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#37 - Iron Council, by China Miéville

The greatest strength of China Miéville's New Crobuzon novels is the freshness, the outright alien-ness of the world and the peoples that populate it, and that continues to shine through in Iron Council. The problem with the book seems to be a lack of control. The idea of much-abused railway workers taking over a job site and stealing the train to form a kind of socialist utopia is a little far-fetched, but in a world where people have beetles instead of heads, it's certainly workable. The problem is the execution. The idea that an awkward collection of working class folk, criminals, and prostitutes would be able to organize themselves, successfully fight a well-trained military, and then escape, all while having to continually tear up the track behind them and lay it anew ahead of them is preposterous, even in Bas-Lag. I understand that Miéville has socialist leanings (so do I, to a lesser degree), but there are limits to the credulity of even the most sympathetic reader. The interlude describing the history of the Iron Council started out showing tremendous potential; the scenes with Judah Low learning golemetry from the stiltspear people were delicate and compelling, but it quickly fell apart when the socialist politics (which Miéville claims leak in subconsciously) began to take over and the plot and characters took a backseat. It's especially disappointing given how good The Scar was.

The war between Tesh and New Crobuzon and the working class uprising within the city were far more interesting than the story of the train, and it was in that subplot (and was a subplot, even though the blurb on the back of the book and the early chapters of the novel suggest that they are the main plot elements) that Miéville's most polished writing can be seen. There's so much going on there that it's difficult to talk about without having to rehash half the book, but that the war itself was treated more as a problem that could be (and was) solved in five pages of special effects and a chase scene was more than a little disappointing, particularly in light of how emotionally complex the issues leading up to those five page were.

Miéville's prose felt considerably less competent in this novel as well. He's not a bad writer, not at all. He has a talent for finding interesting images and imbuing them with an emotional significance that seems inherent rather than contextual. But Iron Council simply felt sloppy. Events that would later be referenced with specificity were described with a dream-like vagueness that often made it difficult to figure out just what the hell was going on. It felt like he was in such a hurry to move the plot forward that he ignored the mechanics of his prose. In addition, he once again made use of the pseudo-stream-of-consciousness interludes that are a kind of trademark of his novels. They are always, always, always the worst parts of his work, and they are a chore to read through, because he's frankly not very good at the technique. I do hope he drops it for the next book. So in the final analysis, Iron Council wasn't terrible, by any means, but the book could definitely have done with another draft.

Back to the world of literary fiction with Iris Murdoch's The Bell.

Posted by August on 08.26.07 at 2:21 PM | Comments (0)

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