reviews: Watchmen, Inglourious Basterds, Perdido Street Station
1. Watchmen (film): First things first: I should preface this by admitting that if you think I'm late to the party with the film, well, I still haven't actually read the graphic novel at all. So I can't comment on the film as an adaptation, and everything I say here is based entirely on the film as source text.
When this came out at the cinema, none of my friends wanted to go and see it with me, possibly because I'm not sure I sold it very well - I sold it with what was interesting to me about it, the fact that it's essentially a deconstruction of a genre and the social contexts and impulses that produced it. Apparently this is not that much of a USP for people who aren't theory geeks, who knew? I talked galvani into renting it with me last night, though (with the promise that it may well be eminently MST-able, as indeed it turned out to be)...and I'm still not sure how else to sell it. It seemed to me very much a lit student's text (I would say film student, if it wasn't for the fact that Snyder's whole style of filming, pretty much, is very much in thrall to the sequential text & image structures of comic books), in the sense that it is a solid, clever, parody and unpacking of a genre and didn't really have much to recommend itself to me apart from the pleasure of cocking my head at it and thinking, hm, yeah, I see what you did there (except perhaps Ozymandias's rather pretty face). The pacing and balance of plot with backstory with character development was pretty poor; the acting was variable; it wasn't particularly exciting; the dialogue was often stilted with not enough effort made to make that feel like part of the parody.
But from that lit student's perspective, it was pretty satisfying. It was very coherent in what it did; there weren't many moments where I thought, doing that has fucked over or confused the critique/commentary you're trying to get out. In some respects, it was maybe even a little too in thrall to the integrity of its parody; as a means of setting up a moral grey area suitably hefty and troubling to end the film on (and I have to say, the dilemma of kill x number of people to save >x number of people is always a pretty good one, and I was impressed that the film just let it sit there and didn't give an easy answer), the end-game is obviously very effective, but as supposedly the best plan that the smartest man in the world could come up with, it is somewhat shit. And not shit in a way that is meant to expose and deconstruct the things that ~*even the smartest man in the world can't understand*~, just kind of shit. Short-sighted, and, as galvani pointed out, relying on an incredibly narrow, US-centric conception of war and peace. But that aside, I thought it offered a very competent and thorough deconstruction of the superhero genre, and I liked it for that.
What stopped me from loving it for that, however, is the fact that as a parody it was just that: competent and thorough. I said to galvani after about half an hour, and stand by it after watching the whole thing, that it's the sort of text I'd want to use to teach people how parody works and how to analyse it, because it was textbook in what it did - and as a result, I found it kind of obvious and predictable. If you had said to me, we are making a deconstruction of the superhero genre, and one of the tropes we're going to take to pieces is the scientist-who-gains-godlike-powers-after-a-physics-experiment-gone-wrong - well, I'd have written you Dr. Manhattan's story: alienated from other humans because of his suddenly radically different physicality and consciousness; haunted and almost paralysed into retreat and inaction by seeing just how much power he can wield over people. Same thing with Sally and Laurie: fourth-wall the ridiculousness of the outfits; enact a depressingly inevitable conclusion to the aggressive sexualisation of female superheroes; &c. &c. All the film's insights into and attacks on the superhero genre made sense and made me nod vigorously, but they didn't really blow my mind. So you're saying that a guy with unimaginable intelligence might have a God complex and something approaching narcissistic personality disorder, and that his attempts to improve the world might be alienatingly and amorally pragmatic. Really. Rorschach had an exceedingly troubled childhood that totally fucked up his ideas of punishment and justice. You don't say. Rorschach is named and costumed after a test involving the exposure of the subject's desires and psychological workings through what they project onto an abstract and endlessly interpretative image; this is pretty much an exact analogue for the function that characters like Rorschach generally serve in superhero narratives, and it's a very clever point to make but it's not a very exciting one. Again, so you're telling me that superheroes are an expression of more or less hidden desires and impulses on the part of their creators or readers. Well I never.
