Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

If a person reads three mind-bending books in a row, is there a chance that person's mind might stay permanently bent? Just wondering....

I don't believe that is going to happen to me, however, since this mind-bender did not entrap me as completely as the last two I read, War with the Newts and At Swim-Two-Birds. Perdido Street Station is too obviously an extended ego trip by the author, who fell in love with his own words and exercised no control or discrimination about what he included in the novel. I can just imagine him writing the pillow-talk love scene between a human male and a khepri female, who has a curvilicious woman's body and a head that is a complete beetle's body. "Damn, this is good," Mieville is thinking. "The tension between instinctual disgust and feelings of love and understanding...Wow." So he includes it. Never mind that the whole love affair side-plot is unimportant to the real plot of the story. And then, because he has read and enjoyed Charles Dickens and Mervyn Peake, Mieville lets himself loose to create a bleak slum of a city. He does it very well. Never mind that when Dickens and Peake did the same, their landscapes had some pertinence to their stories. Although his landscape does not really influence the plot, Mieville includes it because "it is so well done."

And it is well done. Mieville is a very good writer, way beyond what is usually found in the Science Fiction/Fantasy aisle of the bookstores. But it's as if, with this book, he included every weird idea and thought that had occurred to him up to that time, never mind whether it fit or not. The plot of the book is interesting; never mind that it doesn't really start for 200 or so pages in. The atmosphere of urban decay is impressively accomplished; never mind whether that's even important. Some of the scenes are so well done that I'll remember them always; moth-sex is described in more arousing a manner than many a human sex-scene I have read.

So the first part of the novel is concerned with atmosphere and a consideration of cross-species love, and the last two-thirds is an adventure story, with a group of mixed-species heroes fighting giant vampire moths who suck the essence from thought-forming brains. And it all ends "miserably ever after."

This is a well-regarded book in sci-fi/fantasy circles; it was awarded the Arthur C. Clark Award and the British Fantasy Award. In certain aspects, I would agree. Mieville is a very proficient writer, but this book is too much, too long, too patched together.