Albert Square Syndrome
Jul. 2nd, 2005 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel08 May 2005
Perdido Street Station - China Mieville - Pan 2000
* * *
When I was a child growing up in deepest Surrey, going to London was a treat. We would take the train to South Kensington and visit the Science Museum. I can still remember the fun of the children's hands-on section in the basement and the excitement of seeing, for the first time, a traffic light that turned green as you approached it (something they never seem to do nowadays). Afterwards we would go for tea in the cafe, passing through the nearly unpopulated halls housing the ship propellors and steam engines with the spitfires hanging overhead, and have cream cakes which invariably made me ill. Later, when I was a teenager, Oxford Street and the Charing Cross Road became the new treat, visiting the Games Centre to buy the latest roleplaying supplement, Forbidden Planet for comics and Foyles for those books that you could never find anywhere else. Even now, going to see a play or a musical at the National Theatre or Drury Lane still gives me a buzz.
But nothing on earth would persuade me to live there. In fact it would be a good working definition of hell. The sheer stress of getting around on the delapidated and inefficient public transport system, the overwhelming press of people living in a metropolis designed for one tenth the number, the graffiti and the grime, the traffic, the pollution, the noise... China Mieville, however, clearly loves it, for the dynamics of his fantasy city of New Crobuzon are essentially those of modern London, complete with railways, different ethnic communities living side by side (though his ethnicities are people with insects for heads, bird-people and human/toad hybrids), a government which rules from a building called the Parliament, slums and well-to-do areas jammed side by side, a polluted river running through. The similarities with modern London may partly explain why I didn't especially enjoy my visit to New Crobuzon, although there are other problems as well.
The main character is a large, fat scientist called Isaac Van Der Grimnebulin. We first encounter him in bed with his insect-headed girlfriend Lin (a major character in the first half of the novel who disappointingly fades out in the second). Isaac is contacted by Yagharek, a garuda (bird-man) who has had his wings cut off for an unspecified crime. He wants Isaac to come up with a device that will enable him to fly again. Isaac agrees to do so, but in the course of his researches unwittingly unleashes something that could destroy the entire city. He, Yagharek and a band of misfit friends try to put things right. Unfortunately, the government and the New Crobuzon equivalent of the mafia are in on the act...
The story is fine, and for once there is relatively little idiocy in the plotting. The baddies are intelligent and react in a plausible fashion to the actions of the heroes, making them much more formidable than the pantomime villains that are usually found in fantasy. The first half could have been pacier - given the small part that Lin ends up playing, her sections could have been cut, and there are some other places where slightly self-indulgent world- and character-building slows things down (for example, the lengthy descriptions as characters travel from one part of the city to another). Nonetheless, once things get going, the pages fly by - Mieville is good at action and the second half reads more like a thriller than a fantasy.
No, the problems with this book relate to setting, characters and theme. To take the setting first: despite the obvious amount of care and detail that has been lavished on it, New Crobuzon feels like a construct. In part this is because of the names, which are wonderfully euphonious and atmospheric - Salacus Fields, Murkside, Canker Wedge, and my particular favourite, Abrogate Green. However, they are not the sort of names that people would naturally have given parts of a city. Most place names either derive from people's names or from distinctive landmarks, and (in the UK at least) often have elements of foreign languages in them. The names here have none of these qualities. They were chosen simply because Mieville liked the sound of them.
Other features contribute to the sense of a constructed rather than evolved world. Despite being so obviously old, there is very little sense of history, with few curious buildings or statues that relate to events from the past. In this respect, New Crobuzon isn't like London at all - it feels more like a new world city like New York or Melbourne, with lots of surface variety but missing the deep sense of interconnectedness of the truly old. Also, New Crobuzon is presumably the capital of whatever country it lies in, but we get no feel for what the country around is like, nor for its geo-political relationships with other countries.
