerably and there are some passages that are utterly egregious and add nothing to the story.
For example, there is an adventurer who is hired by the main characters to help them solve a problem during the book. After a while the adventurer decides she's had enough and she's cutting and running. Sorry, but she's a professional, she's not in it to get killed. All well and good. What follows is a passage describing the adventurer's departure from the city, reflections on the events, a brief discussion of her species's preferred method of architecture, (They're sort of frog people? Definitely amphibian.) and then her decision on what she's going to do now in the future. And honestly, I couldn't have cared less about what this character was going to do. She was barely, just barely in the novel and mostly some extra muscle the main characters had hired on with little to no characterization. I would have been perfectly happy with her waving goodbye and leaving, which is what she did initially, rather than going into an entire tangent about the character. Maybe Mieville means for this character to be important in later books, which is why he focused on her, but it seems entirely unnecessary in this book.
And even with the world-building I feel like the author resorted to a deus ex machina towards the end of the novel. The actual thing is mentioned before in the book, but only very briefly and dismissed as a myth so it still comes as a bit of a surprise when it shows up.
So that's really the biggest problem I have with this book, it feels super bloated with extra information. That feels cool for a bit, but after a while the exposition gets really boring and starts distracting from a plotline that is, in theory, time-critical. I think if Mieville was trying to add a sense of urgency to the plot, adding a bunch of exposition and making the book take a languid pace was not the best way to go about this. There's definitely a lot of good world-building but I think there's a lot that could have been left out and the book wouldn't have suffered. If you do read this be prepared for a lot of exposition.
- Kalpar
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