Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading Perdido Street Station, it was a bit of an enigma for me. China Mieville’s prose is so dense, dark and descriptive that it often required re-reading a sentence, or a paragraph, or even a page to fully digest. A good dictionary by my side also kept me moving through the streets of New Crobuzon with greater understanding of Mieville’s masterful wordsmithing. I personally did not mind his sporadic use of uncommon words, or even his prodigious (although wonderfully original) mixture of similes and metaphors. But I’m just as sure that many younger readers found this density, at the least, gratuitous. I myself occasionally felt like I was walking through a peat bog in hip waders, or chewing long and hard on a month old piece of beef jerky before I could swallow.

Perdido Street Station is not for the faint of heart. The story and the city are dark, dirty and dank, a virtually endless journey of despair and hardship for its myriad of strange inhabitants. District by district, street by street, New Crobuzon is a miasma of death and squalor. There is an underlying love story, although rather creepy in its incredibly alien fulfillment. The main characters are in constant survival mode and early on are fighting for their lives. Don’t expect many touching moments, the few encountered are quickly overwhelmed by treachery and tragedy. Having said that, the story is a mesmerizing journey and utterly enthralling.

Even the most avid reader will discover that China Mieville has created a new and still unidentified writing genre. Fantasy would likely be the headline genus, but fantasy that is totally submerged in horror, science fiction and modern steampunk. Although his adjective thick style is certainly enough to place Mieville in a rarified group of authors, his rich, minestrone soup of genuinely extraordinary alien species will certainly challenge and entertain every reader’s imagination.

The incredibly vivid, vibrant, fascinating worlds that inhabit Mieville’s fertile mind translate well to print, and that’s what its all about. I’ve read two of his novels, King Rat and Perdido Street Station; both are one-off, stand-alone works. I’ve read reviews that compare Mieville’s style with Dickens, Kafka, and Cronenberg among others, but they pale. China Mieville is unique. As an aspiring writer myself, he has already taught me many things, and I will continue to savor the journey through all his novels in the future.

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Created Jan 12, 2014 at 1:13am • Submit your own review...