Maybe I am just too cynical, too genre-saturated, too genre-savvy to start with. Maybe it is only thanks to the influence and importance of the original graphic novel that I do feel I've been exposed to a lot of these ideas before. But I find it difficult to get excited about ideas like, if you took a realist, naturalistic look at superheroes they would all most likely have serious psychiatric problems, or, superhero comics treat women like shit, or, the kind of society that imagines superheroes is one of fear, reactionary-ness, and profound anxiety, or, most superheroes' idea of justice is ROYALLY FUCKED UP, or, the world isn't as morally black and white as it's portrayed in most superhero narratives. In moments, it made me feel more geek-excited - when it occurred to me that the film was both setting the Comedian up as absolutely batfuck nuts, and having him most frequently and clear-sightedly express the true nature of the world of the film; that made me think nice - but for the most part, I felt like its ideas, while they no doubt were revolutionary at the time the original graphic novel was written, were a little tired.
The other problem I lurkingly had with it is a problem I have with parody generally, which is that it's fundamentally a destructive, rather than a transformative, art form. All a parody can do is attack; it can't rebuild or move forward or make changes. And I love the savagery of parody, especially when it's being used to really go for something and expose how fucked up it is, which is what Watchmen did and I do love it for that. But. I have seen Watchmen accused of misogyny and homophobia, and the accusers told they're missing the point. Which I would agree to an extent they are; the film is a parody of fucked up attitudes, and as such is inevitably going to contain a lot of fucked up attitudes. And therein lies my problem with parody, and therein lies why I don't think people who call Watchmen sexist and homophobic should be entirely dismissed: but for a difference in tone and intent, in order to illustrate the sexism &c. in superhero films, in choosing to do so through parody Zack Snyder has unavoidably made a sexist superhero film. Obviously tone and intent are very important, but I do have some sympathy for the argument that in the final reckoning, what's there on the screen at times is exactly what would be there if the film had been made by someone who saw nothing whatsoever wrong with having women in skintight lycra and impractical leather boots in a film as eyecandy. Like I said, though, that's an inherent risk with parody, and I think it's too effective a mode of discourse not to use.
The final thing that struck me now I've seen it, though, is how utterly baffled I am by the fandom, in particular the fondness people seem to have for Rorschach. I'm not just talking the people who claim to identify with him - although I am baffled by them, much more so than I am by people who claim to identify with Light Yagami or similar, because Rorschach is clearly A FUCKING PSYCHOTIC TO AN EXTENT THAT I SINCERELY HOPE ONLY A VERY, VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE ARE - and I'm not just talking about the people who claim to fancy him - although I am also baffled by them, given that he is a) supremely physically unattractive, and b) lacking any remote trace of the kind of charisma that usually draws people to otherwise unpleasant characters. I am also talking about people who find him interesting as a character, because, well, really? Maybe he's more interesting and subtle in the graphic novel, but I found him kind of laughable, when I didn't find him repellent. His diary entries about the Filth of the City just made me lol, so much that I sort of figured I was supposed to. So he thinks humanity is fucked up. Wow, no one has EVER had that insight before; why don't you actually try working to make society a better place instead of just enacting your bizarre revenge fantasies out on a small subset of criminals. I couldn't relate to his moral compass at all, and actually found it consistently pretty childish and abhorrent.
All of that said, though, I am very glad I watched it; I did find it a very satisfying couple of hours; and I can see how important it must have been, even if in a climate where a massive mainstream blockbuster like The Dark Knight can handle the idea that superhero narratives are full of serious psychological issues waiting to be articulated, it feels kind of dated.
2. Inglourious Basterds: A friend of mine had a very interesting and entertaining rant at me the other day about how much she hates Quentin Tarantino, essentially because he's such a desperately cynical, pandering film-maker, who doesn't really have any stories to tell. I found myself nodding along in complete agreement, despite usually very much enjoying Tarantino's films - and in fact, it actually clarified for me exactly why I do usually like his films. The thing about Tarantino is that usually, he only ever makes films about making films - Pulp Fiction, for example, isn't really about anything other than the film it is; it isn't trying to say anything other than the fact that it is a film with unusual dialogue, unusual narrative structure, self-consciously iconic characters and scenes and images and music. Tarantino's films are the epitome of cynical po-mo smugness; unlike most people, however, I happen to be incredibly fond of cynical po-mo smugness, because I apparently have a brain sickness that makes me incapable of appreciating anything that isn't anxiously reflexive and self-conscious.
Inglourious Basterds is also a film about making films; it's actually the only Tarantino I've ever seen where this is literally true. It's a film about war films, about how war films construct the two sides of the conflict they're portraying, about how they use violence and what function (cathartic, vicarious, alienating) that violence performs for the audience, about how they produce cultural icons and frame and mediate history and structure narratives of major world events that come to circulate in the cultural consciousness.
