or his fourth novel, the award-winning prodigy China Miéville returns to the grotesquely alluring world of Bas-Lag and its mightiest city, New Crobuzon, as previously explored in Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002). Readers familiar with those predecessors will have their enjoyment of the new book enhanced. Yet the third entry in the series is eminently readable for novices also, featuring a new cast of characters and easy immersion in the various species, politics and culture of New Crobuzon.
The tale follows two parallel tracks—symbolically quite fitting, seeing that a mighty railroad train lies at the heart of the novel—which converge toward the climax.
We first encounter a small party of the renegades against the stifling and violent oligarchy that rules New Crobuzon, a man named Cutter and several of his comrades. They have fled the city on a quest, to find the bard of the Iron Council, a "golem master" named Judah Low, and through him the legendary Iron Council itself. The Iron Council is an emblem of rebellion: "a myth ... something missing ... something they had to save, that would one day save them." By contacting the Iron Council, the rebels will gain an edge over the authorities. Cutter and his friends make a perilous journey of 2,000 miles before finding Judah, after which further hardships await them before they do finally reach the Iron Council.
At the same time, matters in New Crobuzon are coming to a head. Through the eyes of a rebel named Ori, we witness events beginning to spin out of control. Ori works for a criminal named Toro, who plans to assassinate the mayor of New Crobuzon and thus precipitate open revolt by the masses of the oppressed. But Ori's education in the ways of rebellion are painful and harsh. A mad old man named Spiral Jacobs, rebel of another era, serves as something of a mentor and inspiration to Ori. But Jacobs proves to have his own nefarious secrets and schemes.
Between alternating episodes from both narrative tracks, we learn in an extended flashback the story of Judah's young manhood, how he worked for the grand, monumentally crazy scheme of building a railway across the treacherous terrain of Bas-Lag, and how he helped form the Iron Council when he and others stole the vehicle that was essential to the enterprise, converting it into a "perpetual train" of independence and freedom.
Eventually a dozen different subplots cohere, culminating in a massive battle for the soul of New Crobuzon, with Cutter, Judah, Ori and others making enormous sacrifices—sometimes at deadly cross-purposes.
A dazzling dose of the New Weird
China Miéville and co-conspirator M. John Harrison have recently promulgated manifestos and BBS discussions regarding the "New Weird," a movement in the world of fantastical literature to reclaim the field from commodified Tolkien rip-offs. The best proof of any aesthetic theory, though, is not manifestos but art itself. By this measure, Miéville's books are decisive volleys in the battle, proving that writers of talent and genius may remake forms that seemed stale and intractable.
Miéville succeeds in his ambitious program due to a number of factors. First are his sheer language abilities. Like Ian MacLeod, a fellow British fantasist, Miéville writes gorgeous sentences that are obviously crafted with painstaking effort, yet that read smoothly and elegantly, sheer poetry. Whether he's describing monsters such as the "inchmen"—"Colossal and grossly tubate, a caterpillar body studded with tufts, ventricles opening and closing sphincters, dun with warning colors. The man-torso congealed into the front of that yards-long body ..."—or gothic buildings or convoluted action sequences, Miéville employs diction and syntax in idiosyncratic ways, not content to fall back on cliches. Secondly, Miéville exhibits immense fertility of both plot and setting. The dozens of "xenian" sentients who share Bas-Lag with the humans, the welter of incidents that make up this history, all spew forth in convincing multitudes. Bas-Lag possesses the inexhaustibility of the real world.
Next comes Miéville's allusiveness. Literary precedents—Tolkien, Vance, Peake—are playfully invoked (consider that one dire battle is resolved by the unexpected arrival of horse-clan warriors), but so are real-world milestones. The war between New Crobuzon and Tesh bears comparison to the conflict between the United States and Iraq. The revolt of the underclass in the city harks back to Paris in 1968. And could the mayor of new Crobuzon be Maggie Thatcher? No doubt! Anchoring his tale in both the literature of the fantastic and real history gives it a solidity that other more rarefied fantasies lack. Miéville's sense of multiculturalism is another plus. His creation is not a whitebread affair, but partakes of many different flavors suitably transmogrified: Hispanic, European, African, Anglo. Finally, Miéville's flair for rich characterization is pronounced. Cutter, a gay man, suffers much for love of Judah. Ori, a young idealist, passes into a cruel disillusionment. Other characters undergo equally convincing and dramatic arcs.
In short, what Miéville has accomplished once again with this book is to render a world both utterly estranged from ours, yet eerily congruent, and to populate it with figures who breathe and bleed and love, and whom we may care deeply about.
