Let us suppose that one has answered the question "to be or not to be" in the affirmative, what next? For all its many distinctive qualities, China Mievelle's dynamic new novel Perdido Street Station is perhaps most unusual for the firm answers it brings to bear on the question above. It is, after all, a question most authors leave politely veiled in some form of tepid ambiguity. Perdido Street Station is set in New Crobuzon, an ancient city of some unspecified time or world. New Crobuzon is the incarnation of decay, a metropolis whose festering is so entrenched that it has developed into a kind of independent gravity which demands adaption from the city's dwellers. New Crobuzon is inhabited by a hierarchy of species including humans, but also including many cross species genetically devolved from humans, from bug, bird, cactus, and so forth, each somewhat ghettoized but economically and socially interrelated. In bringing New Crobuzon to life Mieville has taken a page from the macabre school of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, who steeped their stories in a particular vocabulary, one of fetid ichors, charnel stenches, reeling, abyssal currents, and mephitic catacombs, until a unique atmosphere was attained. In his turn Mieville suffuses his novel with mouldering, pungent, torpid, festering, bruised squat, troglodytic things. The sense of a squalid urban organism, engulfing and gorging upon itself, take on a very vivid, and incrementally effective life. The story centers on the quest of a member of the half-bird half-human race of Garuda, Yagharek, who has committed the unspecified crime of "choice-theft." Brutally shorn of his wings therefore, Yagharak seeks to regain flight. He enlists, monetarily at first, a brilliant scientist, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, by choice a marginal outcast of the scientific community, to restore him, not via a potion or contraption, but in truth, to the ability to leap "from earth to as easily as you walk from room to room." Yagaharek's quest overlaps with that of a criminal art connoisseur, Motley, who hires Ygaharek's half-bug girlfriend Lin, an artist, to do a life-size portrait of him. Yagharek and Motley represent two diametrically opposed paths to achieving individuation, Motley by diffusion of self, individuation by aggregation. Yagharek takes the path of merging into the city, paring down the elements of his self until he reemerges from his immersion. Mievelle's book twists and squirms like the hallucinogenic caterpillars which, to their mutual danger, Isaac is studying and Motley is exploiting. The caterpillars ooze out of their cocoons, hovering between worlds, both a vacuum and a pressure, squeezing answers out of an urban cocoon as out of a rancid tube of toothpaste from which something seeking to transcend both horror and beauty is emerging. Unafraid of
depth, profundity, and richness of language, Perdido Street Station
provides them all. |
