I’ve read most of Miéville’s books, and they’re a bit hit or miss. He’s a talented writer on a sentence by sentence basis, and that’s sometimes a problem: He gets so enthusiastic about how good he is that he has a tendency to go on and on, conjuring forth an exciting miasmatic milieu just by insisting on it. That worked really well in Perdito Street Station, where we were in a very alien city, but this one is in London.
And it’s a really exciting read! It’s propulsive and interesting and scary and fun. Lots of plot twists I didn’t see coming. Nine thumbs up.
But: Spoilers ahead! And you shouldn’t read the rest of this if you ever intend on reading the book, which you should if you like Miéville and haven’t yet.
But! It has also more than a whiff of just being ridiculous. We’re talking London, right, and not some imaginary fantastic city, so Miéville have to big up current cultural phenomena like drum and bass and raves into something magical and mysterious, and it’s like *lifts eyebrow*. Especially since this was published past the tail end of jungle as a cultural phenomenon… But it’s also things that make a nerd go “well, echshully”, like rats being so dirty, and there’s pages and pages and pages about how filthy rats are, and presumably everybody these days know that rats are pretty clean mammals, as mammals go — so the protagonist not cleaning himself for weeks because he’s now “a rat” is like… what. There’s also the inherent ridiculousness of the Big Villain — I was thinking “surely not, that would be too risible” and then it turned out that it was. And! The Big Final Showdown had exactly the same problem as the first season of Jessica Jones had — and the Supervillain’s power is basically identical: 1) Why not invest in ear plugs, and 2) why not get a gun. Or a knife. Or anything! Don’t just go in with nothing else than your naked hands to take him out!
What I’m saying is is that this book doesn’t just require you to suspend your disbelief a bit, but put it on hold for the entirety of the book. If you start to think about anything that’s happening, you can’t help yourself (and I’m speaking on behalf of everybody) starting smirking and chuckling, and that’s not the effect Miéville was after.
I think! I may be wrong!
But I thoroughly liked reading this book, and I’d put it above a bunch of other Miéville books.
King Rat (1998) by China Miéville (buy new, buy used, 3.56 on Goodreads)