Occasionally, I come across a novel where the world building is so exquisite that I’m perfectly content to soak in countless pages of atmosphere with little need for plot to push me along. I don’t think there’s any one genre that excels at this magic trick over the rest. I’m just as content on the desert planet of Arrakis as the mountains of Middle Earth or the surreal dreamscape of Joyce’s Dublin.

New Crobuzon, the setting to China Miéville’s epic novel, Perdido Street Station, is certainly an impressive piece of world building. The filth and squalor of the city streets and alleys overflow with glimpses of a dizzying array of life. There are demonic bureaucrats, mutated criminals, an omnipotent pile of trash, a giant interdimensional spider. Miéville seems to have an endless imagination for inventing characters and settings, and this wealth of ideas alone makes Perdido Street Station worth the price of admission.

Yet, despite the exoticism of New Crobuzon’s citizenry, it’s the mundane flats, urban decay, and over populated ghettos these creatures inhabit that provide footing in familiar territory for we earthly readers, giving Miéville’s city the texture and bustle of Charles Dickens’ London.

This whirlwind of detail is wonderfully paired with Miéville’s writing style. Often florid and baroque, Miéville uses a mix of arcane English and invented words, piling it all up in dizzying threads of purple prose that are the electric jolt which brings life to this monster of a story.

The novel is often described as an example of the subgenre of New Weird for its echoes of the pulp horror tradition the of early 20^th century. And while Perdido Street Station certainly possesses elements of HP Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, it’s the effluviant prose that most reminded me of those old-time masters of horror, albeit handled with the surer hand of a genuine wordsmith.

I could easily have spent all seven hundred pages of Perdido Street Station exploring back alleys and meeting the endless panorama of New Crobuzon’s inhabitants. The novel’s first half has a decidedly baggy plotline which follows a brilliant but awkward scientist and the forbidden love he shares with his humanoid insect girlfriend. There’s are also plot threads involving a mysterious bird man who seeks out our protagonist so as to regain the ability to fly, an unusual caterpillar that eats the dreams of those under the influence of a new drug, a mysterious force called crisis energy that our scientist protagonist wishes to harness. Honestly, nothing would have left me more satisfied than if Perdido Street Station had been little more than an enormous pile of red herrings wrapped together in beautiful prose.  

Instead, I was shocked to find my enthusiasm for the Perdido Street Station evaporate as the plot streamlined in its second half. For a book dripping with so much originality, the plot devolves into a surprisingly clunky by the numbers race to destroy a pack of monsters who lack the depth and personality of almost any of the innumerable nefarious minor characters we meet in this read.

Worse, as the story progressed it became clear that there were no rules guiding the world of New Crobuzon. Whenever our protagonists find themselves in a difficult situation a random solution presents itself from left field, draining any sense of urgency and defanging much of the sinister effect created by the story’s setting and character development.

As the story droned on, Miéville’s generous imagination wore out its welcome. I became suspicious that the book was something of a dumping ground for a backlog of character sketches and scene concepts the author had been accumulating for some time, which might have been fine had it not felt like the book had been front-loaded with all its best ideas. More than once I found myself wishing for a series of shorter novels based in New Crobuzon, maybe a collection of short stories, or even a postmodern avalanche of vignettes and sketches.

Defenders of this book far outweigh the critics, and it’s easy to understand why. Perdido Street Station showcases Miéville’s unique prose and vivid imagination in a truly original world. But the more time I spent in New Crobuzon the less alive it felt.

In all the best examples of world building it’s as much about the details left out as what is revealed. After all, it’s the gaps my imagination has to fill in when encountering some dark corner of a ruined landscape or an allusion to some lost history that really breathes life into a fictional world and fills me with the wonder of encountering an unknowable mystery.

The problem with Perdido Street Station is that it’s just too much of a good thing – like meeting a loquacious stranger who talks and talks until all their mystique has evaporated. Perhaps, Miéville would have better served his novel if he had reigned in some of his incredible imagination just enough to let the reader’s really take flight.

Whenever someone asked me how I was enjoying The Path to Power during the two months I spent lugging it around, I would inevitably tell them about the grass and soil of Texas Hill Country.

Fifty pages before the birth of Lyndon B. Johnson in this first volume of his definitive biography, Robert Caro profiles the very land on which the future president would be born and raised. Caro describes the verdant grass and gently rolling hills that lured 19^th century settlers into the isolated territory only to discover the land’s fertility was a deception, that the soil was rich but shallow, sitting atop a bedrock of limestone. It had taken centuries for Texas Hill Country to become verdant, but only a few short years to be ruined by agriculture.

At first it seems like a drastic, albeit beautifully written detour. But later, when Johnson’s father purchases a plot of land in a doomed attempt at becoming a farmer, the reader understands the foolishness of this decision as well as any neighbor must have.

In taking such care in describing the Hill Country, Caro provides unparalleled insights into the landscape Lyndon Johnson was born into, as well as a deeply nuanced understanding of his father’s failings – arguably the two most critical elements of the future president’s formative years.

Throughout The Path to Power this meticulous detailing is on display. On several occasions the character of Lyndon Johnson will slip away as vivid portraits are painted of historical figures both major and minor. The chapter on Samuel Rayburn, in particular, is a spectacularly vivid portrait that could be read as a stand-alone piece.

Admittedly, there were a few moments where I felt Caro’s obsessive research bogs down the book’s momentum. In particular, the wonky minutiae with which the political maneuvering, permitting and financing for the Marshall Ford Dam is retold felt maddeningly detailed, though I could appreciate the emphasis as a major pivot point in Johnson’s early rise to power in Congress.

But overall, Caro’s fastidious attention to detail is this biography’s greatest asset. By the time Johnson succeeds in wiring his district with electricity I experienced a vicarious sense of wonder for the Hill Country folk whose lives would be forever changed for the better. And the work that went into unearthing Johnson’s affair with Alice Glass, or Caro’s stitching together of the murky dealings that went into Johnson’s 1941 Senate campaign funding would make great stories in themselves.

In a 1999 interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Caro explained his evolution as a biographer, “I came to see that I wasn’t really interested in writing a biography to tell the story of a famous man. I realized that what I wanted to do was to use biography as a means of illuminating the times and the great forces that shape the times-particularly political power.” With The Path to Power Caro has done just that, writing an exhaustive but never exhausting examination of the first half of Lyndon Johnson’s life along with a staggering panoramic depiction of the events, places, and people of the future president’s life.

 The Path to Power only covers the very beginning of Johnson’s rise to power in American politics, and yet it is already without question the greatest biography I have ever encountered. It also – for its scope, its research, its beautiful prose – is shaping up to be one of the best pieces of writing I have ever experienced. All of Johnson’s greatest achievements and failures are still to come and the promise of being guided along the arc of this man’s political destiny by Robert Caro is about as exciting a literary summit to climb as I can imagine.