This book is not so impressive as the other two I have reviewed here (at the time of this writing, you should be able to find both reviews simply by scrolling down the main page). While words like “clever” and “original” were the sort of thing to come to mind after reading King Rat or the more robust Perdido Street Station, the word that jumps to the fore after reading this collection of stories is “derivative”. They aren’t bad stories, really. “The Tain” definitely deserved all sorts of awards, and neither “Details” nor “Familiar” are the sort of thing that would have occurred to me in a million years, which is exactly the sort of thing good fantasy should be. I don’t want my expectations confirmed, I want them denied. I want surprises. But. But but but but but. “The Ballroom” was so straightforward a ghost story that I had it pegged from page two, and “Reports of Certain Events in London”, while executed competently (it was far too short) felt like nothing more than a knock-off of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. “Looking for Jake”, the title story, is actually one of the collection’s weakest, and will be familiar to anyone who has read the “World’s End” sequence of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, even though Miéville chooses a slightly different execution. The style of the piece is also remarkably off-target. It takes pages upon pages before the narrator reveals that it’s supposed to be epistolary, though it never quite feels like it is, and the bulk of the first half of the story is so abstract and circular that I’m surprised no editor ever had it excised for getting in the way of the story (which is exactly what it does). “Jack”, the only New Crobuzon piece in the collection, was not a disappointment, however, and it was good to see the story told from an unexpected point of view. “An End to Hunger” missed the mark by so wide a margin that I was almost unable to finish the story. I wanted to shout “no, you fool, the Internet doesn’t work like that, my grandmother could tell you the technology doesn’t work like that”, but I suppose it’s asking a bit much to expect an author (generally notorious Luddites), and a fantasy author at that, to know very much about computers. The rest of the collection is solid but ultimately forgettable, bringing nothing new to the table. I hope that this represents a toe in the water, or a kind of apprenticeship, like the stories in Pynchon’s Slow Learner, with Miéville realizing that, though he is a compelling writer of long-form fiction, shorter works are not at all where he shines.
Now, because it has been too long since I’ve read any of his work, and because I promised some Literature with a capital “L”, and because I’m spending the weekend with a friend at a comic book convention and I like deliberate incongruities, I will now be reading The Wild Palms, by the inimitable William Faulkner.
