Iron Council

New Crobuzon, Book 3

By: China Mieville

Narrated by: Gildart Jackson

Length: 21 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon - this time, decades later.

It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.

In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.

In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council…

The bold originality that broke Miéville out as a new force of the genre is here once more in Iron Council: the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.

©2004 China Mieville (P)2014 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Continuously fascinating.... Miéville creates a world of outrageous inventiveness." ( The Denver Post)

Amazing work

A bit tangled up in the politics at times, this is still an engaging and enjoyable read/listen. Juda Low and Cutter are great characters, depth and development. This is a Mieville novel, so it is full of creative imagery and concepts. There are gems in the writing and the word play- this is well worth your time. The narrator was marvelous.

excellent work! a great end to a great series.

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Difficult to connect to

China’s work is difficult to connect to on this one. I do realize that he takes us on a journey of the dark, strange, uncomfortable and abstract with all of his works so it might seem odd to expect to connect. However, I do find that I am normally invested in the outcome of the story for his characters and fascinated by their journeys. I made it all of the way through this book without being able to rally anything more than a mild curiosity about the story arc (which I ultimately found utterly blah) and no particular interest in any of the characters. The narration is well done if not stellar or compelling.

Very Close to the First

The first book in this trilogy was my very first introduction to China Mieville. I dug "Perdido Street Station" and read almost every book from this author after that. It took me a few years to finish New Crobuzon Trilogy because I didn't believe that he could beat "Perdido Street Station." I thought that "The Scar" was well done, but not better than the first.

After starting this series three years ago, I finally wanted to finish the train saga with "Iron Council." The last book is my favorite in this series. I think that the "Iron Council" is far better than the second and very close to the first. I liked the drama from the council,more monsters, remade, the train and realism of each characters.

Mr. Mieville has a special talent of approaching science fiction and fantasy in a different way. It's almost addicting to read any of his books.

loved the first two-- this one was a struggle

Iron Council has some clever new ideas, but its characters have less depth and less quirk than the previous two books.

worth the listen

A difficult and occasionally obtuse book hard to get through, but infinitely worth it in the end.

Long Live Bas Lag

As the second was so different from the first, so too does this instalment separate itself from its Sisters. At first that change stalled me but I found as I continued the tale that it was, for me, just as fantastical and horrifying as its predecessors. This one moved water to my eyes. I hope for a fourth episode from China.

Miéville does not tolerate satisfaction in his audience

This book taught me that I need to break up with China Miéville as an author as badly as Cutter needs to break up with Judah Low as a lover—and for the same reason: he’s uncaring and self-righteous, and I love him.

A long way to get not very far

It's difficult to offer a decent review without spoilers. But this is the third in the "New Crobuzon Trilogy," so at least for me, the rating and this review is as much a comparison to the first two ("Perdido Street Station" and "The Scar") as it is on its own.

Note: as I think about it, this book is likely readable without having read the other two first. There isn't that much here that directly tracks, except for the city of New Crobuzon itself. And this book would likely give you enough of an understanding of the city to enjoy this book, without the various expectations from the first two.

Back to the book. One issue, for me, is that this is the most openly political of the books. Mieville hasn't hidden his political musings in other writings, but the first two books in this trilogy left the politics as an undercurrent, one that the characters and events dipped into but never, to use a phrase, swam in. Not so here. It's front and center. Which meant that I occasionally felt like I was reading a treatise from various revolutionary movements from history, as we never really get the Establishment view, except as reflected by the various revolutionary movements or deduce from their actions.

But it's also the structure. The first two-thirds are a collection of parallel narratives that take quite some time to determine that they truly are related. And this reflects on the title of this review, going a long way to get not very far. Much of this just seemed endless events for the sake of events.

To say more would be too close to spoilers. It is wildly imaginative, and the views of Bas-Lag added more breadth and depth from what'd been revealed in the first two books. But, again, on this, little would require you to read those to be able to appreciate the details here. The only way to get anything close to a full understanding of all of Bas-Lag would be to read all three books. Although all have a single city, New Crobuzon, as their trigger, all evoke different aspects of Bas-Lag.

“we were, we are, we will be.”

Following Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002), China Mieville's third Bas-Lag novel, Iron Council (2004), occurs at least 20 years after the events of the first book. All is not well in New Crobuzon, the powerful, vast city-state featured in Perdido Street Station. The city has been locked in an endless war against Tesh, a rival city-state on the other side of the world where the laws of physics and magic are different; horribly wounded veterans are sapping morale; the brutal militia are clamping down on insurrectionists; factions (like the xenophobic bowler-hat wearing Quillers) are attacking inhabitants they dislike (like the scarab-headed Khepri); and gangsters are ever active.

