First and foremost, it should be said that I am a huge fan of China Mieville's work: while I have only read his three Bas-Lag novels (this, and
Perdido Street Station
and
The Scar
) I wholly admire his bold, complex narratives and vast imagination. He's been dubbed a member of a writing movement called "The New Weird" (including Jeff Vandermeer, among a few select others), and the title does a pretty adequate job of detailing their most telling trait.
If you've never read Mieville (or have, but not any of the Bas-Lag novels), I think you might do well to start with PERDIDO first. Though the novels can be read on their own, that novel might provide some necessary background to the dissension and unrest in this one.
I wholly admire this work, but I must be honest: I did not like it quite as much as the other Bas-Lag novels. This has much to commend it, but it drags at times, particularly at the beginning and, while one expects a Mieville novel to bounce back and forth between narratives, the narratives were not of equal strength--some are good enough to be their own novels, while some (like the first chapter) were confusing and, well, kind of dull. Additionally, several of the characters were difficult to "know." Judah, a self taught golem wizard, and Ori, a revolutionary who bordered on terrorism, were two main characters who remained out of touch for me. For key, important characters, I didn't understand them as I felt I should have.
But...WOW. What a story. Mieville has more creativity and passion and graphic clarity than SO many other writers it's almost criminal. His stories are so rich, his vivid details so clearly displayed, his action scenes so graphically intense that he draws the breath out of me. While this story is indeed a story of fantasy, wherein some men and women have powers far beyond others, and there are certainly acts and deeds that go well beyond the capabilities of the workaday world, yet Mieville's strength is in creating a world in which such moments are drawn from the same earth that you and I belong to. There is such power in his descriptions that his it all makes an organic sense, a plausibility.
There is SO much that goes on in this tale; the main, titled portion involves a trainful of refugees who choose to escape to a region of the world so feared that NO ONE in his right mind would go there. How they get to the pivotal point that they must escape, and how they manage that escape...well, it's just a great demonstration of an imaginative genius. And the portrayal of the warring state of the city of New Crobuzon--a dismal, wretched metropolis that is not unlike throwing New York City and Calcutta into a blender and setting it on Puree.
The Iron Council itself--the name given the trainful of escapees--is Mieville's clearest expression of his own political belief. Here, socialism is given its fullest expression, and it WORKS: though it is not without its blemishes, the men and women (most of whom were prostitutes) and Remades (criminals of the State whose physiques were grotesquely re-engineered as punishment) all work together for the common good. There is no status here other than chaverim: comrades. The "Iron Council" becomes a myth to all outsiders, but in their own real sense they last for decades as a truly functioning socialist community.
Here, too, Mieville tackles homosexuality...I cannot remember his approaching the subject before in the other Bas-Lag book. It is not handled sensationally, just as an element of plot, to explain and enhance a fuller spectrum of relationships.
ONE ADDITIONAL NOTE, and I cannot stress this enough: if you can, acquire and read whatever Mieville book you possess on a Kindle. One of the most amazing things about this author is his vocabulary, and scarcely a paragraph will transpire without his slipping these darlings in. Whether it's "piceous" or "inspissate" or "byssus" or "dweomer" or any one of a million others you'll be VERY glad all you have to do is tap the word to find out its meaning. I bought my own hardback novel in this particular case and I rued that very fact with every word I stumbled across.
But it's not just show. Mieville's preternatural ability to use unusual, arcane language to express the exact thing he's looking for goes beyond mere descriptive wordplay. No; they go beyond mere narrative and become synthesizers of mood themselves, imparting the scene and the entire novel with a bizarre, almost unfathomable depth of atmosphere. This is true other-ness...this is the novel - be it the New Weird, or fantasy -- as pure escape. It is a word painting using no broad brush, but an exactitude of expression unlike any other.
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