Perdido Street Station

A re-read, and one that fully rewarded the return. Miéville is one of my favourite writers, but it's been a very long time since I visited this one.

While there is a fairly wide cast of characters - most well drawn, all with quirks and flaws - by far the most fully developed is that of the city of New Crobuzon itself. Based on Miéville's beloved London it is a quasi-Victorian, steampunk, fantasy. Like London, it is packed with a variety of cultures and races. The author puts a lot effort into ensuring that the place is textured and historied - every street and laneway has a name, social class paints the different areas in quite different tones. The text practically sweats with the humid, smoky, raucous atmosphere of the place.

The races are far from the typical Tolkienesque hand-me-downs. Beetle-headed kheprie rub shoulders with the humanoid plant cactacae. Toad-like vodyanoi, swim beneath the coarse swearing of the demonic wyrmen. The Remade people or animals have their flesh fused with other animals, machines, or equipment. There are many more, and much more surreal and fantastical.

It is rich, but also rough and unflinchingly human (which means that it is very often not at all humane).

There are several phases to the plot. What will become the crisis doesn't really kick off until more than 150 pages in, after we've met our protagonists, and become invested in their labours. A challenge that is both scientific and very personal taken on by a bohemian researcher begins a process that will, through a series of people being greedy, curious, careless, and ignorant, give rise to a calamity that threatens the entire city. It will expose (or threaten to). the extent to which the powers of the city - both legal and criminal - have more in common than the people they exploit, and how even in the throes of crisis there is possibility for growth, and ruthless taking advantage.

Miévillie's prose is immensely rich but still very easy to read, bringing you along through the streets, the pubs, the wending rails of the train lines and the waste strewn alleyways and sewers.

It's brilliant.

It's a marvelously inventive fantasy setting here. Be warned though; it's at least 200 pages before you get a proper sense of the plot if memory serves. That said, this is by far my favourite in the series. It's a great self contained story, relentlessly inventive in its world and relentlessly curious in its myriad themes.