There is similar vagueness about technology and magic. The human-animal hybrids which populate the city are a nice if not particularly original idea, but I found myself wondering how they could possibly have come about. There is an intriguing hint in that the chief form of magic appears to do with manipulation of flesh, which presumably means that they were artificially created by powerful thaumaturges long ago, but if so they ought to have legendary status and Isaac, for one, should know about them. Likewise, the technology is somewhat arbitrary. The city is lit by gaslight suggesting a Victorian tech level, but there are also little robotic cleaning constructs and calculating devices of enormous sophistication that run on punched cards. There is no obvious history of technology, nor of magic. The result is similar to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - one feels that Mieville is arbitrarily creating the rules as he goes along to accommodate whatever flight of fancy has occurred to him, and not really worrying about whether all of these disparate elements could possibly have co-evolved.
Another feature that this book shares with JS & Mr N is that none of the main characters are particularly likeable. They are all somewhat self-obsessed and, fatally, they do not have a sense of humour. In fact, there is very little laughter in this book at all - grim and gritty are Mieville's watch words, and he seems to take particular enjoyment in describing stinks, ugliness and squalour, and the mean-minded and unpleasant people that it generates (one review aptly described his style as "thuggish"). Mieville is a socialist, which may explain why he considers that foul environments inevitably lead to foul people, but it simply isn't true, and his (presumably) beloved Londoners are a case in point. In general they are cheerful and humorous and always have been, even in the squalour and ordure of Victorian times and the horror of the Blitz. Mieville's characters, while grotesque and memorable, are too humourless to ring true.
New Crobuzon also suffers from what I call "Albert Square syndrome". This is an affliction that affects television soap opera characters, rendering them incapable of noticing that the rates of murders, rapes, assaults, gangsterism, divorces, adultery and unplanned pregnancies in their particular neck of the woods are several times those of anywhere else and getting the hell out. New Crobuzon has the same problem. It's such an unpleasant place that I can't understand why anyone would want to live there (I certainly wouldn't). When the evil is unleashed, Isaac does in fact consider making a run for it, but in a wholly unconvincing outburst of heroism he decides to stay and fight instead. This kind of character implausibility is why I dont bother with television soaps and, along with its apparent absence of anything significant to say, makes this book in my view rather less a classic than others have claimed. But then what do I know? Some people like living in London.
Perdido Street Station - China Mieville - Pan 2000
* * *
When I was a child growing up in deepest Surrey, going to London was a treat. We would take the train to South Kensington and visit the Science Museum. I can still remember the fun of the children's hands-on section in the basement and the excitement of seeing, for the first time, a traffic light that turned green as you approached it (something they never seem to do nowadays). Afterwards we would go for tea in the cafe, passing through the nearly unpopulated halls housing the ship propellors and steam engines with the spitfires hanging overhead, and have cream cakes which invariably made me ill. Later, when I was a teenager, Oxford Street and the Charing Cross Road became the new treat, visiting the Games Centre to buy the latest roleplaying supplement, Forbidden Planet for comics and Foyles for those books that you could never find anywhere else. Even now, going to see a play or a musical at the National Theatre or Drury Lane still gives me a buzz.
But nothing on earth would persuade me to live there. In fact it would be a good working definition of hell. The sheer stress of getting around on the delapidated and inefficient public transport system, the overwhelming press of people living in a metropolis designed for one tenth the number, the graffiti and the grime, the traffic, the pollution, the noise... China Mieville, however, clearly loves it, for the dynamics of his fantasy city of New Crobuzon are essentially those of modern London, complete with railways, different ethnic communities living side by side (though his ethnicities are people with insects for heads, bird-people and human/toad hybrids), a government which rules from a building called the Parliament, slums and well-to-do areas jammed side by side, a polluted river running through. The similarities with modern London may partly explain why I didn't especially enjoy my visit to New Crobuzon, although there are other problems as well.
The main character is a large, fat scientist called Isaac Van Der Grimnebulin. We first encounter him in bed with his insect-headed girlfriend Lin (a major character in the first half of the novel who disappointingly fades out in the second). Isaac is contacted by Yagharek, a garuda (bird-man) who has had his wings cut off for an unspecified crime. He wants Isaac to come up with a device that will enable him to fly again. Isaac agrees to do so, but in the course of his researches unwittingly unleashes something that could destroy the entire city. He, Yagharek and a band of misfit friends try to put things right. Unfortunately, the government and the New Crobuzon equivalent of the mafia are in on the act...
