Iron Council - getting it off my chest
coalescent has posted some reactions to China Miéville's Iron Council (shortlisted for this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award). I was going to post comments but what I've written has turned out rather long, so it's now a post in its own right...
My first disappointment with Iron Council can't be laid at Miéville's feet - it's the cover. I still dislike it. I bought the American Del Rey first edition, the cover for which also ended up on the British edition. Why couldn't Macmillan recognise that all we Brits wanted was another beautiful 'Edward Miller' painting? Macmillan planned a completely different cover which Miéville reacted strongly against, so with time running short Macmillan just used the US cover instead. Too bad, and for me at least, not the best start.
But to the book. It's a novel I had difficulties with, and I have a slightly different take on it from most posts about this book I've seen so far. Basically I felt that the politics of the book would have better served in the telling of the story, rather than being the major segment of the story that they are. I have no problem with Miéville actually attempting this for it is part of the originality and shape of the finished novel; the problem I have is that for me the politics come across as over-indulgent, and actively get in the way of the rest of the story.
In that sense I wonder if Miéville has tried to give some of his fans what they wanted: his readers know he does politics in real life, so, well, here they are. One of the down-sides for any writer with a "hugely anticipated" novel in the works must be the danger of not living up to your readers' raised expectations, and the wish to at least try and please most of the people at least some of the time might give rise to an unsteady reworking of what might once have been a smoothly flowing narrative. I wonder if that is what happened in the case of Iron Council.
I admire Miéville as a very able writer who can - does - stretch himself where other authors wouldn't even bother. It's probably his burden that whatever he produces will inevitably be compared, at least in the success of its storytelling, to Perdido Street Station's marvellously fluid narrative and totally gripping tale. Miéville is doing the right thing by refusing to repeat a formula, and each novel needs to be read on its own terms with as little harking back to PSS as possible. Anyone who enjoyed PSS for what it was - an easier task when we had nothing similar to compare it with - has to admit this is sometimes difficult. Everyone wants him to write PSS 2, and I certainly wouldn't object if he did, but it will probably be many years yet before he gives in, if ever.
So what differentiates PSS and The Scar from Iron Council? I'd say it's a matter of role reversals: whereas in the first two books the politics provided the context and the monsters occupied the foreground, in Iron Council these positions mostly switch places amid the variety of settings. In The Scar Miéville wrote a maritime adventure, so it was necessary for him to bone up on other maritime tales, such as those of Patrick O'Brian, and The Scar was infused with an admirable 'lost at sea' feel to several of the characters, notably Bellis Coldwine, a character given a name that Miéville specifically does not want you to warm to. With a different pedigree Iron Council is a frontier novel, rooted in Westerns with particular acknowledgment given to the novels of Zane Grey, but this time the frontier is also given a heavy dose of sometimes radical and violent countercultural politics, mostly unarguable, largely because of the plainly fascist nature of what Miéville's characters are up against. Iron Council just about works in this regard, the politics of the Perpetual Train may be improvised but they are always right-on because their reaction against the fascism and capitalism of New Crobuzon is how the characters are defining themselves. The reader is therefore always reminded that this is firstly a political novel, and is then distracted by the question of whether these political points of view happen to chime in with Miéville's own, which to a large degree we suspect they probably do. It's a 'performance', for want of a more accurate word.
In PSS we were presented with the moral dilemna of Yagharek: did he deserve the punishment he was given by the Garuda, and therefore should Isaac help him to fly again? This was a debatable scenario with no obvious answer, and was the moral crux to the entire tale that Miéville played out brilliantly to the last page. Iron Council, on the other hand, presents in comparison a simplistic scenario, the sort that inevitably gives rise to the resistance shown by the various factions opposed to the fascism around them, and who can barely be criticised other than in their preponderance to politically-motivated violence. There is, therefore, little here to debate.
I'd agree with coalescent, when he says the only character who really stood out was Judah Low. I was not aware at the time (thank you, fjm) that Miéville had based him on a real-life Judah Low who also created a Golem, and who, rightly or wrongly, underwent no name change for this novel.
Other small bones of contention that niggled me for most of the book:
1. Trains are meant to go fast. That is their thrill. However for most of the novel the Perpetual Train seems to be condemned to moving at a frustratingly slow pace, mostly slower than a knackered out 1969 Volkswagen Doormobile with the doors hanging off, and more resembling the intermittent progress of a 'gypsy train' than the kind pulled by a mighty locomotive. OK, I grant they're laying the track too which will inevitably slow things down a bit, so when the Iron Council returns to New Crobuzon I was pleased to see their train to get up a head of steam at last on its triumphant return to the city. However the train itself is given so little detail as to be rendered almost nebulous, as if it is enough that we should only see it as a vehicle for the story around it. Who's driving the thing? How many wheels has it got? Does it run on wood, or coal, or what? How does the whistle sound (I barely recall hearing it once)? Where do the workers forge the tracks and sleepers that they lay? These kinds of details are too often absent. But the final fate of the train, embedded in some very complex magic, seems about right.
2. Much like the movement of the train itself, the flow of the storytelling is interrupted too often, and is always weighed down by the political rather than being lifted by it. Miéville often says how he's "in it for the monsters", which in PSS and The Scar was joyously apparent, and the politics - particularly in PSS - provided the necessary contextual background. Despite his above comment, in Iron Council the monsters seem to be given the supporting role. Much like the noisy kids in the back of the car, the monsters are mostly shoved in the back seat while their lefty parents in front get on with the grown-up stuff of navigating how to get to where they're going, while at the same time having a heavy discussion on Marxism. The monsters only seem to be given attention when they need to interrupt the political dynamic, and/or when it might be necessary to actually remind us that this is a fantasy novel we're reading.
I have no problem with the often contracted language with which Miéville has chosen to write Iron Council, such that you sometimes need to read a sentence twice to see where he has deliberately omitted certain linking words and then to understand how those sentences still make concise sense. As a form of style it often works well, sometimes less so.
It's been a while since I read it, but for me, ultimately, Iron Council was disappointing probably because it felt more like a thinly veiled political statement - and as I said a deliberate performance - and one which felt that the context is, for the writer, more important than the text itself. I admire it and recognise it as a notable book in the 'lefty fantasy/SF' field that I frequently read, however large or small that sub-genre may be, but it's not a work I recall with any particular fondness, as I do when I recall the exhuberance of Perdido Street Station and the masterful slow-build of The Scar. Maybe I just need more time to digest it.