Update on Perdido Street...
Jul. 11th, 2011 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitchen_kinkSo, I've finished Perdido Street Station, about which I posted so sideways-enthusiastically the other day.
I found the whole thing weirdly pleasurable, not necessarily in a train-wreck-can't-look-away sort of way that was going to be my first analogy, but rather in a perverse, intense, viscerally pleasurable sort of way, the same way I sometimes enjoy extremely dark sexual fantasies, or reading Clive Barker, or watching something like 28 Days Later.
My favorite thing, which I loved unreservedly, was the Weaver. Oh, the Weaver! I've gotten over a great deal of my arachnophobia in the past few years, by sheer force of will. So his spider-form, although described in great and terrifying detail, didn't bother me much; it was especially mitigated by the fact that he kept showing up and being a worthy foe to the much more horrifying slake moths. I loved his sing-songy monologues, his human hands and the way he would scoop up the main characters and carry them through the web, his obsession with scissors and the sound they make. I loved the idea of the Web itself: the actual fabric of reality, and the Weavers, like Anansi or the Fates, assigned to tend and mend and make more beautiful. He reminded me a lot of the Fey: pure, unfiltered consciousness and unconsciousness; total unpredictability; capriciousness; weird, immense power; a dangerously playful and changeable love for other beings. His final appearance, having turned a fear-paralyzed soldier's rifle into glass and then playing noughts and crosses with him in the wooden floor, was absolutely classic.
The thing that bugged me, though, was akin to what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coraline alluded to in comment to my last post, though she was speaking about Iain Banks: the tendency of "horrible things happening to unsympathetic people for no good reason."
Now, I wouldn't put it exactly that way, nor would I use the phrase "unrelentingly grim," as another commenter did, though I can see why one would. I actually grew to like some of the characters, morally flawed and sometimes utterly broken as they were. I certainly rooted for fat, irascible Isaac. Derkhan, so fierce and fragile. Yagharek, the broken bird-man, whose formal, florid speaking style grew on me and whose pain I felt for. And especially, especially the khepri artist Lin, who may be the only innocent, the only pure light in the entire book.
What I hated was how, in the end, everyone was either morally bankrupt or destroyed beyond repair. Isaac and Derkhan, who, already battered by their circumstances, perform the unforgivable in order to destroy the moths, then turn around fail to forgive their friend the Garuda. Yagharek, whose crime is saved for the end of the book, and whom the reader has been tricked into loving before he is unmasked as utterly guilty of something few readers could see him the same way after knowing. And Lin - the artist, the innocent, probably the only character I would call lovely, is destroyed in the most horrible way possible: left to live, with half a mind, stumbling and babbling and drooling and no longer able to create art or to love.
I enjoyed the book, and will probably read more. But sometimes, in cases like this, I think, why does the author hate us so much?
I found the whole thing weirdly pleasurable, not necessarily in a train-wreck-can't-look-away sort of way that was going to be my first analogy, but rather in a perverse, intense, viscerally pleasurable sort of way, the same way I sometimes enjoy extremely dark sexual fantasies, or reading Clive Barker, or watching something like 28 Days Later.
My favorite thing, which I loved unreservedly, was the Weaver. Oh, the Weaver! I've gotten over a great deal of my arachnophobia in the past few years, by sheer force of will. So his spider-form, although described in great and terrifying detail, didn't bother me much; it was especially mitigated by the fact that he kept showing up and being a worthy foe to the much more horrifying slake moths. I loved his sing-songy monologues, his human hands and the way he would scoop up the main characters and carry them through the web, his obsession with scissors and the sound they make. I loved the idea of the Web itself: the actual fabric of reality, and the Weavers, like Anansi or the Fates, assigned to tend and mend and make more beautiful. He reminded me a lot of the Fey: pure, unfiltered consciousness and unconsciousness; total unpredictability; capriciousness; weird, immense power; a dangerously playful and changeable love for other beings. His final appearance, having turned a fear-paralyzed soldier's rifle into glass and then playing noughts and crosses with him in the wooden floor, was absolutely classic.
The thing that bugged me, though, was akin to what
coraline alluded to in comment to my last post, though she was speaking about Iain Banks: the tendency of "horrible things happening to unsympathetic people for no good reason."Now, I wouldn't put it exactly that way, nor would I use the phrase "unrelentingly grim," as another commenter did, though I can see why one would. I actually grew to like some of the characters, morally flawed and sometimes utterly broken as they were. I certainly rooted for fat, irascible Isaac. Derkhan, so fierce and fragile. Yagharek, the broken bird-man, whose formal, florid speaking style grew on me and whose pain I felt for. And especially, especially the khepri artist Lin, who may be the only innocent, the only pure light in the entire book.
What I hated was how, in the end, everyone was either morally bankrupt or destroyed beyond repair. Isaac and Derkhan, who, already battered by their circumstances, perform the unforgivable in order to destroy the moths, then turn around fail to forgive their friend the Garuda. Yagharek, whose crime is saved for the end of the book, and whom the reader has been tricked into loving before he is unmasked as utterly guilty of something few readers could see him the same way after knowing. And Lin - the artist, the innocent, probably the only character I would call lovely, is destroyed in the most horrible way possible: left to live, with half a mind, stumbling and babbling and drooling and no longer able to create art or to love.
I enjoyed the book, and will probably read more. But sometimes, in cases like this, I think, why does the author hate us so much?
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Date: 2011-07-11 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-11 09:11 pm (UTC)