Perdido Street Station: First Impressions

Since it's supposed to be so good, I finally picked up Perdido Street Station recently and started reading it. I'm on Chapter 9 at the moment and...I'm afraid I'm missing something here. Quite frankly, I'm finding this book to be quite boring.

I have no problem with Miéville's writing style. It's just that I don't really find the protagonists that interesting so far - the main character (Isaac) is a "renegade eccentric scientist", but despite this book being so "different" from the norm, Isaac is simply a cliché. His half-insect/half-human "forbidden love" (Lin) is somewhat interesting but so far nothing about her really stands out - other than being partially insectoid. I'm also not seeing much of a storyline. So far Miéville is spending so much time on describing the setting (the steampunk city of New Crobuzon) that the characterization and plot development are being neglected. There is a storyline, but it's plodding along so slowly to make way for more descriptions of the grimness and oppressiveness of the city that I'm rapidly losing interest.

Of course, the sophisticates reading this (if there are any...) have no doubt dismissed me as a literary savage with a short attention span at this point. I didn't even mention that I far more enjoyed the first two books of the Black Company series that I read prior to this. But with all due respect to them, as well as two other fans of the book whose opinions I actually respect - Neil Gaiman and Michael Moorcock - I'm just not getting it. In some ways it reminds me of Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien goes into great depth describing countrysides and what hobbits eat for lunch and relegates narration of epic events (such the ents destroying Isengard or the battle betwen Eowyn and the Witch-King) to a single paragraph or a disinterested third-person re-telling.

I realize that I may be judging the book prematurely, but my attitude is similar to my wife's (who is about ten times more well-read than I'll ever be). Her philosophy is that if a book doesn't grab her attention in the first 50 pages, it's not worth continuing when there are so many other books she wants to read (her interests include fantasy and sci-fi as well as history, politics, economics, religion, and a host of other topics - I'll be damned surprised if our kids aren't frickin' genuises).

I think I'm going to give it a bit more of a chance, though. This review from Amazon helps:

I almost faltered with this book. Initially I was wading through the prose and seeminly [sic] not getting anywhere, but once the principal protagonists took the stage ( along with the Weaver ), this became a page turner.

On the other hand, this one seems to match my feeling so far:

Though China Mieville displays a great deal of potential in "Perdido Street Station", it could really have done with a ferocious editor, relentlessly hacking away the unnecessary prose - and probably halving the book's size by doing so.

The world of New Crobuzon is somewhat interesting but is very much dominant, it may be the author's intention to treat it as the protagonist. On the downside, there's not a lot of meat in the story. One gets the feeling of style over substance (not always bad, but it is overbearing here).

There's also the fact that too many people seem like this book because it's different. But "different" does not automatically mean "good". I'll take a book set in a standard Middle-Earth/Forgotten Realms setting with good characterization and good storyline over one set in a different, unique, interesting world but with crappy characters and a bland plot.

There are far more positive reviews than negative for the book on Amazon, but the negative reviews are echoing my initial sentiments - and seem to indicate that things only get worse the farther into the book I get. Sure, there are lots more positive reviews, but then there are also lots of people who read the execrable D&D novels published by WotC (yeah, I know there are some good ones - and lots of bad ones).

Hmm...here's another one (can you tell I'm going back-and-forth between Amazon and Blogger?):

Some of you Mieville-lovers may hate me, but I write the truth. This book is for a certain type of person: one who appreciates a novel's aesthetics and symbolism more than it's meat, it's plot, it's characterization.

I may or may not continue. Part of me says I owe Miéville a chance since I actually read the entirety of The Kingless Land, and despite my misgivings about PSS it's about 100 times better than Greenwood's steaming pile (WotC never published anything that bad). But the big thing comes down to this: a good book is one where I continue to read because I want to see what comes next. With PSS (and Kingless Land, and some others), I'm continuing to read because I'm hoping that it will get better.

Of course, that's no guarantee that you won't be disappointed in the end. I quite enjoyed Philip José Farmer's Dungeon series, until the last book in which the author completely and utterly destroyed the entire story. That terrible book ruined the enjoyment of the other five.