Lazy Man's Review: Iron Council

On the train home this afternoon I finished Iron Council: China Mieville's fourth novel, his third set in Bas-Lag, his second set in New Crobuzon, and the first of his that I've read. In Iron Council, revolution comes to Mieville's city-state.

I haven't decided how I feel about it yet; it hasn't had time to settle in my mind. But I think I think it was impressive but uneven; there were many sections I liked or loved, but probably an equal number that left me stone cold.

I will now be thoroughly lazy and tack my other thoughts onto other people's reviews.

Geneva said:

As well as reigning himself in stylistically, Mieville has also reigned himself in imaginatively. I don't mean to say that Iron Council is unimaginative - it's very far from that and Mieville is still the most creatively inventive writer around - but that Mieville's inventions in this latest book are inventions that substantially contribute to the story he's telling. In earlier works I sometimes got the feeling that his imaginative creations were almost gratuitous; fancies for the sake of fancies. That's not the case in Iron Council, where the flights of fancy and creative world-building are all instrumental to the tale being told.

Oh dear. I thought Iron Council was fairly full of gratuitous imagination. At times it just got a little tiring, like reading through a D&D bestiary in one sitting; at times I thought it genuinely clogged up the storytelling. The first 125 pages or so, in particular, seemed to drag immensely (Adam Roberts felt the same way, it seems). But then we get the Anamnesis, a long flashback that is almost a complete story in itself.

Matt Cheney said:

The anamnesis section of the book is a minor masterpiece, a story that is emotionally affecting, philosophically interesting, well written, inventive, and gripping. It is a pastiche of various types of writing -- most clearly tales of the Old West -- which also manages to maintain its own integrity. It echoes much labor history, utilizing archetypes from strikes and union battles past. (I couldn't help thinking of the role of railroads in the Mexican Revolution, and I'm sure other readers will think of various parallels.) It is, appropriately, filled with the excitement of underdog stories, of good guys versus bad guys, fueled with a naive (but necessary) belief in wondrous progress.

I agree with all of this, and then some. I found the anamnesis an order of magnitude more engaging than the rest of the novel; perfectly paced, extremely well-drawn, and with the restraint I thought was lacking elsewhere. It helps that I found the Iron Council itself fascinating, whereas New Crobuzon (surprisingly) didn't do a whole lot for me. It is perhaps the only time that I've wished a fantasy novel had a map inside the front cover.

Dan said:

Fittingly, the characters in Iron Council are almost all more human than some of the best in The Scar - there is no superhuman Uther Doul here, no preternatural Brucolac. Instead, we have a jealous and lonely shopkeeper-turned-adventurer, an uncertain and easily led, but genuine and ultimately tragic, political dissident, and a menagerie of other flawed but identifiably 'real' characters who struggle to tackle important issues in a way different to the one in which they are told to deal with them.

I found most of the characters remarkably hard to engage with. I have no real sense of who Ori and Cutter are; the only person in the book who stands out as truly memorable is Judah. This is probably not unrelated to the fact that the anamnesis, in which Judah features proiminently, is my favourite section of the book.

Norman Spinrad said:

You think you know how such a story must end, especially within a political and passionately revolutionary novel, but it doesn’t. Far be it from me to give away the ending even if I could, which I can’t, for it involves magic so convoluted and abstract that I can’t even understand it, not that I really believe Miéville intends me to, but the thematic confusion of it at least must be danced around.

[...]

Maybe Miéville has adopted an apocryphal slogan from the Irish Republican Army: "Now is the time for a futile gesture." Maybe this is Mao’s notion of the permanent revolution, that it is the process and zeitgeist of this neverending story that is the true revolution, not the end product.

Whatever my misgivings about the rest of the book, I thought the ending was pretty much perfect--thematically and emotionally right.

( a digression )

Lastly, there is a 'virtual seminar' on Mieville and Iron Council available at Crooked Timber (or at least there was, and I hope there will be again when the site comes back up).