Well-Begun and All Done: Perdido Street Station

The book: Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

Opening: "Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth."

Ending: "I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man."

Infinite possibilities place a special burden on the writer of fantasy. In fantasy, anything can happen, but that doesn't mean that anything should. Writers must necessarily refrain from some flights of fancy, otherwise they risk ruining or cheapening their work.

Consider Lord of the Rings. It would have been eminently allowable for Tolkien to endow characters with the ability to travel instantaneously through time and space. Of course, that would have made Frodo's journey to Mordor far less arduous and, therefore, interesting. And the book would have been several hundred pages shorter.

At the same time, magical abilities and fantastical conventions must also be appropriately introduced so that, when they become necessary in the course of a narrative, the audience doesn't feel that the author is cheating. We hear that Jedi knights have some quasi-mystical powers before we first meet Obi-Wan Kenobi, so we are not overly bothered when, with a wave of the hand, he convinces a couple of imperial soldiers that those are not the droid's they're looking for.

China Mieville displays a fertile imagination in Perdido Street Station. The novel is set in the city of New Crobuzon, a multicultural metropolis inhabited by humans, intelligent cacti, beetle-headed women, sentient machines, and gigantic birdmen among others. The city faces an existential threat in the form of monstrous insects that drain their victims' psyches. Obviously, in order for the novel to have a plot, defeating these moths must entail more than just klomping them with the world's biggest fly-swatter. And with a theoretically unlimited arsenal of fantastic elements at his disposal, Mieville can come up with an exciting and narratively satisfying way for the heroes to battle the villains.

Mieville succeeds, but, without giving away too much, we can't help but feel that he falls back on something of a "cheat": A possible solution, a literal deus ex machina in fact, presents itself a little too conveniently. The reader feels as though the author has generated a solution to allow himself a way out of the narrative he has created. Which, of course, he has--that's his job. When the reader can see the plotting, though--can sense the man behind the curtain to which he should pay no attention--he feels somehow cheated.

None of which should dissuade anyone from reading this book. The characters are well-drawn, the book is packed with event and incident, and is quite the page-turner--no small feat for something over 700 pages long. And if one's only major complaint with a novel is that one can see the novelist's plotting, this is a small price to pay for a fantastic journey.