Where it's different from most Tarantino films, however, is that when the genre of films you're dissecting and playing with is one that deals with fascism, the Holocaust, World War II generally, there's an awful lot more at stake than there is in a film like Pulp Fiction. Any clever-clever games that you play with shifting the audience's identification, messing with the film's moral compass, challenging popular narratives of events, lose their playfulness; they're still smart-arse games, but with a hell of a lot more weight and seriousness behind them. It is risky and it is difficult to try and interrogate the major cultural narratives of World War II, to deconstruct the popular understandings and constructions of heroism, evil, victimhood, the enacting of justice and morality, relative to it - because they are so very entrenched and stable in the sort of general cultural moral compass, if you can say something like that exists.
And I am surprised and impressed that Tarantino, whose films usually have nothing at stake but their own cleverness, was willing to touch that with a ten-foot barge pole. Inglourious Basterds is a smart-arse film, it is an irreverent film, it is a self-conscious film, but because of its subject matter, in being all these things it is also an unexpectedly brave film, and I kind of admire it for that. I admire it, too, for doing a solid, intelligent, thoughtful job with the risk it took - not only in the quality of the script, acting, the film-making generally, all of which were impressive, but in the consideredness and comparative depth and subtlety of its ideas.
I thought an awful lot of it - much more, I have to say, than I was expecting to; I didn't trust Tarantino to be able to pull off a black comedy about WWII without being offensive and went to see it primarily because I cannot resist Brad Pitt's acting when he's not taking himself seriously - and would recommend it.
3. Perdido Street Station: I picked up Perdido Street Station ages ago, but never really found the time or the inclination to tackle it. Having read and very much enjoyed Un Lun Dun, though, I wanted to give it another go (especially seeing as my main issue with Un Lun Dun was its shallowness, making me want to pick up some of Mieville's adult stuff), and I figured a week in miserable weather in the arse end of nowhere was probably as good a time as any to pick up an 800+ page novel.
My opinion of it in a nutshell was that I enjoyed it very much, and that it did what Watchmen didn't: presented me with ideas that really interested me and made me think - and yet all the way through, I found myself consistently mildly, nigglingly irritated by it.
I very much enjoyed the feel that the length of it produced (that's what she said, hur); it felt like spending a few days just living in New Crobuzon, the city, and it was a wonderful city to live in. The nature of the city he invented was always going to appeal to me, saturated with vitality and decay in equal measures, and I loved the basic kind of semantic matrix he used to create that impression, all the oozing, glutinous and gluttonous words running through it; on the other hand, recurrence of these words started, after many hundreds of pages, to feel more like repetition. Still, I was incredibly impressed by Mieville's worldbuilding; it felt a lot more thorough than a lot of sf I've read, and not only that, but not schematic in its thoroughness, much more organic and much more sensitive to the huge range of different forces (i.e. not just geography, or government, or technology) that shape a city, the cultures and communities that grow up within it, the people living in them and the experiences they have. I was less impressed by the uses to which he put it; a lot of the time, it felt like he was essentially producing direct analogues of contemporary social dynamics and issues, rather than more complicated estranged presentations of them, which made setting it in an extravagant invented world seem rather redundant. Bits of Mieville's invention really were eye-opening, though, and were excellent catalysts for really exciting ideas. I loved all the different kinds of consciousness he tried to explore, from the subtle and yet totally unbridgeable differences between the human and the garuda mindsets, to the radically different consciousnesses of the Weaver and the Construct Council; I loved generally that the nature of consciousness was such a prominent theme, and that Mieville chose to build an adventure plot based on the negotiation of abstract, intangible issues. Isaac's crisis theory was fascinating to me (I got embarrassingly flail-excited when he first revealed his plan for channeling crisis energy as a way to give Yagharek back his flight, and also when he was talking about how crisis theory intersected with his interest in the watercraeft), and managed to feel thorough and both narratively and intellectually compelling without actually explaining what the maths &c. involved was. All the discourses about the nature of art and the creative process that spiralled out from the invention of Lin's mode of sculpting were engaging and thought-provoking, and the central theme of justice and punishment was explored from a satisfyingly kaleidoscopic range of angles.
