By: China Mieville Publisher: Del Rey Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 576 Publication Date: July 26, 2005 Release Date: July 26, 2005 Studio: Del Rey
Amazon.com Review: China Miéville's novel Iron Council is the tumultuous story of the "Perpetual Train." Born from monopolists' greed and dispatched to tame the western lands beyond New Crobuzon, the train is itself the beginnings of an Iron Council formed in the fire of frontier revolt against the railroad's masters. From the wilderness, the legend of Iron Council becomes the spark uniting the oppressed and brings barricades to the streets of faraway New Crobuzon. The sprawling tale is told through the past-and-present eyes of three characters. The first is Cutter, a heartsick subversive who follows his lover, the messianic Judah Low, on a quest to return to the Iron Council hidden in the western wilds. The second is Judah himself, an erstwhile railroad scout who has become the iconic golem-wielding hero of Iron Council's uprising at the end of the tracks. And the third is Ori, a young revolutionary on the streets of New Crobuzon, whose anger leads him into a militant wing of the underground, plotting anarchy and mayhem.
Miéville (The Scar, Perdido Street Station) weaves his epic out of familiar and heavily political themes--imperialism, fascism, conquest, and Marxism--all seen through a darkly cast funhouse mirror wherein even language is distorted and made beautifully grotesque. Improbably evoking Jack London and Victor Hugo, Iron Council is a twisted frontier fable cleverly combined with a powerful parable of Marxist revolution that continues Miéville's macabre remaking of the fantasy genre. --Jeremy Pugh
Get lost in a different world ^ The style of the work allows the reader to go there and be there. To have an interesting tale to be involved in then becomes just a bonus. Good read. Read Perdido Street station first though -a work that complies with the same qualities.
Richly imagined, with a sharp Left sensibility, but slow, difficult, and overlong ^ There's nothing else like China Mieville's tales of Bas-Lag, the dark fantasy/horror world in which IRON COUNCIL takes place. New Crobuzon, the city-state around which these tales revolve, is an awful, horrible place, inhabited by cactus people, talking frogs, women with scarab heads, and the Remade -- people magically combined with animals and steam-age machines in the most bizarre and cruel ways imaginable. There are no cute little elves or faeries in Bas-Lag and no benevolent kings and princesses, either; instead, New Crobuzon is governed by a greedy and corrupt oligarchy that rules with an iron fist.
In IRON COUNCIL, a visionary business tycoon is trying to build a transcontinental railroad. When a protest over unpaid wages boils over, the men, cacatae, Remade, and prostitutes working on the railroad strike, and when the railroad calls in the vicious militia, they go on the lam. Now calling themselves the Iron Council, they escape temporarily, but the powers of New Crobuzon cannot let their defiance go unpunished. As revolt simmers under the surface of New Crobuzon, it may be time for the Iron Council to return and do their part to overthrow the oppressive regime.
One of the virtues of Mieville's work is that he takes the maxim "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto" ("I am human; nothing human is alien to me") and stretches it to its limit. He has empathy for all of his characters (except for the faceless killers of the militia, mostly), regardless of race (human, Remade, cacatae), religion, class, or sexuality, and regardless of how repellent they may be to our cultured, earthly, human, presumptively middle-class sensibilities. This is very much present in IRON COUNCIL.
On the other hand, the narrative in IRON COUNCIL is so twisted and Mieville's desire to keep the reader in the dark about what's going on is so strong that the first third-to-half of the book quickly becomes difficult to read. This problem is compounded by language that is often annoyingly difficult to parse. It is also aggravated by too little self-editing; neither the narrative nor the reader need so many details. Given these faults, many readers will consider quitting in the first half of the book. I was tempted, but by the mid-point of the book I had enough momentum going to pull me through to the end.
