What I Am Reading: "Perdido Street Station" by China Miéville

“Somewhere on the wards of Darkplace Hospital, a man gives birth to a giant eyeball which brings out paternal instincts in Dagless, still grieving for the loss of his half-human, half-grasshopper son. However, the eyeball could be a potential killer.” - Wikipedia’s description of the “Skipper the Eyechild” episode of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace

When I found them available as e-books, I decided on a whim to tackle China Miéville's magnum opus, Perdido Street Station, and the subsequent two books in the series. It is not for nothing that Miéville writes in the "New Weird" subgenre, and sometimes summaries of his stories invoke the same type of off-the-wall absurdism present in the Wikipedia excerpt quoted above.

The thing I knew about Perdido Street Station, and the reason I was wary about reading it for many years, was that like Berlin Alexanderplatz or Manhattan Transfer, it was a novel about a city, in all of its neighborhood-characterizing, population tabulating, urbanist sociocultural glory. I like these readings, but I knew that it would take a lot of attention, and would bring about guilt over not keeping up on urban studies readings as well as I could. I am happy to report, though, that the novel is a fast-paced read, and at no point did I get bogged down in it.

It is set in the city of New Crobuzon, in a sort of fantasy-steampunkish setting that sets magic ("thaumaturgy") alongside muskets, airships, trains, robots ("constructs"), the "remade" victims of punitive bioengineering, and a variety of odd half-human species. This is all contained within the many neighborhoods and districts of the city, teeming, run-down, oppressed, unequal, disgusting New Crobuzon. But this depiction of a gritty urban environment never crosses the line into grim-darkness, and if anything the novel retains something of a whimsical tone despite some heavy subject matter. Miéville doesn’t make the city gross, he portrays it as it is, or at least as it would have been in such an era.

The protagonist of the novel is portly renegade (human) scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebuli; who is cohabitating with Lin, a sculptor and member of the khepri race (full insect bodies as the heads of human bodies). Both receive work in the early part of the story: Isaac is contracted by Yagharek, a garuda (bird-like species) who has been stripped of his wings as a punishment for a crime, to devise a way for him to fly again. Lin meanwhile has come to the attention of a crime lord Motley, who wants her to make a sculpture of his body, a riotous amalgamation of parts.

Things proceed upon these lines until one of the creatures that Isaac has acquired to study, a strange caterpillar, gorges itself on a new drug attuned to the dreaming subconscious. The caterpillar pupates, turns into a hideous moth-man ("slake-moth"), and escapes to drain the thoughts from victims. It finds the others of its kind, originally imported as a government experiment before being decommissioned and sold off to Motley for drug harvesting. This break-out leads Motley to take Lin as a hostage against Isaac’s meddling.

It is spiraling situations like these that can lead to straight-faced fantasy absurdism, such as an eventual battle between the five moth-creatures on one hand and a serendipitous team-up between an interdimensional art-arachnid and ten creatures controlled by clenching hand-parasites (led by the Deputy Mayor) paired up so as to be steered backwards through mirrors in order to avoid the moths' hypnotic wings. The elegance of this book is that these concepts, the species, the city's geography, and all of it, are introduced in moderation, each palatable in its own time and with no overwhelming infodumps. They build on the next layer after a suitable amount of time, so the weird is controlled. Similarly, the characters are put through successes and setbacks in proportion, so they are not simply defeated and defeated until they win. What's more, several main characters die, and the survivors (including the brain-damaged Lin) must flee the city at the end, hunted by the police state authorities as they are. Also in this dark final chapter, Isaac makes the decision not to complete his invention to help Yagharek after he learns that the latter's wing-severing crime was rape. I guess this could be where the book heads into grimdark a bit, to provide us with a downer ending; it was definitely jarring.

Isaac's work on "crisis physics" (described digestibly as a permanent state of kinetic energy in a feedback loop), which he intended to use for flying, does help them with the slake-moths. As it happens, after enlisting the help of a city-wide machine intelligence they track the moths down to an abandoned building in the glass dome of the cactus people ghetto; destroying the slake-moth eggs but leaving the creatures alive (and getting their D&D-style hired adventurers killed in the process). This necessitates the use of the crisis engine to combine the psyches of the artificial intelligence, the aforementioned interdimensional art spider, and a human sacrifice as bait to draw the slake-moths and cause them to gorge themselves to death on dream essence. They receive covering fire in doing so from a vigilante freedom fighter who had previously appeared only in scene-setting cityscape introductions to new chapters, though I was careful to take notice of him. Anyway, as you can tell, the work is a rich and well-woven tapestry, I love summarizing it, and I’m happy to be able to continue with the series.