The year is 2001 and my genre reading is only just beginning to come out of the ‘Star Wars’ phase that saw me all the way through college (and a little bit beyond). I’ve still got all my epic fantasy favourites but they’re starting to feel a little too familiar and I’m after something new. The only problem is that it’ll be about another year before I discover Erikson and Martin...
We were off to Tunisia for a week’s break and we raided the local bookstore to stock up on books to take. As an aside, we both felt pretty guilty that the only time we’d ever been inside this place was as it was closing down (which it was). Would our earlier custom have kept the place open? The surly shop assistants serving hordes of bargain hunters seemed to think so... One of the books I picked up was China Mieville’s ‘Perdido Street Station’ and I never looked back.
The days in Tunisia were all about exploring the Medina’s and seeing how many times we could get ripped off by the stall holders (quite a lot as it happened). At one point we somehow managed to find ourselves up a dead end, in the red light district, surrounded by a large number of Tunisian men who were very surprised at the stupidity of the dumb English tourists. We made our escape and never went back!
The nights however were all about the adventures of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin in the oppressive regime of New Crobuzon and his dealings with both the well to do and more nefarious denizens. To be honest, you sometimes couldn’t tell the difference between the two, everyone in New Crobuzon is either on the make or repressing the populace whilst being on the make... ‘Perdido Street Station’ proved to be a vivid exercise in how someone with all the best intentions can succeed in bringing an entire city (and possibly beyond) to the edge of total ruin. I’m talking about Isaac here, not Mieville! ;o) It’s nothing short of compelling to see how all the pieces inevitably slot together to form the downward spiral, a downward spiral that contrives to snatch defeat from the jaws of an unlikely victory.
The real joy for me though was journeying through New Crobuzon itself and meeting the motley crew that inhabit it. A city ruled by totalitarian fear still manages to support a thriving cultural movement, the sciences and a vicious criminal underworld as well as combining steampunk and the use of magic. It’s a city that’s vibrant and bursting with life, a life that is all too often brutal and short (although a little too reminiscent of London for me to be able to truly suspend disbelief. This scene setting combines well with the nature of the plot to drive things along at a vast rate of knots. ‘Perdido Street Station’ turned out to be one of those books, for me, where you finish reading it and you realize that there is far more out there in the world of speculative fiction than you were aware of.
The nature of the ending meant that I thought there would be no more novels set in ‘Bas-Lag’ after ‘Perdido Street Station’ came to a close. After all, what could Isaac possibly do next? As it turned out, while there wasn’t anything else in store for Isaac Bas-Lag is an expansive world with plenty of room for more tales to be told. Mieville cleverly links Isaac’s misadventures with a character in ‘Perdido’ that you won’t even realize was there (unless you were reading very carefully) and makes her the star of the story in a brand new setting. ‘The Scar’ was the first book that I ever bought in hardback format, based purely on how much I had enjoyed ‘Perdido Street Station’.
The cityscape is very much Mieville’s forte and this is very much the case in ‘The Scar’, a tale of piracy and parallel dimensions on board a floating city made up of thousands of ships. Mieville draws together dozens of species and nationalities to recreate the vibrancy of ‘Perdido’, a vibrancy that is all the more apparent when set in contrast against the coldness of the seas that they travel across. The concept and setting were enough to get me fully involved in the book and if that wasn’t enough for me, Mieville kept me reading with a story that refused to go where I expected it to. A raw and emotional climax still sticks with me even now, years after I read it.
‘The Iron Council’ is a little more difficult to write about, seeing as I remember being distinctly unimpressed when I read it last (although I wonder how it would stand up to a re-read...?) and that was a while ago now. The fact that it never really grabbed me in the same way as the other two did means I have no real strong experience of it to draw on for this post... Still, it’s a ‘Bas-Lag’ novel and that’s what this post is about! My abiding memory of ‘The Iron Council’ was my feeling that Mieville had sacrificed the story (one of his strengths in my opinion) in order to expand upon his politics and how they related to New Crobuzon and Bas-Lag. It felt like it was all commentary and what I was after was a good story...
Two excellent novels followed by one that was a disappointment, at least in my opinion. Despite this though, Mieville did more than enough to ensure that I will always pick up his books when they are published. Like I said, I’m looking forward to reading ‘Kraken’...
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