Horror Book Reviews
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Title: Iron Council |
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Review of Iron Council
- Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzonâthis time, decades later.
It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.
In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.
In the blood and violence of New Crobuzonâs most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council. . . .
The bold originality that broke Miéville out as a new force of the genre is here once more in Iron Council: the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.
From the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
- China Miéville's novel Iron Council is the tumultuous story of the "Perpetual Train." Born from monopolists' greed and dispatched to tame the western lands beyond New Crobuzon, the train is itself the beginnings of an Iron Council formed in the fire of frontier revolt against the railroad's masters. From the wilderness, the legend of Iron Council becomes the spark uniting the oppressed and brings barricades to the streets of faraway New Crobuzon. The sprawling tale is told through the past-and-present eyes of three characters. The first is Cutter, a heartsick subversive who follows his lover, the messianic Judah Low, on a quest to return to the Iron Council hidden in the western wilds. The second is Judah himself, an erstwhile railroad scout who has become the iconic golem-wielding hero of Iron Council's uprising at the end of the tracks. And the third is Ori, a young revolutionary on the streets of New Crobuzon, whose anger leads him into a militant wing of the underground, plotting anarchy and mayhem.
Miéville (The Scar, Perdido Street Station) weaves his epic out of familiar and heavily political themes--imperialism, fascism, conquest, and Marxism--all seen through a darkly cast funhouse mirror wherein even language is distorted and made beautifully grotesque. Improbably evoking Jack London and Victor Hugo, Iron Council is a twisted frontier fable cleverly combined with a powerful parable of Marxist revolution that continues Miéville's macabre remaking of the fantasy genre. --Jeremy Pugh
Amazon.com
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Comments for Iron Council
- Posted on 2008-06-22
Conceptually interesting
This book is extremely slow moving. I was almost completely done with the book before I really understood why I was even reading the book.
The world is incredibly different from ours because the characters are not human, and not homogeneous. I usually enjoy complex books, but there was so much initial complexity in the character base, that added in with the non linear nature of the story line, I just never got inside the book.
The story was interesting, and by the end of the book, I really enjoyed not only the main character, but several of a ancillary ones as well, but as a whole I didn't like the book as it came off as too disjointed.
Score: 3
- Posted on 2008-05-09
Good Book
I am a recent fan of China Miéville, and love the world of these books. This book was great for the most part, but ended a little weak. Worth the read I think, but not his best.
Score: 3 - Posted on 2008-02-07
Another Great Mieville Book
This is the third book in Mieville's works about the city of New Crobuzon. It is the most overtly political of the three, including radical union organizing, issues of race gender and sexuality and full on good social revolution. It is pretty darn good, but I still think the middle one, The Scar, is the best. The politics hear take too much of center stage I believe, and the characters are not as creatively developed as in the previous two books.
Mieville gets categorized as part of the "new weird" and for once, a tagline might actually be useful. This isn't science fiction, really, and it isn't horror or fantasy either. It is a strange world filled with monsters and very recognizable social ills. If you want politics along with your monsters, you should be reading Mieville.
Score: 4
- Posted on 2008-02-06
Will it ever end...
I absolutley loved Perdido Street. This was a boring, drawn out book. It seemed to drag on forever, and I couldn't wait for it to end.
Score: 1
- Posted on 2007-11-18
Third time's a dissapointment
Let me start by saying I am a Bas Lag/New Crobuzon fan. I am a China Mieville fan. I wish I could go travel back into the past and read Perdido Street Station for the first time all over again just to experience how amazing of a world it was. So of course I delved into Iron Council with all of the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning. Unfortunately I found mostly coal in my stocking.
The book is long. Overly long, and quite boring in many parts. The plot wanders back and forth in time, from uninteresting story line to unsympathetic character and back to boring again. For some reason the entire book is also shot through with a lot of gay and bisexual sex. I was never able to figure out why, as it seems to have little to no bearing on the story.
Mieville's first two Bas Lag novels (Perdido Street Station, and The Scar) were so good that I may have had unrealistic expectations. That said, Iron Council was a poor companion to those two much stronger works and I would not recommend it. Save your time and read the other two, and let this one sit in a time golem of it's own, untouched by man until sometime far into the unknown future.
Score: 1