I found a lot of things about this section of the book either narratively unsatisfying or reflections of problems I've had with Perdido Street Station along the way. But I also think it's a reflection of the project Mieville's taken on with this novel, and I respect that.
In a lot of science fiction and fantasy, the heroes don't merely neutralize a problem. They take on a problem, and along the way, they make the world a better place. Luke and Han don't just blow up the Death Star, they begin weakening a tyrannical Empire that makes life worse for millions. Alanna of Trebond doesn't just kill Duke Roger, she makes Tortall a better place for women, sets the country on a path to a stronger ruler, and takes a stand for a more benevolent use of magic. Stories work this way because we want to believe in justice and progress. But they also condition us to expect it. We want satisfaction out of our fantasy, we want to see common people raised above their station, we want society to get a little bit better, at minimum.
Mieville is rejecting that need for satisfaction, for progress, for justice, for elevation. His characters are small figures. They are invisible to the city, and even in their greatest acts, on the margins of society. They will receive no recompense for their losses. The best they can hope for is to keep the city in neutral. That's profoundly unsatisfying, but what Mieville does in this chapter is dramatize it, show us that the characters feel some lack of satisfaction, some distance, some numbness. In a way, just as he rejects their importance and their potential, Mieville brings his characters closer to our experience of reading than he does at any other point in the book.
Take the title location of the story, for example. Early in the section, Isaac tells the Construct Council that getting to Perdido Street Station is important: "'Why do you not perform the operation here?' asked the avatar. Isaac shook his head vaguely. 'It wouldn't work. This is a backwater. We have to channel the power through the city's focal point, where all the lines converge. We have to go to Perdido Street Station.'" At last, it seems we're going to get a justification for the title of the novel. Something magical's going to happen at Perdido Street Station, our characters will get in touch with some sort of central power of the city. Except they never even make it there. "Picking the station was just something to tell the Council, to get out of the dump and away from it before...betrayal," Isaac thinks. "But he found himself wishing that they could plant themselves at the core of the station, as if there was in fact some power inhering in its bricks."
And Mieville makes it clear that his characters were always distant from the center of power and respectability in New Crobuzon. Whereas in earlier chapters, they were rebels, artists, choosing their isolation, now, they're just misfits: "They were interlopers here. This was not Dog Fenn or Badside or the Ketch Heath slums. There, they would have been invisible. They crossed the bridge nervously. They were hemmed in by its lively stones, surrounded by the sneers and jibs of shopkeepers and customers."
We never get a moment of heroic justification, either. This is a world with no swords in stones, no lightsabers. The characters' invisibility and seeming irrelevance is their strength. In this climax, Isaac brings down the slakemoths with what looks like junk, the ruins of his crisis engine: "Everything was battered. Dented, cracked and filthy. It was a sad pile. It looked like nothing at all. Rubbish. Isaac squatted beside it and began to prepare."
It's the same with the cable, the miraculous network the Construct Council's worshippers string across the city:
They moved the cable up and down the height of the brick or concrete, winding it past stains in the wall's structure, and joining twisting skeins of other pipes, gutterings and overflows, gas pipes, thaumaturgic conductors and rusting channels, circuits of obscure and forgotten purpose. The drab cable was invisible. It was nerve fibre in the city's ganglions, a thick cord among many.Even the man who is sacrificed to kill the slake-moths is irrelevant, anonymous even though he has a name, chosen by Derkhan because he seems sick enough to sacrifice but healthy enough to survive to the critical point. He doesn't matter. He's just useful. And after the operation is complete, it's Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek's tininess, nigh-irrelevance, invisibility, that allows them to escape:
They might have walked past Isaac and his companions a thousand times. there was an infinity of holes in New Crobuzon. There were far more hiding places than there were people to hide. Motley's troops never had a chance. On nights like that one, when rain and streetlamp light made all the lines and edges of the city complex—a palimpsest of gusting trees and architecture and sound, ancient ruins, darkness, catacombs, building sites, guesthouses, barren land, lights and pubs and sewers—it was an endless, recursive, secretive place.All of this is only possible if the characters aren't elevated. They can live as long as they don't become heroes of the common people, if they avoid becoming legends like the fascinating, frustratingly deus-ex-machina-like Jack Half-a-Prayer whose convenient appearance is a total waste by Mieville, a rendering of a fascinating legend boring by making him invincible and his motivations for intervention entirely obscure.
And of course, their victory is in maintenance of the status quo. New Crobuzon is no more just, no more secure, for their intervention:
The city moves without pause, of course, and there is no let-up for the nightcrews in the docks, or the battering of metal as late shifts enter mills and foundries. Brazen sounds puncture the night, sounds like war. Watchment still guard the forecourts of factories. Whores seek business wherever they can find it. There are still crimes. Violence does not dissipate. But the sleepers and the waking are not taunted by phantoms. Their terrors are their own.The only thing the city wins is responsibility for itself.
In a way, I thought, the contrasting perspectives of Derkhan and Pengefinchess as they say goodbye to each other beautifully dramatize the feeling we, as readers, have by the end of the chapter. The acquaintance has been glancing, the victory partial, futile, frustrating, null. And yet, there's some attachment. From Derkhan's perspective:
It made very little sense, Derkhan realized, to have begged Pengefinchess to help at this last stage of the hunt. Undoubtedly it had made things easier, but they could have managed without her, with the help of more of the Council's vodyanoi followers. And it made little sense to feel affected by her leaving, even if remotely; to wish Pengefinchess luck; to wave with feeling and feel a faint lack. The vodyanoi mercenary was taking her leave, was disappearing for more lucrative and safer contracts. Derkhan owed her nothing, least of all thanks or affection. But circumstances had made them comrades, and Derkhan was sorry to see her go.Pengefinchess feels even less sentimental:
Shadrach and Tansell were dead, and it was time for her to move on. In a vague way, she wished Derkhan and the others luck. They had been companions, though very briefly. And she understood, in a lax fashion, that there was a great deal at Stake. New Crobuzon was a rich city, with a thousand potential patrons. She wanted it to remain healthy....
I'll go up-coast, Pengefinchess decided, round the edge of the mountains. Through the Bezhek Foothills, maybe, and the outskirts of Wormseye Scrub. I'll head for the Cold Claw Sea. With the sudden decision, Derkhan and the others were transformed instantly in her mind, becoming history, becoming something over and done, something she might one day tell stories about.There's a value in that fleeting attachment, they both find, a lingering. They will all know that they participated in an extraordinary effort even if they reap nothing, or an exceptionally bitter harvest from it. They will have to live with that. And so will we. In a way, though, I wish Mieville had just ended the novel with this passage, which to me is a dramatization of what makes New Crobuzon random, and beautiful, and terrifying, and ultimately worth saving—in other words, the Weaver:
In the last room on the attic corridor, they found a militiaman sitting with his back to the wall, comatose and alone. A bizarre, beautiful glass flintlock lay across his lap. A game of tic-tac-toe was scratched in the wood by his feet. Crosses had won, in three moves.Except really, it's all for nought.