China Mieville, The Iron Council
Oct. 12th, 2006 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI just finished reading China Mieville's The Iron Council. There isn't much point to providing a synopsis of the book, that's not what this book is about, although I'll try. The Iron Council is once again set in mieville's New Cruzabon, that horrific city of twisted magics and desperate poverty, a neverending vision of the worst places ever described by Charles Dickens, overlain with the worst ugliness of Sinclair Lewis, heavily leavened with the amorphic horrors of Lovecraft and the human repugnance of Poe-- to that is what Mieville wants us to turn our eyes.
The story is roughly this: in Mieville's magical world, New Cruzobon sets out to cross the continent with a train. Drawing heavily on the stories of the actual transcontinental railroad, Mievville finds a historical period that rivals his 19th century London for the degredations it imposed on the common worker, and over that he imposes his own dystopic imagination. A railroad strike goes horribly awry and The Iron Council is born. The strikers steal the train and with a few dozen miles of track, torn up behind the train and laid down in front, they escape into the wilderness. New Cruzobon, driven by the ugliest of passions, cannot let them rest, and a twenty-year struggle to find and punish The Iron Council for its brazen theft ensues.
The story is also told from the point of view of New Cruzoboners themselves, and their suffering, and the adventures they have living with the legend of the Iron Council. There's an incredibly moving story of a member of a street gang who gets sucked into something bigger, and how much he changes the world of New Cruzobon with his actions.
Mieville never phones in a work. The Iron Council is an utterly poetic and literary masterpiece dedicated to making you cry for the downtrodden, the hopeless, the helpless, all the while convincing you that it'll never get better, that generation after generation of New Cruzoboners will live and die in the kind of misery that has lasted a lot longer it Mieville's fantasy world than it did in 19th century London or the American midwest. The heroes are heroic, the villains villainous, the victims undeserving of their fates, the stories told so beautiful that it takes a hard and brutal mental swerve to see just how sentimental and groundless Mieville's hopelessness really is.
Still, I recommend reading it, if only for the vocabulary lesson. Mieville's clearly in love with his Oxford. I had to look up: inselberg, serein, cerecloth, atrabilous, cirri, byssus, solfatara, bezique, nacre, banausic, aleatoric, loess, talus, guttersome, sere, weald, banyan, dolomite, swale, batholith, peneplain, corrie, pampas, chapparals, and rincon. And I'm sure I missed some. (And yes, I wrote every one of them down in my notebook.)
The story is roughly this: in Mieville's magical world, New Cruzobon sets out to cross the continent with a train. Drawing heavily on the stories of the actual transcontinental railroad, Mievville finds a historical period that rivals his 19th century London for the degredations it imposed on the common worker, and over that he imposes his own dystopic imagination. A railroad strike goes horribly awry and The Iron Council is born. The strikers steal the train and with a few dozen miles of track, torn up behind the train and laid down in front, they escape into the wilderness. New Cruzobon, driven by the ugliest of passions, cannot let them rest, and a twenty-year struggle to find and punish The Iron Council for its brazen theft ensues.
The story is also told from the point of view of New Cruzoboners themselves, and their suffering, and the adventures they have living with the legend of the Iron Council. There's an incredibly moving story of a member of a street gang who gets sucked into something bigger, and how much he changes the world of New Cruzobon with his actions.
Mieville never phones in a work. The Iron Council is an utterly poetic and literary masterpiece dedicated to making you cry for the downtrodden, the hopeless, the helpless, all the while convincing you that it'll never get better, that generation after generation of New Cruzoboners will live and die in the kind of misery that has lasted a lot longer it Mieville's fantasy world than it did in 19th century London or the American midwest. The heroes are heroic, the villains villainous, the victims undeserving of their fates, the stories told so beautiful that it takes a hard and brutal mental swerve to see just how sentimental and groundless Mieville's hopelessness really is.
Still, I recommend reading it, if only for the vocabulary lesson. Mieville's clearly in love with his Oxford. I had to look up: inselberg, serein, cerecloth, atrabilous, cirri, byssus, solfatara, bezique, nacre, banausic, aleatoric, loess, talus, guttersome, sere, weald, banyan, dolomite, swale, batholith, peneplain, corrie, pampas, chapparals, and rincon. And I'm sure I missed some. (And yes, I wrote every one of them down in my notebook.)