At first, too, I thought Mieville had a great facility for character. I fucking loved spending narrative time with Isaac; he was difficult, animated, generous, sweary, obtuse and abstruse, and I loved him not only because he was likeable (and when he wasn't likeable, he was understandable), but because he was an unusually satisfying and evocative portrayal of how a genius scientific mind would think, with all the problems that come with it (I loved the detail about what a fucking awful teacher he was). I found myself liking Lin less, but if anything she was even more interesting; her artistic sensibility was deeply engaging, the narrative of her complex, ambivalent relation both to the oppressive environment in which she grew up and the radical, activist commune to which she fled (and later left) was surprisingly complexly handled, and she had a bucketload of subtle, clearly well-considered on Mieville's part, realistic flaws (and they are surprisingly hard to find in characters). Every single side character was vividly drawn. And yet. In isolation, the fact that Isaac (male) is the scientist and Lin (female) is the artist is no big deal; in the context of general trends in fiction, it mildly irritated me. I would have liked to have seen a female scientist. I liked that Derkhan was casually queer, and also that she had a strong, emotional, platonic friendship with a guy, and yet, the main True Love was of course heterosexual. Which, of course, there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just a bit tired. I also felt that Mieville's facility for character generally seemed to desert him as his plot picked up; by the time Isaac, certainly, was thoroughly embroiled in the adventure narrative, it started to feel like he could have been anybody, like Mieville lost his grip on what made him him. The plot, on the other hand, impressed me more and more the more it picked up; it is rare to see a hefty adventure plot realised with such thorough, careful attention to all the different forces intersecting and interacting with the main characters' desire to overcome a particular obstacle, and like I said above, that involves such interesting concepts and themes.
And I hated the end. I liked that Isaac, Lin and Derkhan's stories didn't end easily, and that not everything was ok after they defeated the big bad. But I found the resolution of Yagharek's story incredibly anti-climactic, even though I appreciate that it was a final twist to the novel's discussion of justice, and I resented what happened to Lin - again, the end of Lin's narrative was something that in isolation, is unproblematic; in the light of just how many female characters end up denied so much of their agency in so many ways, I disliked that Mieville chose to make Lin yet another. I've read some of Mieville's commentary on it, and I really don't think he achieved what he was clearly setting out to do with it. Idk, I'm trying not to be spoilery, which is making me incoherent and obscure, so I think I'll abandon that line of rambling.
Still, I genuinely did enjoy it, and I got an awful lot out of it.
When this came out at the cinema, none of my friends wanted to go and see it with me, possibly because I'm not sure I sold it very well - I sold it with what was interesting to me about it, the fact that it's essentially a deconstruction of a genre and the social contexts and impulses that produced it. Apparently this is not that much of a USP for people who aren't theory geeks, who knew? I talked galvani into renting it with me last night, though (with the promise that it may well be eminently MST-able, as indeed it turned out to be)...and I'm still not sure how else to sell it. It seemed to me very much a lit student's text (I would say film student, if it wasn't for the fact that Snyder's whole style of filming, pretty much, is very much in thrall to the sequential text & image structures of comic books), in the sense that it is a solid, clever, parody and unpacking of a genre and didn't really have much to recommend itself to me apart from the pleasure of cocking my head at it and thinking, hm, yeah, I see what you did there (except perhaps Ozymandias's rather pretty face). The pacing and balance of plot with backstory with character development was pretty poor; the acting was variable; it wasn't particularly exciting; the dialogue was often stilted with not enough effort made to make that feel like part of the parody.
But from that lit student's perspective, it was pretty satisfying. It was very coherent in what it did; there weren't many moments where I thought, doing that has fucked over or confused the critique/commentary you're trying to get out. In some respects, it was maybe even a little too in thrall to the integrity of its parody; as a means of setting up a moral grey area suitably hefty and troubling to end the film on (and I have to say, the dilemma of kill x number of people to save >x number of people is always a pretty good one, and I was impressed that the film just let it sit there and didn't give an easy answer), the end-game is obviously very effective, but as supposedly the best plan that the smartest man in the world could come up with, it is somewhat shit. And not shit in a way that is meant to expose and deconstruct the things that ~*even the smartest man in the world can't understand*~, just kind of shit. Short-sighted, and, as galvani pointed out, relying on an incredibly narrow, US-centric conception of war and peace. But that aside, I thought it offered a very competent and thorough deconstruction of the superhero genre, and I liked it for that.
