Iron Council by China Miéville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “They are always coming.” “We were, we are, we will be.” Following Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002), China Mieville's third Bas-Lag novel, Iron Council (2004), occurs at least 20 years after the events of the first book. All is not well in New Crobuzon, the powerful, vast city-state featured in Perdido Street Station. The city has been locked in an endless war against Tesh, a rival city-state on the other side of the world where the laws of physics and magic are different; horribly wounded veterans are sapping morale; the brutal militia are clamping down on insurrectionists; factions (like the xenophobic bowler-hat wearing Quillers) are attacking inhabitants they dislike (like the scarab-headed Khepri); and gangsters are ever active. What is the Iron Council? It takes many pages to find out. That's because we first read a lot about a merchant called Cutter in the wilderness leading a small band of insurrectionists on an epic journey trying to catch up with the man he loves, Judah Lowe, a powerful golemetrist seeking the Council, and then about a naïve laborer called Ori in New Crobuzon leaving his all talk and no action ("too much yammer, not enough hammer") dissident group to join the rebel crime lord Toro. Then we plunge into a lengthy flashback (the best part of the novel) relating how about twenty years ago Judah became an idealistic autodidact golemetrist. Eventually we learn that a visionary New Crobuzon tycoon was pursuing his holy mission to push his Transcontinental Railroad Trust across the continent from coast to coast when the workers (including Remade slave laborers), camp followers (including prostitutes), and assorted TRT scientists and mages, mutinied over absent pay, took the train, and turned it into a “feral perpetual train,” pulling up track behind and laying it down before, unbuckling the past and making the future, making a contingent moment of railroad, “a rolling democracy. A Remade arcadia”: Iron Council. The novel is full of Mieville’s fertile imagination, usually at work making monstrous chimera, whether natural or artificial. His chimerical imagination drives his approach to genre, as this novel combines genres like epic fantasy, science fiction, horror, western, exploration adventure, political fable, crime caper, and same-sex romance. Technology rubs shoulders with thamaturgy, “normal” humans kiss Remade humans, and divine and semi-divine beings show up now and then. I like his exploration of the science and magic of golemetry (an intervention in the natural still state of inanimate matter so as to shift it into another form that moves with a kind of sentience), his conception of the perpetual train “renegapolis,” his audacious attempt at a climax interruptus, his politicizing of things like love, theater, war, justice, and capitalism, his avoidance of cheap sentimentality, his refusal to make his readers feel good, but instead to challenge them and provoke them and stir them up in constructive ways. Mieville can write. When he gets going on a poetic riff, whether sublime or profane, he really goes: "Elsie remembered the air burials she had heard of among northern tribes, women and men of the tundra, who let their dead rest in open coffins under balloons, sent them skywards through the cold air and clouds, to drift in air streams way above the depredations of insects or birds or rot itself, so the stratosphere over their hunt lands was a catacombs, where explorers by dirigible encountered none but the frost mummified dead." He fashions myriad cool, grotesque, and or beautiful things, like a monk who literally trades something he/she knows in return for something hidden or lost, the Stiltspear marsh people who chant their prey still, a "susurrator" who controls people by whispering in their minds, five-fingered military handlingerer parasites who wear animal or human bodies, elementarii who command elemental monsters, kinetiphage motion demons who gorge on sounds, and golems made of shadow, light, air, sound, and time. Mieville details all those and many more with a feverish poetic flair. In fact, that becomes a problem. As Cutter muses at one point when he’s traveling through the Cacotopic Stain, a dread unmapped region where land and air and time are sick, “where monsters are made . . . a viral landscape . . . of pathological parturition," "We don't even see it no more. . . You can get used to the most monstrous absurdity." So Mieville's profligate imagination for monstrous chimeras begins to numb, as when he describes a sublime and scary moonlight elemental and then botches it by making it a fish-bear-rat-horned-firefly-deathmoth thing. Moreover, although New Crobuzon is a vivid creation, a vibrant and decadent city with districts, towers, trains, repressive government, and motley population comprised of garden variety humans, arcane races (including cactus people, aquatic people, and beetle people), the Remade (criminals sent to punishment factories to gain all manner of grotesque animal, insectoid, and machine appendages), and singers, scientists, thamaturges, laborers, dissidents, merchants, militia, and so on we have been there before in Perdido Street Station, and its coolness wears a little thin here. And although Cutter and Judah are great (and sf-fantasy novels could use more homosexual or bisexual main characters like them), Iron Council hosts fewer compelling characters than Perdido Street Station and The Scar. People who like Mieville’s first two Bas-Lag books should like this one. People new to Mieville should start with either of the earlier books. People who like weird sf that melds multiple genres, who like to view the world as a political creation, and who appreciate rich prose should like this book. The audiobook reader Gildart Jackson does a professional job voicing all the many different kinds of characters in different kinds of moods. View all my reviews
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