Iron Council (Bas-Lag)

First and foremost, it should be said that I am a huge fan of China Mieville's work: while I have only read his three Bas-Lag novels (this, and  Perdido Street Station  and  The Scar ) I wholly admire his bold, complex narratives and vast imagination. He's been dubbed a member of a writing movement called "The New Weird" (including Jeff Vandermeer, among a few select others), and the title does a pretty adequate job of detailing their most telling trait.If you've never read Mieville (or have, but not any of the Bas-Lag novels), I think you might do well to start with PERDIDO first. Though the novels can be read on their own, that novel might provide some necessary background to the dissension and unrest in this one.I wholly admire this work, but I must be honest: I did not like it quite as much as the other Bas-Lag novels. This has much to commend it, but it drags at times, particularly at the beginning and, while one expects a Mieville novel to bounce back and forth between narratives, the narratives were not of equal strength--some are good enough to be their own novels, while some (like the first chapter) were confusing and, well, kind of dull. Additionally, several of the characters were difficult to "know." Judah, a self taught golem wizard, and Ori, a revolutionary who bordered on terrorism, were two main characters who remained out of touch for me. For key, important characters, I didn't understand them as I felt I should have.But...WOW. What a story. Mieville has more creativity and passion and graphic clarity than SO many other writers it's almost criminal. His stories are so rich, his vivid details so clearly displayed, his action scenes so graphically intense that he draws the breath out of me. While this story is indeed a story of fantasy, wherein some men and women have powers far beyond others, and there are certainly acts and deeds that go well beyond the capabilities of the workaday world, yet Mieville's strength is in creating a world in which such moments are drawn from the same earth that you and I belong to. There is such power in his descriptions that his it all makes an organic sense, a plausibility.There is SO much that goes on in this tale; the main, titled portion involves a trainful of refugees who choose to escape to a region of the world so feared that NO ONE in his right mind would go there. How they get to the pivotal point that they must escape, and how they manage that escape...well, it's just a great demonstration of an imaginative genius. And the portrayal of the warring state of the city of New Crobuzon--a dismal, wretched metropolis that is not unlike throwing New York City and Calcutta into a blender and setting it on Puree.The Iron Council itself--the name given the trainful of escapees--is Mieville's clearest expression of his own political belief. Here, socialism is given its fullest expression, and it WORKS: though it is not without its blemishes, the men and women (most of whom were prostitutes) and Remades (criminals of the State whose physiques were grotesquely re-engineered as punishment) all work together for the common good. There is no status here other than chaverim: comrades. The "Iron Council" becomes a myth to all outsiders, but in their own real sense they last for decades as a truly functioning socialist community.Here, too, Mieville tackles homosexuality...I cannot remember his approaching the subject before in the other Bas-Lag book. It is not handled sensationally, just as an element of plot, to explain and enhance a fuller spectrum of relationships.ONE ADDITIONAL NOTE, and I cannot stress this enough: if you can, acquire and read whatever Mieville book you possess on a Kindle. One of the most amazing things about this author is his vocabulary, and scarcely a paragraph will transpire without his slipping these darlings in. Whether it's "piceous" or "inspissate" or "byssus" or "dweomer" or any one of a million others you'll be VERY glad all you have to do is tap the word to find out its meaning. I bought my own hardback novel in this particular case and I rued that very fact with every word I stumbled across.But it's not just show. Mieville's preternatural ability to use unusual, arcane language to express the exact thing he's looking for goes beyond mere descriptive wordplay. No; they go beyond mere narrative and become synthesizers of mood themselves, imparting the scene and the entire novel with a bizarre, almost unfathomable depth of atmosphere. This is true other-ness...this is the novel - be it the New Weird, or fantasy -- as pure escape. It is a word painting using no broad brush, but an exactitude of expression unlike any other.

