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Iron Council
The world of the New Crobuzon city-state is loosely based on the European industrial revolution's "steam age", mixed together with an extraordinarily inventive range of fantastic features. People are "remade" into strange forms in punishment factories, there are all kinds of nonhuman sentients -- cactus people, insect-like kephri, and more -- and there are a diverse range of magics. The Mayor and Parliament rule through a brutal Militia, but revolutionary factions abound and a draining war with Tesh is fueling discontent.
Cutter leads a band of insurrectionists from the Caucus, looking for the golem creator Judah. They fight a series of battles as they travel across a war-torn landscape, seeking the semi-mythical Iron Council, a group of railway workers who rebelled and escaped into the wilderness. Meanwhile Ori is involved with the shifting revolutionary factions in New Crobuzon. He joins one of the more violent groups, which eventually launches a plot to assassinate the Mayor.
Much of the "colour" of Iron Council comes from politics, with allusions to historical groups and events, most obviously to various socialist and anarchist movements and to the Paris Commune. It attempts to harness the pathos and power of revolutionary myth and history, but the result is mostly poor pastiche, nowhere approaching the drama of real history. The historical links are weak, often mismatched with the peculiar features of New Crobuzon, and unable to carry the sentiment Mieville tries to invest them with. And there's not enough background for anyone to actually care about the New Crobuzon revolution in its own right: Iron Council has neither actual political philosophy nor social detail nor real people.
Another annoying feature of Iron Council is that everything is subservient to the special effects of the moment. At one point, for example, we read:
"With a thumb of chalk, Spiral Jacobs drew the shape that had given him his name, whispering while he did, and it was of astonishing perfection, a mathematical symbol. And then there were smaller coils coming from its outer skin, and Jacobs ran his hand over it and walked on.But though Ori and Jacobs continue to roam the city, the rain never features again -- it's just a completely ad hoc device to highlight the mysteriousness of the spiral symbols. This is a trivial example, but this kind of thing recurs at different levels throughout Iron Council: strange wondrous monsters are invented, new magics deployed, characters introduced and then disposed of, new words coined -- all to help enhance a single encounter, battle, scene, or piece of dialogue.It began to rain as Ori reached the mark Jacobs had made. It did not smear."
Mieville's characterisation is weak. The three central characters manage to get less and less interesting as time goes by, to the point where the deaths of two of them are of no moment. The plot and Mieville's dazzling invention hold Iron Council together and kept me reading to the end, but the overall effect is, apart from a few novel ideas, unmemorable and unlikely to bear rereading. It was no doubt unwise of me to expect more, but the fuss about Mieville and the recommendations of friends had raised my hopes.
Note: I haven't read Mieville's earlier books set in the same world -- Perdido Street Station and The Scar -- but Iron Council is entirely self-contained.
You can purchase Iron Council from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Tbe group weblog Crooked Timber had a mini-symposium on China Mieville and Iron Council a little while ago, including a long reply from Mieville.
(Referrer free) link to Amazon's list of books by China Mieville
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First off, for those of you new to China Mieville, I would recommend that you begin with "Perdido Street Station" (or "King Rat"), followed up by "The Scar", and only then tackle "Iron Council". While the three books don't form a trilogy in the traditional sense, they nonetheless draw on shared themes and a common setting and history. As such, while "Iron Council" can certainly be read and appreciated by a newcomer to Mieville's writing, there are numerous small references and commonalities that will be missed.
.com bubble of the late 1990's. However, Mieville has made it abundantly clear in numerous interviews that he has no interest in spreading his political views (he is a Socialist who has run for Parliament) through his writing, and that holds true here. Rather, these elements serve to ground the story in a believable reality, which allows the reader to accept at face value the fantastic elements. Moreover, even as he subverts everything that is a "norm" of fantasy, Mieville also casts his own views in a realisitic light. For example, the political activists (with whom he obviously sympathizes) frequently make capricious, even brutal decisions, and display very un-liberal traits such as disdain for homosexuals.
Fans of Mieville, however, will find in "Iron Council" perhaps his most nuanced and sophisticated writing to date. As usual, the author defies genres, and has produced what would best be described (if one was forced to use labels) as a gothic-western-political-thriller. At the same time, he continues to subvert traditional fantasy elements as well as co-opting elements from other traditions and grounding them in his reality. However, Mieville has also tackled a more challenging structural approach in this novel, as he uses three different voices and two time periods that, while connected by plot threads are separated by decades. Furthermore, the chronologically earlier section comes 130 pages into the book, which in the hands of a less gifted writer would be horribly jarring, but which Mieville pulls of with style.
The primary story (which is elaborated upon by the flashback) is set some twenty years after the events of Perdido Street Station, and finds New Crobuzon at war with distant Tesh, with discontent at home mounting as the casualties mount and the economy falters. It is a time of turmoil and political dissent bordering on civil war; as options are weighed, one man, Judah Low, goes in search of a near mythical construct whose time may be at hand, Iron Council. To say more would risk severe spoilers, but the real joy of "Iron Council" is that the plot is served so deftly by the underlying themes, and vice versa.
And those themes are legion, the most obvious one being New Crobuzon's war with Tesh as a parallel with the Iraq war. Likewise, there are economic factors that are akin to the bursting of the
However, as I said, these groundings are mere jumping off points for a much more intriguing exploration, for at its heart "Iron Council" is an exploration of change/history. The groundwork for this is laid in Judah's ability to create golems, which Mieville describes as an intervention, a decision to change the un-living to living. Once the reader recognizes this metaphor, Mieville's intent becomes clear as he considers industry, politics and war (among other things) as interventions into the status quo, as forces for change. In so doing, Mieville quite rightly takes a long view of history in which right and wrong become blurred by the law of unintended consequences. There is a symmetry in his world, almost karmic in its nature, in which actions in the past rebound in unexpected ways in the present. The driving force of history for Mieville is the individual, but as such, he recognizes the fundamental instability this introduces into his novel. People change, there motivations change, and as such, tipping points can never be quite predicted, and will often radically diverge from the expected path.
A friend of my Mother used to work for the NY Times in their book review section so I have a number of advance copies of books. They usually look like something printed up at Kinkos, slightly smaller than a hardcover, stabled binding with a papercover and no, or black and white cover art. It usually comes with a disclaimer. "This does not represent the final work" etc.
I have an advance copy of Anne Rice's "Memnoch the Devil" with a duplicated page and some typos not in the first edition. I've always wondered if it was worth something.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
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Iron Council is Mieville's third book in the world of Bas Lag. The second -- The Scar -- is the best of the bunch. Mieville let the plot get away from him in Iron Council and he didn't flesh things out enough.
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