China Mièville's Perdido Street Station

 PSS's description on the back does nothing to really describe the convoluted events of the book, which is more than "Issac is given a job to help a garuda; ominous statement made as to the fate of an entire city". The writing is, as expected, tremendously well-written, and it's certainly a literary highlight. The concepts are also deeply abstract and high-flown as well, ambitiously penetrating different dimensions in ways regular human beings can't hope to understand.

But this isn't a review, it's an analysis, and Steampunk Scholar Mike Perschon told me the other day, "You like to rip shit up." Which I do, so let's get to it. Spoilers ahoy, under the cut!

So I'll be honest: I actually put the book down about three or five pages in the first few times and decided to go read Gail Carriger's Changeless instead, because the introductions to each section, Yagharek's first-person perspective, got tedious, really quickly, unhelped by the first introduction to Isaac and Lin. These first fifty pages really set the tone, though, of a gritty and dark setting - have I mentioned I don't really like those? I'm doing this for you, you know /guilt-trip - in a city teeming with conflict. Once I got past this hurdle and Mieville got down to really letting us get to know Lin and Isaac, I was much more absorbed, because I actually liked them. Yes, Issac was compelling even as a white male (because there are no hints otherwise, so I'm back to the Great White Default), but then, I liked him mostly because he wasn't given pretensions to heroism, and he's a total geek and ultimately flawed, without being a complete asshole. In many ways, he reminded me a lot of Buck Godot (particularly his description of himself and his motley crew as "one fat scientist, a crook and a journalist" on page 432, although Buck Godot would never have referred to himself that way). Lin was a bit harder to like, because Mieville wrote her as a humanoid insect, but she grew on me easily. I'll get to this in a bit.

Now, I ordinarily respect folks who can write complicated plotlines and keep everything straight, but this novel had so many elements, I was getting lost and confused when new elements popped up more than halfway through the book that were barely mentioned before. Not even a Neil Gaiman book confuses me that much! And these new elements wouldn't just be "something hitherto unknown about the character" but something major, like an aspect of a race, or a completely new one, playing a huge role in the plot. Maybe I'm too fond of Chekov's gun law, but it felt unfair, annoying even, to have little revolvers popping up all over. Like the handlingerers, wtf? Where did that come from and what exactly do they play, besides add to the chaos? I can understand the Construct Council, which was at least hinted at fairly early, but other things, like the cactacae's ghetto, could have been introduced earlier on - the slake moths were living there, so wouldn't the cactacae have been affected earlier? 

Speaking of the cactacae and ghettos and getting back to Lin, really now... different species illustrating the real-life conflict between races? Where have we heard this before? One could make the argument that PSS isn't set in a place remotely like our grand planet Earth, which would be true, but can we honestly say the Great White Default isn't at play here? (Which brings me to a thought - perhaps the next time I pick up PSS again, I'll read all the human characters as various PoC and see how that works out. Since Mieville provides no real physical description, that should be a cakewalk.) 

When Isaac approaches the New Crobuzon garuda ghetto, he walks in with money and grand speeches, expecting to be listened to, expecting cooperation, and he is bewildered when the garuda leader rejects him, forces any willing garuda back. "I just don't see why they were so fucking antagonistic," he complains to Lin (134), who unsympathetically replies, being a minority from a ghetto herself, "Because they're poor and xenian and scared, you cretin." She goes on to point out the truth about ghettos and minority groups: "Place like this needs someone to look after its own" (135). Isaac's reaction isn't so very different from dominant-majority individuals attempting to help the minority and getting angry when those efforts are rebuffed. We PoC call this the White Saviour complex (when it's a gender issue, we call it being a white knight), beacuse these efforts ignore the fact that in order to truly come into our own, minority groups need to work for themselves, and the best dominant groups can do is offer the tools and platforms to do things for ourselves. Too often dominant-majority individuals get involved only to get into leadership positions, whether subconsciously or not repeating the same kyriarchal-racial structure, driving in the same old message: the little people can't take care of themselves and need the big people. Isaac asks Lin, "When you were ready to leave Kinken [the khepri ghetto], there must've been people telling you to stick to your own ... you didn't listen to them, did you?" Lin doesn't answer, but I could - there is a different dynamic when an individual wants to leave the group of hir own volition, than when an outsider comes tempting members to leave. These few pages were chockful with painful delineations of the power structures that keep dominant and minority groups apart, psychologically and physically.

