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Finished "Perdido Street Station"
I didn't like it. Rather, I quite enjoyed the first half, relishing the world and its colorful characters, even though Miéville's insistence on continually reminding us about the yuckyness of the Industrial Revolution-esque urban setting was kind of lame. It was like: Isaac made his way through the muck that encrusted the sidewalk. A thin drizzle of mucous, manifesting from the sooty air itself, clung to his clothes. Somewhere, a dog pooped. And by the third page of this you're like yes, it's dirty, we get it, but it goes on for the whole damn book.
As I said, though, I overlooked this, coz I liked everything else. I mean, the protagonists include a mad scientist, his artist girlfriend - who has a beetle for a head - and his client, a conflicted, flightless bird-man. It was just as fun as it sounds like it could be, perhaps moreso. I was hooked.
But about halfway through, the fun stops, and the book reconfigures itself into a horror novel. And I shoulda been like bzuh? but I kept plowing through on the momentum of the first half because Robin Hobb has taught me no lessons, apparently.
Listen: you can introduce scary man-eating monsters to a story without switching genres. You and I have both read plenty of stories with horrible things in them that we wouldn't call horror. But, not so here: the characters lose control of the situation quickly, and spend most of the book's latter half either howling in despair or running away from things as they are inexorably ground down and destroyed over the course of 300 pages, and that my son is a horror novel, and waiter, this isn't what I ordered.
As a bonus, the narrative takes a takes a ridiculous right turn in the final pages in order to crush one character who escaped with the least damage. It was such a rotten and blatant act of teasing the reader with a parting bit of light, only to cacklingly snuff it out, that I booed out loud. (On further reflection, though, it's really just the "and then the monster that was supposedly dead jumped out of the mirror and ate her anyway ha HA!" ending from the horror-movie playbook.)
I am told by someone who didn't like Perdido Street Station that The Scar, also by Miéville and set in the same world, is pretty good. I dunno, though... I feel kind of betrayed by the author, and am not sure I trust him to tell me any more stories.
Having written all that, I now allow myself to look at this account of a Readercon panel with Miéville on it by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kate_nepveu, which Zarf shared with me a couple of days ago. And, OK, yes: author appears to be gloating "my readers love me because I am a bastard" type. Ah well.
As I said, though, I overlooked this, coz I liked everything else. I mean, the protagonists include a mad scientist, his artist girlfriend - who has a beetle for a head - and his client, a conflicted, flightless bird-man. It was just as fun as it sounds like it could be, perhaps moreso. I was hooked.
But about halfway through, the fun stops, and the book reconfigures itself into a horror novel. And I shoulda been like bzuh? but I kept plowing through on the momentum of the first half because Robin Hobb has taught me no lessons, apparently.
Listen: you can introduce scary man-eating monsters to a story without switching genres. You and I have both read plenty of stories with horrible things in them that we wouldn't call horror. But, not so here: the characters lose control of the situation quickly, and spend most of the book's latter half either howling in despair or running away from things as they are inexorably ground down and destroyed over the course of 300 pages, and that my son is a horror novel, and waiter, this isn't what I ordered.
As a bonus, the narrative takes a takes a ridiculous right turn in the final pages in order to crush one character who escaped with the least damage. It was such a rotten and blatant act of teasing the reader with a parting bit of light, only to cacklingly snuff it out, that I booed out loud. (On further reflection, though, it's really just the "and then the monster that was supposedly dead jumped out of the mirror and ate her anyway ha HA!" ending from the horror-movie playbook.)
I am told by someone who didn't like Perdido Street Station that The Scar, also by Miéville and set in the same world, is pretty good. I dunno, though... I feel kind of betrayed by the author, and am not sure I trust him to tell me any more stories.
Having written all that, I now allow myself to look at this account of a Readercon panel with Miéville on it by
kate_nepveu, which Zarf shared with me a couple of days ago. And, OK, yes: author appears to be gloating "my readers love me because I am a bastard" type. Ah well.
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I side-note that read this knowing nothing about the author (beyond what his jacket photo could tell me), and as I'm reading the comments in the LJ post I linked to I'm kind of "ew."
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If it had at least been well-written, that might have made up for the lack of substance. The book was the setting, and the setting got old fast. I also felt like the author thought he was really cool (like his two main characters, see previous paragraph) and that really annoyed me. I didn't enjoy it on many different levels, and the grammar and sloppy writing were the factors that put me off the book entirely.
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