What stopped me from loving it for that, however, is the fact that as a parody it was just that: competent and thorough. I said to galvani after about half an hour, and stand by it after watching the whole thing, that it's the sort of text I'd want to use to teach people how parody works and how to analyse it, because it was textbook in what it did - and as a result, I found it kind of obvious and predictable. If you had said to me, we are making a deconstruction of the superhero genre, and one of the tropes we're going to take to pieces is the scientist-who-gains-godlike-powers-after-a-physics-experiment-gone-wrong - well, I'd have written you Dr. Manhattan's story: alienated from other humans because of his suddenly radically different physicality and consciousness; haunted and almost paralysed into retreat and inaction by seeing just how much power he can wield over people. Same thing with Sally and Laurie: fourth-wall the ridiculousness of the outfits; enact a depressingly inevitable conclusion to the aggressive sexualisation of female superheroes; &c. &c. All the film's insights into and attacks on the superhero genre made sense and made me nod vigorously, but they didn't really blow my mind. So you're saying that a guy with unimaginable intelligence might have a God complex and something approaching narcissistic personality disorder, and that his attempts to improve the world might be alienatingly and amorally pragmatic. Really. Rorschach had an exceedingly troubled childhood that totally fucked up his ideas of punishment and justice. You don't say. Rorschach is named and costumed after a test involving the exposure of the subject's desires and psychological workings through what they project onto an abstract and endlessly interpretative image; this is pretty much an exact analogue for the function that characters like Rorschach generally serve in superhero narratives, and it's a very clever point to make but it's not a very exciting one. Again, so you're telling me that superheroes are an expression of more or less hidden desires and impulses on the part of their creators or readers. Well I never.
Maybe I am just too cynical, too genre-saturated, too genre-savvy to start with. Maybe it is only thanks to the influence and importance of the original graphic novel that I do feel I've been exposed to a lot of these ideas before. But I find it difficult to get excited about ideas like, if you took a realist, naturalistic look at superheroes they would all most likely have serious psychiatric problems, or, superhero comics treat women like shit, or, the kind of society that imagines superheroes is one of fear, reactionary-ness, and profound anxiety, or, most superheroes' idea of justice is ROYALLY FUCKED UP, or, the world isn't as morally black and white as it's portrayed in most superhero narratives. In moments, it made me feel more geek-excited - when it occurred to me that the film was both setting the Comedian up as absolutely batfuck nuts, and having him most frequently and clear-sightedly express the true nature of the world of the film; that made me think nice - but for the most part, I felt like its ideas, while they no doubt were revolutionary at the time the original graphic novel was written, were a little tired.
The other problem I lurkingly had with it is a problem I have with parody generally, which is that it's fundamentally a destructive, rather than a transformative, art form. All a parody can do is attack; it can't rebuild or move forward or make changes. And I love the savagery of parody, especially when it's being used to really go for something and expose how fucked up it is, which is what Watchmen did and I do love it for that. But. I have seen Watchmen accused of misogyny and homophobia, and the accusers told they're missing the point. Which I would agree to an extent they are; the film is a parody of fucked up attitudes, and as such is inevitably going to contain a lot of fucked up attitudes. And therein lies my problem with parody, and therein lies why I don't think people who call Watchmen sexist and homophobic should be entirely dismissed: but for a difference in tone and intent, in order to illustrate the sexism &c. in superhero films, in choosing to do so through parody Zack Snyder has unavoidably made a sexist superhero film. Obviously tone and intent are very important, but I do have some sympathy for the argument that in the final reckoning, what's there on the screen at times is exactly what would be there if the film had been made by someone who saw nothing whatsoever wrong with having women in skintight lycra and impractical leather boots in a film as eyecandy. Like I said, though, that's an inherent risk with parody, and I think it's too effective a mode of discourse not to use.
The final thing that struck me now I've seen it, though, is how utterly baffled I am by the fandom, in particular the fondness people seem to have for Rorschach. I'm not just talking the people who claim to identify with him - although I am baffled by them, much more so than I am by people who claim to identify with Light Yagami or similar, because Rorschach is clearly A FUCKING PSYCHOTIC TO AN EXTENT THAT I SINCERELY HOPE ONLY A VERY, VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE OF PEOPLE ARE - and I'm not just talking about the people who claim to fancy him - although I am also baffled by them, given that he is a) supremely physically unattractive, and b) lacking any remote trace of the kind of charisma that usually draws people to otherwise unpleasant characters. I am also talking about people who find him interesting as a character, because, well, really? Maybe he's more interesting and subtle in the graphic novel, but I found him kind of laughable, when I didn't find him repellent. His diary entries about the Filth of the City just made me lol, so much that I sort of figured I was supposed to. So he thinks humanity is fucked up. Wow, no one has EVER had that insight before; why don't you actually try working to make society a better place instead of just enacting your bizarre revenge fantasies out on a small subset of criminals. I couldn't relate to his moral compass at all, and actually found it consistently pretty childish and abhorrent.