Which is a shame, because the conflict between species could easily have been conflict between human races. Lin and Isaac's inter-specie relationship is particularly poignant because it echoes many inter-racial experiences, one party hiding the other that seeks vindication of the same love. Lin herself is compelling for her conflicts, always racially marked by her physical self from her adopted culture, even as her mentality separates her from her home community, leading to a doubled isolation. Her arc with the antagonist Motley that leads her to root for Ma Francine, a khepri she has never met but nonetheless feels kinship to, is reminiscent of other minorities who, in face of an enemy, find themselves siding with "people like us".

I understood Lin's ambivalence towards Kinken and other khepri. The emotional push-pull between acknowledging the influence the community that I grew up in and simultaneously rejecting it is confusing at best, but I don't doubt that many individuals live with the same experience, a kind of intellectual and emotional divide. It's not nostalgia, but it's still a need to return to my roots to see where I came from, with uncertainty as to why I really want to do that. Lin reflects on Kinken, on the fact that she allies with Ma Francine because she is khepri, like herself, and on the fact that although she has rejected the larger khepri community, she is still a part of it (182 - 189); her reflection is similar to many I have read of Westernized Asians, trying to balance between their families' expectations and their own desires for individuality.

The most powerful scene of Lin is when she stands in front of her broodma's home, trying to decide whether she really wants to go in. On the one hand, if she goes in there to express her anger, the result will be pointless. On the other hand, if she doesn't get to confront her broodma, she has to live with the frustration of never being able to say what she wanted to say and have it acknowledged (255). I'm sure I'm not alone in knowing exactly how this feels, having to weigh the pros and cons of whether it's worthwhile confronting the people who both built me and fucked me up.

Whilst I can appreciate all this, this makes me all the more resentful that Mieville chose not to use real human races, instead framing these powerful conflicts within alien forms. It's all very interesting, and the world-building is exquisite, but it feels almost like our real conflicts, as ourselves, aren't worth talking about, unless we are insectoids.

Moving on to Yagharek and the treatment of his crimes and actions, again, we are presented with an excellent character arc, but WTF was that ending about? (I'm also not getting Isaac's confusion over choice-theft... but then, for my seminar class on democratic individualism, I presented on Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty".) Okay, look, rape is a heinous crime. He was held accountable for his actions, which he knew were wrong even before his trial, and then punished, through the removal of his wings and exile. Which is hella lot more than what we do in our real society. (Rapists in our societies tend to be sociopaths with little to no remorse.) He doesn't deserve a clean slate, but his final resolution is to... deface himself further to become something he's not? Not even being allowed the benefit of a face-to-face confrontation from Isaac, just a letter? I don't believe forgiveness is necessary for moving on, but he had already been well on his way to developing something of a half-decent relationship with other people. Being remorseful for his crime, he doesn't need further rehabilitation, so why the final isolation? We do this in prisons already, and this doesn't actually help, only serves to antagonize and drive in sociopathic tendencies even further. What is the reader supposed to get out of Yagharek's end?

In Mike Perschon's estimation of the ending, he says, "Yagharek should have flown. Since Miéville had barred his path to acceptance into the flawed faux-family the Garuda had formed with Isaac and Derkhan, the only thing left really, was to fly." I only somewhat agree - I think Yagharek should have left New Crobuzon with Isaac et al. I do not understand why Isaac abandoned the friendship so easily - yes, Lin is a living reminder of how violence affects others, but their friendship has been built for months, with Isaac resolutely refusing to abandon Yagharek to the very end. Perschon writes that the Crisis Theory element that had been worked on, smoking all the way, should have been fired; I think the Crisis Theory element, alongside the slake-moth hunt, provided a platform on which for Yagharek to insinuate himself back into a semblance of social living after his solitary life. And in this, Mieville has cheated readers of a resolution that would have given something humanly fresh back after that long, exhausting read chock-full of alien elements. I guess it's more literary this way. It makes me think I should go pick up all these highly-lauded great literary SFF works and do a lit review and a poll on which ones have happy endings versus unhappy endings.

So, this steampunk postcolonialist says, great read, didn't need the inhuman allegories.