Brad's Reviews > Iron Council

Overtly political, teasingly intricate, and deeply intertextual, China Miéville's Iron Council is everything I expect to love in great speculative fiction, and nearly everything I know I love in Miéville's work.

Yet, since its publication, I have only read it once, and I still find myself ranking it third of Miéville's Bas-Lag books. I've been baffled by my restraint with Iron Council. My admiration of Miéville's other books is boundless, bordering on madness, and I haven't understood how a book so filled with wonders -- Toro and its teleportation headdress, Judah's time-golem, the Iron Council train and its unparalleled mobility, Spiral Jacob and his Teshian machinations to overthrow New Crobuzon -- could keep me at such a distance -- until today.

Today I recognized my problem with Iron Council (I am making my way through The Scar for the fourth time, you see, and it finally came clear). There is a character missing, a character that is fundamental to my admiration of Miéville's work. I can still appreciate him without this character; I can luxuriate in his gorgeous prose without this character; I can even lose myself in Bas-Lag without this character; but it is this character that makes Perdido Street Station and The Scar such fundamental books in my literary pantheon. And that character is place.

Perdido Street Station introduces us to New Crobuzon. And New Crobuzon becomes a character, not just a setting. It is not just the people who are being ravaged by the Slake Moths, but the sweltering, desert dryness of the Glasshouse, the shadows of the Ribs, the gardens of Sobek Croix, and the refuse of Griss Twist. These boroughs, bestowed with sensual reality, suffer as much from the literal "dreamshit" as the people who lose their minds do. And Miéville spends time making us know New Crobuzon. He lingers in every borough, makes us smell and taste and feel everything. It's his intention, and it makes New Crobuzon, perhaps, the most important character in Perdido Street Station.

The Scar, then, gives us Armada. Another character setting. Another unruly, sensually realistic, passionately crafted city, this time floating over the oceans of Bas-Lag, a giant Pirate vessel with its own internal politics, its own "quarters," its own industry, its own secrets and identity, all tethered loosely together as each ship is tethered to each ship in a technicolor mosaic of shipbuilding eclecticism.

But Iron Council gives us the world, and it is too much. Miéville offers too many places in his third book, and he never lets us know one place with anything close to the depth or intimacy we come to know New Crobuzon and Armada. There are wonders, yes, but they are too scattered, too sparsely drawn, too quickly passed over and through for them to percolate into our imaginations. And that is why Iron Council fails to live up to its predecessors (although I consider that higher praise than I would give most books).

It is not a coincidence that all Miéville's Bas-Lag books have, thus far, been titled after places. But Miéville doesn't just love places, he loves cities and expresses cities -- stationary or floating -- better than any author I've read, so his next book, The City & The City, should be a cracking return to what Miéville does best.

No, Iron Council isn't brilliant, but still it IS damn, damn good.