I started writing a bit about Perdido Street Station just to get some of my thoughts down and ended up getting carried away into a long piece because it’s a masterpiece, so I thought it was worth sharing here. I read the book around 5 years ago but I still think about it to this day, so I’ve had a while to consider my thoughts on its notoriously divisive, disturbing ending. I have more thoughts on this subject, particularly in terms of how it plays into the tradition of Gothic literature, particularly the sort of urban epic typified by books like Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, but I’ve written enough for now. Spoilers below.

Though I’m not sure it qualifies as conventionally “scary” the last few chapters of Perdido Street Station are some of the most viscerally uncomfortable, emotionally draining fiction I’ve ever read. The sheer degree of mental and physical turmoil the protagonists are put through - and the fact that not only is there no real escape, but none of them deserve the suffering they get (not entirely - that caveat being part of the horror), and the most innocent among them suffer worst - really makes it painful to read. In any other book, especially a fantasy story, all their pain and loss would serve some grand purpose as a sacrifice for the greater good or a way to redeem them for past mistakes. It would be worthwhile, or at least meaningful. But here, there’s just a bunch of unfortunate souls being forced into a truly existentially horrific situation and having to pay a steep price to survive.

After finally defeating the slake moths that have destroyed so many lives, the heroes end up getting no reward or credit for saving the city and are instead forced to go into hiding. You could say heroism is its own reward, except they’ve had to sacrifice their own morals by killing an innocent person to stop the monsters.

Even so, at least they survived, right? Well, yes, but Isaac probably wishes he didn’t now that he’ll have to spend the rest of his life caring for his girlfriend, who is left permanently mentally disabled right at the last second. On top of that, his love for her compels him to abandon one of his best friends, whose plight was the original cause of all this suffering and who Isaac had promised to help.

I think it’s Mieville’s choice to portray all the conflicting perspectives in the finale that makes this work. We can’t feel triumph for the deaths of the slake moths, because we get to see through their eyes at the very end and remember that they’re just lost, confused animals trying to survive in an unfamiliar environment, and being killed by the same people who put them there.

We can’t feel happy for Isaac, Yag and Derkhan’s survival because of how intensely he describes their guilt over Andrej’s death and Lin’s mental condition, with particularly heart-breaking passages about Isaac’s frustrated inability to make love because the woman he loves no longer has the mental capacity to understand sex, and how she, a brilliant artist, will never create anything again. Even worse is the part just before her mind is eaten, when Isaac warns her not to look at the moths, but she does anyway, and Mieville describes in perfectly rational terms why she would ignore him - because she has a naturally curious, inquisitive mind, and couldn’t conceive of his warning as anything but a metaphorical reminder, not a literal instruction. In a way, his words might have only encouraged her to look even more than if he said nothing, but what else was he supposed to do? And what was she supposed to do, with no point of reference or experience for the situation she found herself in? Who, suddenly encountering an apparently mortal threat, wouldn’t assess the situation and look at the source of the danger?



Finally, you would think it’s impossible to feel sorry for Yagharek, revealed to be a rapist. We can at least be proud of Isaac for sticking to his morals even in the face of such despair, and refusing to show lenience to a heinous criminal just because he personally likes him. Yet we’ve been periodically hearing from Yag’s point of view for the whole book. He has been a steadfast ally and friend to Isaac. He saved Lin from death even if he couldn’t save her mind. When we hear from him last, we see how Isaac’s choice to leave him has hurt him to his core, and get to hear exactly how his gruesome, mutilating punishment originally occurred, how he accepted it, and how he’s now willing to further destroy his body just to find a new life of some kind. He is clearly a changed person; yet he is trying to circumvent the punishment he accepted. Yet could anyone accept the loss of such a fundamental part of their being as wings are to a bird? We hear, too, directly from Yagharek’s ‘victim’, who pointedly refuses to be labelled as such. Yet can we say Isaac is wrong, either for abandoning Yagharek or for viewing Kar’uchai as a victim? No, not when we see how Isaac’s thought process goes – how he feels that to help Yagharek would be an implicit endorsement of the same torture his own girlfriend experienced, and especially not when we think of the very same crimes in our own lives, and how we should respond to them. Even so, though Yagharek’s crime seems more-or-less equally reprehensible by both human and garuda standards, if we insist on regarding Kar’uchai as a victim of rape as we understand it, her will and agency are further violated.



And so we’re left feeling nothing but the deepest, most profound loss. Maybe worse than physical pain and death, the loss of certainty in our beliefs and our understanding of the world, the horror of innocent people going through hell for nothing. So yeah, this book is one of the greatest works of fantasy ever written. It’s also almost unbearably dark.



And man, I will never get over that final line, “…ships for whom New Crobuzon was just one step on a journey.” As well as its diametrically opposed counterpart from the epilogue, “I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.” What a poignant, fitting way to wrap up one of the most unconventional books I’ve ever read.

