It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protuding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering...Some people got sick of reading about how dirty New Crobuzon is, but when it is said like this, I could read it all day:
Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.The scene-setting and the prose are simply fantastic. If you had to look up 'troglodytic', keep your dictionary close by for 'liminal, 'autopoiesis', 'deracinated', 'stygian', and 'etiolated'. I didn't know whether to be impressed by these, or annoyed, it felt like Miéville had lost a bet and had to include half a 'word a day' calendar in the novel.
But it's hard to stay mad at a dark, dirty steampunk world with insecto-humanoids, menancing mind controlling aliens, and mechanical super-intelligences. Miéville's city-world is fantastically imagined and described. Remaking, magic-come-bio-engineering-on-LSD, is particularly horrifying and grotesque, especially when used as punishment:
A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his nose, Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a flaccid wound.And that's not even close to the most disturbing example, think about what remaking means for a red-light district. And yes, Miéville describes it.
Isaac I liked, although I had trouble imagining him and his voice - the many 'Yag, mate' phrases could have been cockney or even Australian. I got sick of the pseudo-scientific crisis theory discussions:
So I'm a MUFTI, a Moving Unified Field Theorist. Not a SUFTI, a Static Unified...you get the idea. But then, being a MUFTI raises as many problems as it solves: if it moves how does it move? Steady gait? Punctuated inversion?
y and z were unified, bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was x, Andrej's mind, the reference point for the whole model. It was integral to the form of each that they were totalities....But I'm totally with Isaac as regards to Palgolak:
Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once....He rather hoped the fat bastard did exist, in some form or other. Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamoured with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.And I have to admit the crisis engine as a power source for the Construct Council steampunk supercomputer (punch cards!) and its minions is a storyline I wish was followed more. Steampunk skynet:
My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.I enjoyed the Aliens/Predator-style slake-moth hunt, but I felt a significant disconnect between the descriptive world-building of the early novel and the alien top-gun style dogfight battles.
So maybe the climax was a little silly, but it was definitely entertaining. The denouement was horrible though. A tacked-on boring sequence of events, a bizarre moral dilemma, and a walkout. Ending a book like this was always going to be tough, but this really detracted from the whole experience.
4.5 stars
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