Ex Libris: China Miéville's Iron Council

(Just a quick and belated review of Iron Council)

I have to admit that I played role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons in my youth.

Specifically, one of my pleasures in that game was perusing on my own the game's ever-changing, ever-expanding monster bestiaries. So when I read in an interview that outspoken writer China Miéville is fascinated by monsters too and he specifically says:

...when I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters...

...I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that to, that’s fantastic. But if not, isn’t this a cool monster?

... I have to admit: yes, that is one cool monster.

Miéville, of course, is the one of a number authors at the forefront of the so-called New Weird fantastic fiction. He's also the controversial speculative writer who taken a shot at the fantasy genre generally and JRR Tolkien specifically. He's one of the many excellent writers of fantasy and science fiction that come from a left -- sometimes a very radical left -- political perspective (like Michael Moorcock, Kim Stanley Robinson, Steven Brust, Ken Macleod, and Iain Banks).

But as he says, what Miéville is about and what he writes can be taken separately.

In his latest novel after Perdido Street Station and The Scar (two other books set in the same world), Miéville writes a proletariat revolution the New Weird-way about the "Iron Council", a perpetually-moving train that has become legend in the darkly decadent and magical city of New Crobuzon (which first came into prominence in PSS). However, unlike his earlier novels, this novel is a more complicated tale as Miéville weaves a number of story threads both past and present as seen through the eyes of three characters.

In one thread, there is the story of Judah Loew, a golem-maker of the highest order who found his calling as one of the heroes in the Transcontinental Railroad uprising that gave birth to the Iron Council. Another thread details the story of Cutter, Loew's lover in New Crobuzon who followed the sorceror into the wilds in order to warn the Council of the trap set by the oppressive city government. Lastly, there is also the thread of Ori, an angry young man who joins a military wing of the underground as New Crobuzon staggers under the fires of revolution.

I can see though why a number of readers felt mixed about this book: warp and weave the above threads together-- from past to present-- plus add nightmarish monsters, sympathetic revolutionaries, hidden spies, teleporting terrorists, outlandish realms, and you get a story that, if you don't hang on tight, you might get lost. But if you do, it's one hell of a ride.

But really, it's Miéville's imaginative approach to the fantasy genre that everyone comes around anyway. Where else can you find a wasteland full of smoke geysers that petrify in the air-- and anyone else caught in it? Or sirocco demons that feed on kinetic energy of wheels and feet as caravans travel through desert dunes? Or the wound in reality called the Cacotopic Stain, where people, animals, and objects can become something else (or worse) in quite a short time?

One can accuse such fantastical renditions as escapist literature, as say compared to the more mundane horrors of Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby (which I did an earlier review). But really, it's more than that-- and nothing more to it. After all, he pointed out in the same interview:

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.

And that's why Miéville is such a wily writer. Is it all about the monsters? Or are they also functions of the texture of the book?

Heh. Makes you wish could have played with Miéville when he was Dungeon-Master (which I presume he did while collecting D&D bestiaries).