What is the Iron Council? It takes many pages to find out. That's because we first read a lot about a merchant called Cutter in the wilderness leading a small band of insurrectionists on an epic journey trying to catch up with the man he loves, Judah Lowe, a powerful golemetrist seeking the Council, and then about a naïve laborer called Ori in New Crobuzon leaving his all talk and no action ("too much yammer, not enough hammer") dissident group to join the rebel crime lord Toro. Then we plunge into a lengthy flashback (the best part of the novel) relating how about twenty years ago Judah became an idealistic autodidact golemetrist. Eventually we learn that a visionary New Crobuzon tycoon was pursuing his holy mission to push his Transcontinental Railroad Trust across the continent from coast to coast when the workers (including Remade slave laborers), camp followers (including prostitutes), and assorted TRT scientists and mages, mutinied over absent pay, took the train, and turned it into a “feral perpetual train,” pulling up track behind and laying it down before, unbuckling the past and making the future, making a contingent moment of railroad, “a rolling democracy. A Remade arcadia”: Iron Council.

The novel is full of Mieville’s fertile imagination, usually at work making monstrous chimera, whether natural or artificial. His chimerical imagination drives his approach to genre, as this novel combines genres like epic fantasy, science fiction, horror, western, exploration adventure, political fable, crime caper, and same-sex romance. Technology rubs shoulders with thamaturgy, “normal” humans kiss Remade humans, and divine and semi-divine beings show up now and then.

I like his exploration of the science and magic of golemetry (an intervention in the natural still state of inanimate matter so as to shift it into another form that moves with a kind of sentience), his conception of the perpetual train “renegapolis,” his audacious attempt at a climax interruptus, his politicizing of things like love, theater, war, justice, and capitalism, his avoidance of cheap sentimentality, his refusal to make his readers feel good, but instead to challenge them and provoke them and stir them up in constructive ways.

Mieville can write. When he gets going on a poetic riff, whether sublime or profane, he really goes: "Elsie remembered the air burials she had heard of among northern tribes, women and men of the tundra, who let their dead rest in open coffins under balloons, sent them skywards through the cold air and clouds, to drift in air streams way above the depredations of insects or birds or rot itself, so the stratosphere over their hunt lands was a catacombs, where explorers by dirigible encountered none but the frost mummified dead."

He fashions myriad cool, grotesque, and or beautiful things, like a monk who literally trades something he/she knows in return for something hidden or lost, the Stiltspear marsh people who chant their prey still, a "susurrator" who controls people by whispering in their minds, five-fingered military handlingerer parasites who wear animal or human bodies, elementarii who command elemental monsters, kinetiphage motion demons who gorge on sounds, and golems made of shadow, light, air, sound, and time. Mieville details all those and many more with a feverish poetic flair.

In fact, that becomes a problem. As Cutter muses at one point when he’s traveling through the Cacotopic Stain, a dread unmapped region where land and air and time are sick, “where monsters are made . . . a viral landscape . . . of pathological parturition," "We don't even see it no more. . . You can get used to the most monstrous absurdity." So Mieville's profligate imagination for monstrous chimeras begins to numb, as when he describes a sublime and scary moonlight elemental and then botches it by making it a fish-bear-rat-horned-firefly-deathmoth thing.

Moreover, although New Crobuzon is a vivid creation, a vibrant and decadent city with districts, towers, trains, repressive government, and motley population comprised of garden variety humans, arcane races (including cactus people, aquatic people, and beetle people), the Remade (criminals sent to punishment factories to gain all manner of grotesque animal, insectoid, and machine appendages), and singers, scientists, thamaturges, laborers, dissidents, merchants, militia, and so on we have been there before in Perdido Street Station, and its coolness wears a little thin here. And although Cutter and Judah are great (and sf-fantasy novels could use more homosexual or bisexual main characters like them), Iron Council hosts fewer compelling characters than Perdido Street Station and The Scar.

People who like Mieville’s first two Bas-Lag books should like this one. People new to Mieville should start with either of the earlier books. People who like weird sf that melds multiple genres, who like to view the world as a political creation, and who appreciate rich prose should like this book.

The audiobook reader Gildart Jackson does a professional job voicing all the many different kinds of characters in different kinds of moods.