When IRON COUNCIL ends, it brings both THE SCAR and PERDIDO STREET STATION to a close with it. The third and final book in China Mieville’s Bas-Lab trilogy picks up a buried theme in the previous two installments and runs wild with it. Looking back, all three books were about history—how it’s made, how meaning is made from it, how much of what really happens goes unknown and undocumented—but IRON COUNCIL puts this theme front and center.The eponymous Iron Council is a small society of mutinous railroad workers. Years ago, they hijacked a train bound to connect New Crobuzon and other major cities and rode it into the wilderness, laying track as they went and picking it up behind them. The Iron Councillors are anarchists, living collectively, living in rapt defiance of where they come from, and back in New Crobuzon they are a symbol of hope that sometimes the poor and downtrodden win.IRON COUNCIL is a split narrative that follows Judah Low*, a golemist who helps create the Iron Council in the first place; Cutter, a wounded cynic whose desperate love for Judah Low drives him into the center of things; and Ori, a young radical caught up in things he doesn’t understand back in New Crobuzon.** This is a big book, full of plot. There is a war, and an uprising, and vigilante justice, and a secret spy, and a strange monk who goes missing in pieces. All of the plot gravitates around the turmoil in New Crobuzon and the role the Iron Council plays in that—both as a catalytic symbol and as a group of real people who must decide to return to the city or keep running from it.IRON COUNCIL is a deeply political book. It seems very clear to me that Mieville’s own politics seeped through to the pages here, that there is perhaps more of him in this book than in other ones. Having been in radical politics, I recognized a lot of the underground and fringe elements: arguments about the pitch and tenor of the paper, debates on the efficacy of guerrilla actions versus collective decisions that spun around and around. And in many ways, this is Mieville’s most utopian novel, too. He takes care to paint the Iron Councillors as real people grappling with real struggles, and they are not perfect. But he writes them with such love and admiration that it’s impossible not to get swept up in the romance and potential of their lives and actions.The book ends on a strange philosophical question: when we reify history, when we relegate it to the realm of stories and divorce it from our day-to-day reality, what purpose does it serve? Is the idea of a thing enough? Here is a quote from the last page:"Years might pass and we will tell the story of the Iron Council and how it was made, how it made itself and went, and how it came back, and is coming, is still coming."But if the Iron Council never arrives, if it’s always a potential and never a reality, then is what it brings a false hope? What is the role of history? How should it guide us? Is it better to freeze things before they have a chance to fail with the idea that they could have succeeded rather than let it play out and deal with the trauma of a defeat? The book doesn’t answer these questions, only dredges them up. Judah, Cutter and Ori all have very different perspectives on these ideas, on the role of ideas in praxis to begin with. I have kept chewing over all these questions for weeks after I finished the book. To call IRON COUNCIL thought-provoking is an understatement.*I see what you did there with that name, China Mieville.**It is a very male-centric book. There is a secondary character, Ann-Hari, who I adored. She had all the agency I wanted Bellis Coldwine in THE SCAR to have. Ann-Hari starts as a whore, and emerges as a leader, first among the whores (with whom she organizes strikes) and then as a prominent and influential figure in the Iron Council itself. Though we meet her and know her first as a love interest of Judah’s, she quickly becomes much more than that and exists as herself outside of that relationship. The end to her story, more than anyone else’s, was deeply affecting and horrifically tragic. It’s worth reading this book for her alone, but I couldn’t help but wish she had been moved to the forefront.

It's Mieville. You came here to read about New Crobuzon and the world -- ok, you get a pass there. What a shame it's locked behind one of the most dense, self-indulgent writing styles around.Mieville invents a new word every page, litters in a dozen 10-letter-plus english dartboard picks, and calls it a day until the next page. Unreadable garbage designed to stroke his ego and make it as difficult as possible to navigate his story. The "Ulysses" of his books. Completely unnecessary.The characters are either shallow or draw your utter contempt; with the major character described in early going as "cynical" and then completely failing to show any such worldview; another beatific man of mystery who is arrogantly inscrutable and unlikeable (and happens to change his mind every so often, very useful so we can follow the plot -- yuck!); a revolutionary city-dweller who dies off-screen; another who 50 pages from the end who turns out to be a SURPRISE! traitor. Just horrible all around.Don't waste your time with this book. I read it to the end and regret it.

3.5/5 • Once again Mieville displays his trademark creative and literary flair. IRON COUNCIL brims with ideas, so much so in fact that it sometimes seems as though he’s struggling to cram them all in. As with the other Bas-Lag novels, this is outlandish stuff. And I love it for that. Mieville has an imagination to die for. He creates worlds that are mindboggling not only in their strangeness but it in their vividness. His is a fertile mind, that’s for shizzle. So why only 3.5/5? Well, when compared to The Scar, and Perdido Street Station, IRON COUNCIL has a less fulfilling story. It just isn’t quite as compelling as it could be and feels rather ponderous at times. Also, the two parallel storylines didn’t come together as effectively as I would have liked. Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t a dull or bad story it’s just not up to Mieville’s usual standard (although it does have a rounded ending, unlike some of his other books). Good, but not his best.

I raced Through PSS and The Scar - loved them and couldn't not put them down. I have been reading Iron Council for ages. I'm only third through and am seriously struggling. I have no idea what is going on. It's really hard to follow the plot and as far as I can see it's a load of disconnected people having random sex. I have no idea what CM was aiming for on this but if he had me hooked on the first two he has totally lost me on this one.

Mieville's conclusion to the Perdido Street Station trilogy is dense, magical, bewildering and brilliant. Out in the wastes beyond New Crobuzon a rag tag band searches for the legendary Iron Council, a train taken by rebels into the wilderness when the City refused to pay their wages. In New Crobuzon unrest is rife and the people are in covert revolt against their authoritarian rulers, themselves at war against the mysterious Tesh, and the two strands come into painful contactMieville introduces us to an incredible cast: Remade, people punished by the authorities by being surgically altered to be part machine; their rebel counterparts the fReemade; magicians; golems; all manner of creatures part bird, bat and insect; stomach churning spells, the visceral urban grit of New Crobuzon and the bewildering landscape outside where smoke turns to stone petrifying its victims and nothing is fixed. And all this in an opaque bewitching language that often had me reaching for the dictionary. Worth the work though.

If you are a fan of China Miéville, then you will know what to expect. Without a doubt, some of his writing is truly brilliant, and some of his plot twists are equally unexpected.However, sometime it seems the reader is drawn in a nightmare labyrinth of prose. I have yet to decide whether this is a flaw, or simply just the author writing at a level that is beyond me.Having said that, this book struck me as being more accessible that previous novels by this author.Treat this as an exotic meal, complex, and not entirely digestible, but at the same time, novel and the opposite of bland, and I am sure that you will appreciate the read.