It's a short section, but it's one that illustrates my fundamental problems with the novel, things that have been evident to me since I started, but that haven't been dispelled by the subsequent writing, and that I haven't been able to tamp down. I care more about the things happening or shown at the margins of this novel than I care about the core characters and events. And despite the fact that he's a fine writer, Mieville spends vastly more time telling us things than showing them to us.
I think it was this description of the neighborhood near the Glasshouse was what really got to me:
It was cheap and not too violent, crowded, mostly good-natured. It was a mixed area, with a large human majority beside small colonies of vodyanoi by the quiet canal, a few solitary outcast cactacae, even a little two-street khepri hive, a rare and traditional community outside of Kinken and Creekside. South Riverskin was also home to some of the city's small number of more exotic races. There was a shop run by a hotchi family in Bekman Avenue, their spines carefully filed blunt so as not intimidate their neighbours. There was a homeless llorgiss, which kept its barrel body full of drink and staggered the streets on three unsteady legs.This, I think, is what I want to know about this universe. It reads to me like a description of a neighborhood like the ones where Coronation Street or Eastenders takes place. I'm curious to know about these people, how they came together, why they aren't living in the ghettos where most of their species gather, how they get along. And I want to know about them through their eyes, on their terms, rather than as places where a gang of elites—and they are elites, the scientist exiled from academia for his revolutionary thought, the accomplished criminal, the crusading journalist—pass through, that exists in this novel, for their purposes or obstacles, but not for itself. I'm tired of the anthropological descriptions of cactacae, of khepri, of vodyanoi. I want stories from within those communities, rather than tiny peeks through people who have left those communities in search of adventure, or as an act of explicit cultural rejection.
But I accept that's not the story we've got. I'm just yearning for something else. My larger problem, as it turns out, is with the writing. Some of this is plot-driven. As Isaac sneaks into the slake-moth lair, we find out that "He had seen the slake-moths. He had seen them feed. He knew what might be before them in the depths of this wedge of rubble." But the problem is, we know this too. And we know, from Mieville's sacrifices of minor characters, that it's probably going to happen to other people, too. There isn't any of the horror of the unknown. In a way, like Isaac, we've gone rather numb, and that's what keeps us going, we're able to endure all the bad things that are happening to the characters rather than being paralyzed by terror for them.
And some of it's just descriptive. When the Weaver attacks the slake-moths again, literally the first thing Mieville does is absolve himself of the obligation to try to write a really compelling scene:
It was an elemental scene, something way beyond human ken. It was a flickering vision of horn blades moving much too fast for a human to see, an impossibly intricate dance of innumerable limbs across several dimensions. Gouts of blood sprayed in various colors and textures across the walls and floor, fouling the dead. Behind the unclean bodies, silhouetting them, the chymical fire hissed and rolled across the concrete floor.What do flickering dimensions look like? Mieville has thought this through enough to decide that the Weaver and slake moths have different colored and textured blood but can't be bothered to tell us what those colors and textures are? What did Isaac feel watching it? Was it beautiful? What color is chymical fire? Do the bodies burn?
The reason that this is infuriating is that Mieville's capable of quite striking writing and description. When one of their company goes mad with grief, we get this terrific image: "The vanguard of the group were startled by this strange, darkly shining figure with hands crooked like a vengeful skeleton." But instead of trying to live up to this standard all the time, Mieville alternately chokes us on quality description or starves us of it.