Perdido Street Station begins with Isaac dan der Grimnebulin, a scientist in the steampunk-Victorian world of Bas Lag. Isaac, fat and brilliant and of questionable standing in the scientific community of New Crobuzon, is in the midst of working on something big -- so-called crisis energy -- when he is visited by Yagharek, a bird-man whose wings were taken from him as punishment for a crime that remains unrevealed until the last pages of the book. Seeking to regain flight, a defining power for a garuda hunter, he asks Isaac to return him to the skies.  Isaac sees an opportunity to help Yagharek and also test his newfound theories. In the early stages of his research, studying different animals, he comes into possession of a strange grub, which, unbenownst to him, was smuggled out of the innermost government research facility.  The grub hatches into an indescribably dangerous monster, a slake moth, and the main characters' troubles begin. 

To be fair, his story has many other layers. Woven into the overarching narrative are Isaac's relationship to Lin, a scarab-headed human-insect hybrid, Lin's own dangerous liaison with a mutant crime-boss, the oligarchic politics of the city's power elite and its response to the growing slake-moth problem, and the ever-present class tension between workers and bourgeosie. Mieville's open Marxist politics certainly inform the book's world.

You could say that Mieville courts chaos (or, perhaps, crisis) rather than causality in his story: the disparate plot threads are brought together almost randomly. Isaac and his cohorts' direct involvement with the slake-moth terror is entirely coincidental, the result of a petty clerk's greed in selling government property for personal profit. Yagharek's decision to aid them is based solely on his own coincidental deal with Isaac. This is almost certainly intentional: both Isaac's "crisis" research as well as the role the Weaver, effectively an inter-dimensional spider, have to play both speak to an awareness on the author's part of chaos theory and its effect on events.

But despite all these admittedly interesting details, the core plot around which all others revolve is the city's plight in the face of a bunch of nasty monsters. Perdido Street Station is a creature movie, albeit a very creative one.

Despite my general tone (which, I'll admit, is somewhat questioning), this is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem I had completely committing to this book may be a problem with me as a reader, not the story itself. The story is a small one, a tiny blip in the history of Mieville's world, a few weeks' worth of terror and excitement and trouble for a sprawling city with a long past, and perhaps I'm not used to that. It is, after all, a secondary world fantasy (as Mieville himself describes it), but it is not epic in the sense most fantasy readers are used to.  It is narrower, tightly drawn, constrained to the thoughts and concerns of a group of characters whose actions and inactions mostly effect their own situations and, at the book's climax, the situations of a city of people. The world is not in jeopardy, necessarily. The slake-moths are powerful, but universe will not necessarily crumble if they are not stopped -- though the city might founder. One could argue that since New Crobuzon is essentially the most important part of the civilizations that Mr. Mieville describes in his Bas Lag books, the fate of that city is indeed an epic question, but really the story contains very little of the over-wrought, world-shaking themes that are epic fantasy's bread and butter.

 I enjoyed the book, but it challenged me -- which is good. Its focus on character worked. Bracketing the storyline with Yagharek's internal dialog worked particularly well as a plot device, and added an element of the poetic into an often overwhelming gritty tale. The novel works far better if the reader is able to distance himself from any preconceptions of what constitutes fantasy fiction and cease comparing the story to fantasy conventions. I enjoyed it, and it will stay with me, for the story is a haunting one. 

While at times the author gets a bit carried away in his own descriptive odes to his steampunk Gomorrah, begging a little narrative restraint, Perdido Street Station is a founding accomplishment and a gauntlet for the minds of any staid reader of fantasy. Its effect may not be revelatory, but with this novel Mr. Mieville struck out in a bold new direction that undoubtedly adds complexity to the genre as a whole.