All of that said, though, I am very glad I watched it; I did find it a very satisfying couple of hours; and I can see how important it must have been, even if in a climate where a massive mainstream blockbuster like The Dark Knight can handle the idea that superhero narratives are full of serious psychological issues waiting to be articulated, it feels kind of dated.
2. Inglourious Basterds: A friend of mine had a very interesting and entertaining rant at me the other day about how much she hates Quentin Tarantino, essentially because he's such a desperately cynical, pandering film-maker, who doesn't really have any stories to tell. I found myself nodding along in complete agreement, despite usually very much enjoying Tarantino's films - and in fact, it actually clarified for me exactly why I do usually like his films. The thing about Tarantino is that usually, he only ever makes films about making films - Pulp Fiction, for example, isn't really about anything other than the film it is; it isn't trying to say anything other than the fact that it is a film with unusual dialogue, unusual narrative structure, self-consciously iconic characters and scenes and images and music. Tarantino's films are the epitome of cynical po-mo smugness; unlike most people, however, I happen to be incredibly fond of cynical po-mo smugness, because I apparently have a brain sickness that makes me incapable of appreciating anything that isn't anxiously reflexive and self-conscious.
Inglourious Basterds is also a film about making films; it's actually the only Tarantino I've ever seen where this is literally true. It's a film about war films, about how war films construct the two sides of the conflict they're portraying, about how they use violence and what function (cathartic, vicarious, alienating) that violence performs for the audience, about how they produce cultural icons and frame and mediate history and structure narratives of major world events that come to circulate in the cultural consciousness.
Where it's different from most Tarantino films, however, is that when the genre of films you're dissecting and playing with is one that deals with fascism, the Holocaust, World War II generally, there's an awful lot more at stake than there is in a film like Pulp Fiction. Any clever-clever games that you play with shifting the audience's identification, messing with the film's moral compass, challenging popular narratives of events, lose their playfulness; they're still smart-arse games, but with a hell of a lot more weight and seriousness behind them. It is risky and it is difficult to try and interrogate the major cultural narratives of World War II, to deconstruct the popular understandings and constructions of heroism, evil, victimhood, the enacting of justice and morality, relative to it - because they are so very entrenched and stable in the sort of general cultural moral compass, if you can say something like that exists.
And I am surprised and impressed that Tarantino, whose films usually have nothing at stake but their own cleverness, was willing to touch that with a ten-foot barge pole. Inglourious Basterds is a smart-arse film, it is an irreverent film, it is a self-conscious film, but because of its subject matter, in being all these things it is also an unexpectedly brave film, and I kind of admire it for that. I admire it, too, for doing a solid, intelligent, thoughtful job with the risk it took - not only in the quality of the script, acting, the film-making generally, all of which were impressive, but in the consideredness and comparative depth and subtlety of its ideas.
I thought an awful lot of it - much more, I have to say, than I was expecting to; I didn't trust Tarantino to be able to pull off a black comedy about WWII without being offensive and went to see it primarily because I cannot resist Brad Pitt's acting when he's not taking himself seriously - and would recommend it.
3. Perdido Street Station: I picked up Perdido Street Station ages ago, but never really found the time or the inclination to tackle it. Having read and very much enjoyed Un Lun Dun, though, I wanted to give it another go (especially seeing as my main issue with Un Lun Dun was its shallowness, making me want to pick up some of Mieville's adult stuff), and I figured a week in miserable weather in the arse end of nowhere was probably as good a time as any to pick up an 800+ page novel.
My opinion of it in a nutshell was that I enjoyed it very much, and that it did what Watchmen didn't: presented me with ideas that really interested me and made me think - and yet all the way through, I found myself consistently mildly, nigglingly irritated by it.
