Iron Council

China Mieville

China Mieville's first three novels rocketed him to prominence in the fields of both fantasy and science fiction. His fourth, Iron Council, is another excellent book, but seems to have slipped a bit from the brilliance of Perdido Street Station. You're going to slog through this for a while, but believe me, it's worth it in the end.

Two intertwining stories weave their ways through the novel. The first concerns Cutter and his band of renegades wandering through the woods seeking a man who's wandering through the woods seeking a legendary enclave of outcasts. The second concerns Ori, still in New Crobuzon (the vast city in which Perdido Street Station was set), a "doubler" (Double-R, a reader of the Runagate Rampant, the underground newspaper whose circulation was much discussed in PSS) who's fed up with the endless talking and wants to do something. Ori meets a man named Spiral Jacobs, who sometimes seems crazy and sometimes seems as if he can get Ori in touch with people more willing to act than talk.

These two storylines (which do eventually come together) go quickly enough, though the one inside the city moves faster than the one in the wilderness. However, a couple of hundred pages in, Mieville puts in a completely different story, that of the Perpetual Train. (It does relate; it's the story of one of the principals, which happens concurrent to the events in PSS, if I've got my timeline right.) The Perpetual Train, which could have been a short novel in itself, is absorbing. It is also brutally slow. You'll spend more time on that part of the book than you do on the rest combined.

Once you're past the long tale of the Perpetual Train, and everything starts fitting together, the book picks up. The ending is Mieville through and through, with all sorts of things blowing up and yet a quiet, understated feel to the whole thing that doesn't allow for explosive endings. Iron Council is a queer, murkily-colored book, quite like the rest of Mieville's material, and another fine one; it could probably have used a bit of trimming here and there to enhance its readability, but it won't steer you wrong.