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Originally Posted by Rane Longfox And I freely admit that I'm pretty much the only person to hate the ending. |
Not at all. I found the ending of Perdido Street Station to be, well, almost
amateurish. Talk about your deus ex machinas! I really got the sense that Mieville didn't know exactly where he was going when he started the novel, and realized 100,000-plus words into the writing that he needed to find a way to wrap things up and bring his tale to an end. It's like he sought out to describe his newly created city over the course of a few hundred pages, cramming in as many ideas as possible before realizing that he had a narrative to finish. Story threads he had cast out were never reeled back in for the finale, making them seem like wasted dead ends. Characters we had never met appeared for no discernible reason to save the day. And the whole
tone of the writing changed.
Mieville's creative achievement with Perdido Street Station can't be denied. It's a wonderful blend of steampunk, Victorian horror with Lovecraftian tinges, and fantasy. The world is dense with life and shadow; it's dense; it
breathes. He crafts mood and creates atmosphere like few others. Despite a too strong love for “bit words” for their own sake, his prose dances across the page with a cadence all its own
But he also meanders a bit more than needed, sometimes unable to distinguish when his mood-setting should stop and storytelling should begin. And the ending felt terribly thrown together.
When I first read Perdido Street Station, I was instantly prepared to proclaim it a masterpiece. As time wore on, however, niggling bothers tickled my brain, flaws I was all too eager to ignore at the time of reading because I was so absorbed in his world, but which in retrospect sapped some power from an otherwise great work. Self-indulgent to a fault, it needed a more heavy-handed editor.
None of which is to say that I don''t think Mieville is the real deal, because I
do. He's got a great vision, a cacophony of sound snatched from a thousand different songs, cut up and reassembled into something totally unique. The world he created is compelling and engaging, a rich tapestry I devoured, and then devoured again in The Scar, and can't wait to devour again in Iron Council. I can't wait to see what he does as the years roll on and his craft improves.