What I liked best about IRON COUNCIL were the moments of revolutionary ambivalence, where characters knew that the present order was unjust and oppressive, and knew that it had to change, but weren't sure what to do about it and more importantly were conflicted over which means the ends justified. Anybody engaged in social activism for a cause that's out of the mainstream knows the feelings and may even share some of the experiences of Mieville's characters.
IRON COUNCIL can be read as a standalone novel, but it is best read in order, after PERDIDO STREET STATION and THE SCAR. I recommend it, but not to those with little patience, allergies to writerly prose, authoritarian tendencies, or homophobia.
Read Something Else ^ All right, I picked this book up because it had been nominated for the 2005 Hugo. Iron Sunrise (By Stross), also nominated for the 2005 Hugo was brilliant.
Iron Council is not. Actually, it's just plain awful. It's impossible to figure out what is going on, who the different factions are, or why we should care about them. Worse, there is no explanation for the rules of how the planet works. It's a bad mishmash of fantasy and steampunk rather than science fiction. And it does not work as any of the above.
I'm on page 110 or so, and only because it was the only book I had on a business trip.
Don't waste your time with this one.
Bas-Lagomorph ^ The review by stnmikita almost exactly reflects my own view of Iron Council. Perdido Street Station and The Scar are exsquisite (PDS being the best). But I bogged down in Iron Council and did not finish it. I am re-reading PDS and enjoying it more than I did the first time, if that is possible. Out of my respect for Mieville I will go back and give Iron Council another go.
Stunning and original ^ This is the first book I have ever read by China Mieville. I picked it up by chance as a staff recommendation in a small but quality-centric bookstore in my city. It has become one of my top three or five favourite books of all time.
If I had to compare it to any book, I would say that it is not unlike Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" in that it presents complex ideas in shifting points of view with no clear moral high ground. I would liken Cutter to Genly Ai, and Judah Low to Estraven.
A large portion of this book is written in a style I am familiar with from Alan Paton's "Cry, The Beloved Country", and it is beautiful. I loved it when I read Paton's book in my first year in college, and Mieville's echo of it does not disappoint. It gives the story a sense of being otherwhere in time from the rest of the narrative. It's raw, immediate, the stream-of-conscious feels like listening to a story spoken aloud.
Thematically, this is a difficult book. I rate it 5 stars because I understand and identify with its ideas on a very deep level; they are pets to me, treasured toys of intellect, many of which make up a large part of how I define myself. This is not a clear-cut tale of good and evil. Indeed, it is never made wholly clear exactly WHY the government's corruption is so deplorable (I suspect it may be clearer to someone who has read the previous books; I have not, and do not feel that it takes away from the overall story). The heroes and villains of the story are difficult to assign and change often. In the end, this story is not about good and evil, or freedom vs. corrupt government. It is about the importance of myth, and the sacrifices of those who create it and become it. It is not an easy story to relate to or comprehend, but if you do -- if the weight of memetics is something you find worthy of investigation, if the questions of who has a RIGHT to be a savior or a revolutionary is something you wish to consider, you should read this book.
Other reviews have noted and criticized the homosexual/bisexual content of this book. I note it, because it is an essential part of what drives at least one of the main characters, but I do not criticize it. To those who would, I would advise you to reevaluate your outlook on humanity. Like Le Guin's "Left Hand of Darkness", this book challenges the traditional validity of romantic sub-plots and the roles played in relationships. There is a sort of convoluted "love story" carried throughout the book. It is tragic. It is unbalanced. It will confuse people who are tied to the notion that a love story is about a man and a woman. This love story ignores boundaries of gender, age, and even (sometimes) species. This book contains fairly graphic depictions of nontraditional sexual desires and acts. These are not, in my estimation, gratuitous. They are very human. They represent the basic truth that humans -- whether they are from Earth, from Bas-Lag, from Gethen, male or female or androgyne or Remade -- are human. They need. They hunger. They lust. There is no meaningful difference between those who hunger for one thing or another. We are all equally warriors, martyrs, lovers, and sacrifices in the end.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
