Iron Council - China Miéville

   2004; 564 pages.  Book 3 in the “Bas-Lag” trilogy.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Steampunk Fantasy; Sword and Sorcery; Weird Fantasy.  Laurels: 2005 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel (winner).  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Three men, all of them believers, all of them revolutionaries, all of them searching for something.

 

    Cutter is wandering through the wastelands, searching for Judah Low and the Iron Council.  He wants to warn them that the city-state mega-power, New Crobuzon, has dispatched forces to seek out and destroy them.

 

    Judah Low is the Iron Council’s somaturge (their what??).  He’s dedicated his life to the overthrow of New Crobuzon.  He’s searching for others that share his rebellious passion.

 

    Ori is a resident of New Crobuzon, and a jaded member of the underground resistance there.  He’s tired of his compatriots talking the talk, but not walking the walk.  He’s searching for a way to light a spark of action amongst his fellow dissidents.

 

    New Crobuzon can be summed up by three M’s:  Militia, Magisters, and the Mayor.  Maybe even add a fourth, Mages.  They can crush any and all of the resisters.  If only they can locate them.

 

What’s To Like...

    Iron Council is the closing book in China Miéville’s fantastic Bas-Lag trilogy.  The first two books are reviewed here and here.  The three novels are all standalones; the storylines are not connected and the characters are completely different in each tale.  What ties them together is the setting – New Crobuzon, the main city in Bas-Lag.

 

    For the most part, we follow the lives of the three men mentioned in the introduction, primarily how they impact and relate to the Iron Council, which is a group of dissident railroad-builders that have seized one of the government’s trains along with its rail-laying equipment.

 

    China Miéville’s superb writing skills are once again displayed here: incredibly detailed world-building, deep and fascinating character development, a masterful vocabulary, and a complex and compelling storyline.  Our trio of rebel protagonists are pitted against a well-equipped and numerically superior foe, and they find it hard to keep their followers, and themselves, from giving up and running away.

 

    Iron Council is written in English, not American, which is always a treat for me.  It’s both a steampunk and a sword-&-sorcery tale, with weapons such as pistols, crossbows, blunderbusses, rive-bows, and motor-guns.  The magic/thaumaturgy is on a par with the weaponry: you can “glamour” someone, be a whispersmith, or make use of verity-gauging.  Judah Low is a somaturge, a rare magic art that enables him to conjure up golems out of just about any substance, and which he learned while staying with the stiltspears.  Stiltspears and golems are just a smattering of the strange and interesting creatures that you’ll meet along the way in this story.

 

    I liked that the revolutionary heroes portrayed here are not perfect.  They squabble, get depressed, get mad, and have to contend with situational ethics.  One example of the latter is the tagline that appears below, right after the two excerpts.

 

    The ending is both hopeful and sad, as well as brilliantly unexpected while at the same time slightly anticlimactic.  Judah Low conceives and constructs it, and it's a wonderful answer to the dilemma of what to do when one is up against overwhelming odds.  It leaves the door open for a sequel, but China Miéville has not penned one in the 19+ years since Iron Council was published, so I think we can safely say the series is complete.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Cacotopic (adj.) : of an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be.

Others: Chaverim (n., plural); Boscage (n.), Somaturge (n.); Gurned (v.), Hadal (adj.); Tain (n.); and dozens more.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.1/5 based on 964 ratings and 170 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.72/5 based on 15,293 ratings and 1,077 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Toro’s out there and he’s doing something, yeah?  He’s fighting, and he’s not waiting like you keep waiting.  And you sit and wait, and tell him he’s getting ahead of himself?

    It’s not like that.  I won’t snip at anyone fighting the magisters, or the militia, or the Mayor, but Toro can’t change things on his own, or with his little crew, Jack . . .”

    “Yeah but he’s changing something.”

    “Not enough.”

    “But he’s changing something.”  (pg. 76)

 

    “We have a responsibility,” Ann-Hari said.  Cutter never felt eased in her presence.  The fervour in her unnerved him—it made him tired and uncertain of himself, as though she might win him over against his will.  He knew he was jealous—no one had had such as effect on Judah Low as Ann-Hari.

    “We’re a dream,” she said.  “The dream of the commons.  Everything came to this, everything came here.  We got to here.  This is what we are.  History’s pushing us.  (pg. 514)

 

If one death’ll stop ten, ain’t it better?  If two deaths’ll save a city?  (pg. 370)

    There are some quibbles.  China Miéville has never shied away from using cusswords in his novels, and here I counted 34 cases in the first 10% of the book.  That doesn’t include the clever use of “faux cussing”, including terms like “for Jabber’s sake”, “godsdamn”, and “in Jabber’s name.”  There’s also several instances of several types of sex—hetero, homo, manual—and a bit of cross-dressing.

 

    There’s an extended backstory/flashback section early on telling how the Iron Council came to be.  It comes without any warning to the reader, which confused me at first, but you’ll know you’ve hit it when the new chapters are no longer numbered.

 

    China Miéville is an unabashedly left-leaning activist (read the Wikipedia article), and a lot of readers seemed to be upset that this is reflected in the Iron Council storyline, which may explain how a Locus Award-winning novel can have such mediocre ratings at Amazon and Goodreads.

 

    Some of the vocabulary the author utilizes will keep you resorting to Google for enlightenment.  Personally I had fun discovering which words were incredibly obscure (such as “tain”), and which were made-up ones by Miéville (such as “somaturge”).

 

    Finally, and repeating a quibble from my reviews of the previous two tales, this series screams for a map and a Cast of Characters.

 

    I thoroughly enjoyed Iron Council, and the Bas-Lag trilogy as a whole.  Those quibbles just mean Miéville is treating the reader as an adult, and the lushness and complexity of the text and storyline mean that he also assumes that the reader is reasonably intelligent and imaginative.  This was my ninth China Miéville book, and none of them have disappointed me.

 

    9 Stars.  China Miéville is renowned and respected enough that the definitions for even his made-up words can be found by googling them.  “Somaturge” was confusing me until I looked it up.