I very much enjoyed the feel that the length of it produced (that's what she said, hur); it felt like spending a few days just living in New Crobuzon, the city, and it was a wonderful city to live in. The nature of the city he invented was always going to appeal to me, saturated with vitality and decay in equal measures, and I loved the basic kind of semantic matrix he used to create that impression, all the oozing, glutinous and gluttonous words running through it; on the other hand, recurrence of these words started, after many hundreds of pages, to feel more like repetition. Still, I was incredibly impressed by Mieville's worldbuilding; it felt a lot more thorough than a lot of sf I've read, and not only that, but not schematic in its thoroughness, much more organic and much more sensitive to the huge range of different forces (i.e. not just geography, or government, or technology) that shape a city, the cultures and communities that grow up within it, the people living in them and the experiences they have. I was less impressed by the uses to which he put it; a lot of the time, it felt like he was essentially producing direct analogues of contemporary social dynamics and issues, rather than more complicated estranged presentations of them, which made setting it in an extravagant invented world seem rather redundant. Bits of Mieville's invention really were eye-opening, though, and were excellent catalysts for really exciting ideas. I loved all the different kinds of consciousness he tried to explore, from the subtle and yet totally unbridgeable differences between the human and the garuda mindsets, to the radically different consciousnesses of the Weaver and the Construct Council; I loved generally that the nature of consciousness was such a prominent theme, and that Mieville chose to build an adventure plot based on the negotiation of abstract, intangible issues. Isaac's crisis theory was fascinating to me (I got embarrassingly flail-excited when he first revealed his plan for channeling crisis energy as a way to give Yagharek back his flight, and also when he was talking about how crisis theory intersected with his interest in the watercraeft), and managed to feel thorough and both narratively and intellectually compelling without actually explaining what the maths &c. involved was. All the discourses about the nature of art and the creative process that spiralled out from the invention of Lin's mode of sculpting were engaging and thought-provoking, and the central theme of justice and punishment was explored from a satisfyingly kaleidoscopic range of angles.
At first, too, I thought Mieville had a great facility for character. I fucking loved spending narrative time with Isaac; he was difficult, animated, generous, sweary, obtuse and abstruse, and I loved him not only because he was likeable (and when he wasn't likeable, he was understandable), but because he was an unusually satisfying and evocative portrayal of how a genius scientific mind would think, with all the problems that come with it (I loved the detail about what a fucking awful teacher he was). I found myself liking Lin less, but if anything she was even more interesting; her artistic sensibility was deeply engaging, the narrative of her complex, ambivalent relation both to the oppressive environment in which she grew up and the radical, activist commune to which she fled (and later left) was surprisingly complexly handled, and she had a bucketload of subtle, clearly well-considered on Mieville's part, realistic flaws (and they are surprisingly hard to find in characters). Every single side character was vividly drawn. And yet. In isolation, the fact that Isaac (male) is the scientist and Lin (female) is the artist is no big deal; in the context of general trends in fiction, it mildly irritated me. I would have liked to have seen a female scientist. I liked that Derkhan was casually queer, and also that she had a strong, emotional, platonic friendship with a guy, and yet, the main True Love was of course heterosexual. Which, of course, there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just a bit tired. I also felt that Mieville's facility for character generally seemed to desert him as his plot picked up; by the time Isaac, certainly, was thoroughly embroiled in the adventure narrative, it started to feel like he could have been anybody, like Mieville lost his grip on what made him him. The plot, on the other hand, impressed me more and more the more it picked up; it is rare to see a hefty adventure plot realised with such thorough, careful attention to all the different forces intersecting and interacting with the main characters' desire to overcome a particular obstacle, and like I said above, that involves such interesting concepts and themes.
And I hated the end. I liked that Isaac, Lin and Derkhan's stories didn't end easily, and that not everything was ok after they defeated the big bad. But I found the resolution of Yagharek's story incredibly anti-climactic, even though I appreciate that it was a final twist to the novel's discussion of justice, and I resented what happened to Lin - again, the end of Lin's narrative was something that in isolation, is unproblematic; in the light of just how many female characters end up denied so much of their agency in so many ways, I disliked that Mieville chose to make Lin yet another. I've read some of Mieville's commentary on it, and I really don't think he achieved what he was clearly setting out to do with it. Idk, I'm trying not to be spoilery, which is making me incoherent and obscure, so I think I'll abandon that line of rambling.
Still, I genuinely did enjoy it, and I got an awful lot out of it.