The story is fine, and for once there is relatively little idiocy in the plotting. The baddies are intelligent and react in a plausible fashion to the actions of the heroes, making them much more formidable than the pantomime villains that are usually found in fantasy. The first half could have been pacier - given the small part that Lin ends up playing, her sections could have been cut, and there are some other places where slightly self-indulgent world- and character-building slows things down (for example, the lengthy descriptions as characters travel from one part of the city to another). Nonetheless, once things get going, the pages fly by - Mieville is good at action and the second half reads more like a thriller than a fantasy.
No, the problems with this book relate to setting, characters and theme. To take the setting first: despite the obvious amount of care and detail that has been lavished on it, New Crobuzon feels like a construct. In part this is because of the names, which are wonderfully euphonious and atmospheric - Salacus Fields, Murkside, Canker Wedge, and my particular favourite, Abrogate Green. However, they are not the sort of names that people would naturally have given parts of a city. Most place names either derive from people's names or from distinctive landmarks, and (in the UK at least) often have elements of foreign languages in them. The names here have none of these qualities. They were chosen simply because Mieville liked the sound of them.
Other features contribute to the sense of a constructed rather than evolved world. Despite being so obviously old, there is very little sense of history, with few curious buildings or statues that relate to events from the past. In this respect, New Crobuzon isn't like London at all - it feels more like a new world city like New York or Melbourne, with lots of surface variety but missing the deep sense of interconnectedness of the truly old. Also, New Crobuzon is presumably the capital of whatever country it lies in, but we get no feel for what the country around is like, nor for its geo-political relationships with other countries.
There is similar vagueness about technology and magic. The human-animal hybrids which populate the city are a nice if not particularly original idea, but I found myself wondering how they could possibly have come about. There is an intriguing hint in that the chief form of magic appears to do with manipulation of flesh, which presumably means that they were artificially created by powerful thaumaturges long ago, but if so they ought to have legendary status and Isaac, for one, should know about them. Likewise, the technology is somewhat arbitrary. The city is lit by gaslight suggesting a Victorian tech level, but there are also little robotic cleaning constructs and calculating devices of enormous sophistication that run on punched cards. There is no obvious history of technology, nor of magic. The result is similar to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - one feels that Mieville is arbitrarily creating the rules as he goes along to accommodate whatever flight of fancy has occurred to him, and not really worrying about whether all of these disparate elements could possibly have co-evolved.
Another feature that this book shares with JS & Mr N is that none of the main characters are particularly likeable. They are all somewhat self-obsessed and, fatally, they do not have a sense of humour. In fact, there is very little laughter in this book at all - grim and gritty are Mieville's watch words, and he seems to take particular enjoyment in describing stinks, ugliness and squalour, and the mean-minded and unpleasant people that it generates (one review aptly described his style as "thuggish"). Mieville is a socialist, which may explain why he considers that foul environments inevitably lead to foul people, but it simply isn't true, and his (presumably) beloved Londoners are a case in point. In general they are cheerful and humorous and always have been, even in the squalour and ordure of Victorian times and the horror of the Blitz. Mieville's characters, while grotesque and memorable, are too humourless to ring true.
New Crobuzon also suffers from what I call "Albert Square syndrome". This is an affliction that affects television soap opera characters, rendering them incapable of noticing that the rates of murders, rapes, assaults, gangsterism, divorces, adultery and unplanned pregnancies in their particular neck of the woods are several times those of anywhere else and getting the hell out. New Crobuzon has the same problem. It's such an unpleasant place that I can't understand why anyone would want to live there (I certainly wouldn't). When the evil is unleashed, Isaac does in fact consider making a run for it, but in a wholly unconvincing outburst of heroism he decides to stay and fight instead. This kind of character implausibility is why I dont bother with television soaps and, along with its apparent absence of anything significant to say, makes this book in my view rather less a classic than others have claimed. But then what do I know? Some people like living in London.