Perdido Street Station is built on sweeping themes. Everything in the book springs from clash and conflict; the uncontrollable energy when two opposing forces meet and create a strange paradox. The hero of the novel, the unconventional scientist Isaac van der Grimnebulin, spends much of the narrative trying to harness this power, which he calls Crisis Energy.

As much as Isaac, Perdido Street Station is about the city of New Crobuzon. A great deal of the book, probably too much, is spent describing its bizarre streets and buildings. Like many fantasy novels, there's a detailed map at the beginning. New Crobuzon is the site of the biggest paradox: the meeting of magic, technology and humanity.

On the one hand, there are overhead railway lines, cameras, household robots and a variety of cyborgs, while on the other there are humanoid bird, frog insect and cactus races, mages summoning representatives of the devil, telepaths practising astral projection, and a mad, omnipotent giant spider. There are few problems in New Crobuzon which can't be solved by either sorcery or mechanics, and this genre-melding meeting of steampunk and fantasy is like nothing I've ever read before. This alone makes Perdido Street Station an interesting read.

At the beginning of the book, Isaac meets a visitor from a desert continents away, one of the rare Garuda, a race of nomadic bird-people. He has committed a crime, unrevealed until the painful ending, and has had his wings cut off in punishment, turning him into an ugly parody of his previous majestic form. He asks Isaac to build something to make him fly, and Isaac turns to Crisis Energy. But in research, he accidentally releases an evil that terrorises New Crobuzon, and that he feels compelled to destroy. Sadly, this evil is one of the most unoriginal aspects of the book, but it is still a good villain.

His insect lover, Lin, also receives a commission: to build a sculpture of a freakish crime lord, Motley. Motley's body, an indescribable combination of every type of limb, tissue and organ found on the planet, is another terrifying paradox.

The reader discovers a lot about the citizens and practices of New Crobuzon. There are the hideous Remade, people condemned to mechanical manipulation in the punishment factories, bonded with machines or animals to make something far from human, sometimes for a purpose and sometimes a judge's idea of a joke. They have a champion, Jack Half-A-Prayer, the fRemade or the Man'tis, a hook-handed terrorist.

There are the Vodanyoi, anthropormorphic frogs who can mould water like clay so it keeps a form. There are the Kepri, insect people whose females live as slaves to the tiny, mindless, rutting males. There is the Weaver, a spider transformed by an unpredictable and violent magical force called Torque into an intelligent being who flits between dimensions and acts only to make the world match his incomprehensible aesthetic standards.

Not all the ideas are as amazing and innovative as those, but there are many more like them which turn the book into a joy to read. The writing helps: although some descriptions of the urban setting are ponderous, the dialogue, external and internal, feels natural while the narration is often gripping. There is occasional awkwardness, like his irritating overuse of the word 'ostentatious' and similar minor problems, but it barely detracts from the book. I have to admit I learnt a few words in the reading of Perdido Street Station: vocabulary like 'didactic', 'palimpsest' and 'valedictory' is more esoteric than I am used to.

I can't say the characters are excellent. The mercenary adventurers introduced later in the book are cliched, and even the main characters like Isaac have uneven and uncomplex personalities, which is surprising for a writer of Mieville's talent. But this hardly matters.

I can only recommend Perdido Street Station. At seven hundred pages it's hugely long, and not that absorbing until the action accelerates about half way through. But it's undoubtedly worth it, all the way up to the surprising conclusion.

Recommended: Yes