China Mieville, King Rat, The City & the City, Perdido Street Station

 In the last few months, I read three novels by China Miéville: King Rat, Perdido Street Station, and The City & The City. I'd been hearing for ages that I'd love his writing (from people who were absolutely correct), so when a friend suggested we have a book club and start with King Rat, I jumped on it. All three are fantasy, though one is contemporary urban fantasy, another Steampunk, and the third is set in a sort-of parallel world. They differ in style, tone, and setting, but all are compelling, consistently creative, and somewhat creepy. But what really tied them together for me was a focus on vision -- on what we see and what we don't, or won't.

King Rat is set in London, roughly when it was published (1998), but primarily in the sewers and slums. I was startled when I realized that the decayed and dangerous neighborhood south of the Thames, where much of the action occurs, was the same now-trendy, upscale neighborhood where I'd just spent a few weeks. Prince Harry apparently hangs out at one of the local bars, regularly (though this, of course, does not improve the area). The book sets two age-old enemies against one another: King Rat (who asserts that he is a rat, and lives and eats like one, though he is human is shape) and the greatest of all rat catchers, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Along the way, we meet Anansi the Spider King (similarly, at once a spider and human) and the Bird King Loplop (borrowed from the art of Max Ernst, of all places). The main character, Saul, learns of his rat heritage and, without changing his appearance, accepts his linage and becomes a rat. Outer appearance is not inner ontology. A whole parallel world opens before him, complete with alternate codes of conduct and Other moralities.

The City & The City, for me the most interesting of the three, also centers on parallel worlds. Here, two cities coexist in space and time -- they are superimposed on top of one another, as if each were the other's palimpsest. Set in an unnamed Eastern European country, in our own present world, these parallel cities draw attention to the ways that different groups can live side-by-side without ever acknowledging one another's existence, though they are both defined and granted meaning by their ever-unseen Other. The plot unfolds as a police procedural, but, gripping though this element is, the main issue here is the fracture, the gap that divides a city from itself.

Finally, Perdido Street Station is something of a sprawling genre exercise in Steampunk fantasy -- everything hisses and pops, with boiler-powered robots, hybrid creatures, and the stench of a retro-futuristic London-esque city. There is great fun in the inventiveness, even if, in the end, the plot seems to get a bit away from Miéville. The cactus-people in their giant greenhouse dome, the interspecial love affair between a bug-woman and a human man, the Remades punished for legal transgressions via horrifying reconstructive surgeries, all create a fascinating atmosphere that is, like the cities of The City & The City, really the protagonist of the novel. They are all at risk of being captured by the hypnotic, terrible beauty of giant, carnivorous moths that bring into question the role of vision, and the horror of beauty.

Read all three. For me, onward to The Scar!