Perdido Street Station
This is a book I wished I had read earlier. Really, I mean, it was there in the bookcase all along. Perhaps it was the thickness that scared me away, but it wasn’t a big deal once I got started. The length was just right, neither too long nor too short. And as if that wasn’t enough, the expectations from his debut novel King Rat was well meet as he managed to be even better this time around.
At the core of the novel, there is a morality issue. Several of them actually, and it doesn’t provide with clear answers at all. The world Miéville has built up is intriguing and full of contradictions. These things make it come alive, and have an agenda of its own.
The city is not an easy place to live, and its residents are just as complex as people are in real life. The descriptions of the city is more of the steampunk movement than regular fantasy, gothic in places and oozes a mixture of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast and the works of H.G. Wells. The way he handles the issues are more in kin with the late Stanley Kubrick in stance, a lot is left to the reader to decide.
Thursday, 14 February 2002. 17:04
Fantasy 
notes in the margin (1)