China Miéville's first novel in his Bas-Lag series, Perdido Street Station, takes its title from the massive skyrail station that sits at the center of New Crobuzon, a city set in a murky world that defies easy description.
Miéville's world is densely packed with unfamiliar figures and hazy technologies, populated by humanoid and nonhumanoid races that are far from the usual fantasy conventions.
Often categorized as fantasy and sci-fi, the first book in this series draws from worldwide folklores, steampunk aesthetics, literary Victorian London, and Miéville's own academic background as a Marxist and a student of international relations, in which he holds a PhD from the London School of Economics.
These influences blend together and permeate his writing, creating a dangerous, intriguing, and truly weird atmosphere.
The narrative follows several central characters:
- Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, a brilliant human scientist who has left the university to pursue his own research
- Lin, a khepri (a race whose females have human bodies and scarab heads) and a sculptor, who happens to be Isaac's lover
- Yagharek, a garuda (a humanoid race with the head and wings of a bird), who has come to New Crobuzon to seek Isaac's help
Yagharek's arrival sets off a cascade of events that lead the reader through the city and its arcane crevices as New Crobuzon becomes besieged by a nightmarish force. Many characters besides these three take the narrative lead at varying points, evoking the sensation of a complex, interconnected metropolis.
Miéville's greatest strength, both as a writer and a world-builder, is making the strange familiar.
In setting, Perdido Street Station partly resembles Victorian London, an urban sprawl accentuated with the early modern characteristics of public transport, industrial machines, and a shady bureaucracy. But there are also airships and carriages pulled by magically altered beasts, semi-autonomous machines called "constructs," and diplomatic relations with beings on other planes of existence in Miéville's world.
He does not treat these fantastical elements with awe or self-reflexiveness but with a sympathetic sociological tone that reflects the "modernity" of the novel. At his best, he excels in introducing a wholly unfamiliar creature or character and thoroughly bringing it to life. In many of these instances, Miéville's tips his hat to a Lovecraftian sense of cosmic horror while reworking it into the tangibility of his own world.
Characters and concepts that emerge in the background of the story appear again in the foreground, emphasizing the book's materialist philosophy that social, economic, and political conditions of the world are what drive action forward.
Miéville allows his characters' choices to shape the world but not to totally triumph over the obstacles they set out to confront. This is one of his stronger critiques of the fantasy genre—in that his world does not automatically reward or even allow for straightforward self-sacrifice in service of a transcendent morality. The characters are each confined by their own needs and desires which, like us, they cannot escape.
Miéville successfully winds together an exciting world, compelling characters, and worthwhile substance in this first novel of his series. While it may falter in its occasional repetitiveness or potentially disappoint in its refusal to bend to narrative conventions, Miéville's world of Perdido Street Station is undeniable in its innovation.
It may be a world that is difficult to describe, but it is easy to recommend.
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