Week 4: Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville (8)

 This book is like the intoxicated, eldritch love-child of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and an SCP Foundation log that rooted through Tolkien’s trash on a whim and satiated its munchies on the most rancid offering. I loved it. I find myself both surprised and unsurprised that there hasn’t been an adaptation of this  into a visual media, because there is so much there. 

And at no point does Mieville ease you into anything, its just one intriguing sucker punch after another. I’ll also admit, if I didn’t already know that thaumaturgy was another way of saying ‘magic’ right off I’d have been horribly confused. How does someone try and conceptualize the slake-moths in a visual format? Or the space between perception and thought and dreams? I actually really want to see this in a graphic novel adaptation - it’d be far fetched to hope for an animated adaptation, given how parents generally treated Sausage Party’s R rating. Which is a pity. 

I think one of the things I enjoyed most about Perdido Street Station, aside from the world building and the characters and the phenomenal execution thereof, its the idea of perception that we enter the story with, with Lin and Isaac and their illicit relationship, and how we end the story, with Yagherak’s crime. This story is full of moments where characters stop and reflect and really think about what they’re seeing, what their actions mean, how they can bend perceptions to their benefit or how it can harm them. The moths are kind of just an interlude to Yagherak’s story with Isaac, which makes a lot of sense, given how the story is fragmented. Isaac didn’t perceive it as his right to interfere with the justice the Garuda gave Yagherak, just as he didn’t perceive it as wrong to openly care for Lin anymore. It’s come full circle, but everything’s changed.

This is a way more socially aware book than what I would have expected from 2000, or at least way more nuanced about it than I usually see. But then again, I’ve been lingering like a ghost around YA Fantasy for the longest time, and it’s really ironic to me that this book, this book that doesn’t hide its exuberance for all of life’s dirty, graphic secrets, is the book that makes it into my forever favorites list while its contemporaries twitter over the same subjects like they’re perverse kinks to fetishize. This book is a testament to the way subjects are handled in writing, if nothing else.

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