Iron Council

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 From Publishers Weekly In this stunning new novel set mainly in the decadent and magical city of New Crobuzon, British author Miéville ( The Scar ) charts the course of a proletarian revolution like no other. The capitalists of New Crobuzon are pushing hard. More and more people are being arrested on petty charges and "Remade" into monstrous slaves, some half animal, others half machine. Uniformed militia are patrolling the streets and watching the city from their dirigibles. They turn a blind eye when racists stage pogroms in neighborhoods inhabited by non-humans. An overseas war is going badly, and horrific, seemingly meaningless terrorist acts occur with increasing frequency. Radical groups are springing up across the city. The spark that will ignite the revolution, however, is the Perpetual Train. Workers building the first transcontinental railroad, badly mistreated by their overseers, have literally stolen a train, laying track into the wild back-country west of the great city, tearing up track behind them, fighting off the militia sent to arrest them, even daring to enter the catotopic zone, that transdimensional continental scar where anything is possible. Full of warped and memorable characters, this violent and intensely political novel smoothly combines elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror, even the western. Miéville represents much of what is new and good in contemporary dark fantasy, and his work is must reading for devotees of that genre. FYI: Miéville has won Arthur C. Clarke, British Science Fiction and British Fantasy awards. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist In the forest Rudewood, Cutter waits for the few who will join him in finding the somaturge, or creator of golems, Judah, and then warning the Iron Council that the militia of the powerful, totalitarian city of New Crobuzon are closing in to destroy it. Meanwhile, in the malign megalopolis, young Ori, seeking to contact a daring urban freedom fighter and strike real blows against New Crobuzon's rulers, gets acquainted with an apparently mad old man said to have been a comrade of legendary outlaw-rebel Jack Half-a-Prayer. Mieville returns to the sublimely weird world of his award-winning Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002) in a shorter but still sprawling saga that is being boosted as his breakthrough to the kind of popularity fellow English fantasists Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman enjoy. The new book's parts alternate between Cutter's and Ori's adventures, which eventually intersect, and a long flashback tells the backstory of Judah and the Iron Council. Cutter's story unfolds like a blending of western movies and King Kong , and Ori's echoes the urban grunge fantasy of Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels. Freighting his prose with arcane botanical and engineering terms as well as neologisms, Mieville writes the intertwined tales in different styles--relatively spare and dry for Cutter's, lush and saturated for Ori's. His verbal and imaginative largesse may throw some readers while utterly engrossing others. No doubt about it, he's an original. Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Miéville moves effortlessly into the first division of those who use the tools and weapons of the fantastic to define and create the fiction of the coming century.”—NEIL GAIMAN“Continuously fascinating . . . Miéville creates a world of outrageous inventiveness.”— The Denver Post From the Inside Flap 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 Crobuzonx97this 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 Crobuzonx92s 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. China Miéville was born in 1972. He is the author of King Rat , which was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Prize; Perdido Street Station , which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; and The Scar , which won the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Hugo Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and Arthur C. Clarke Award. He lives and works in London. From The Washington Post With his shaved head, power-lifter's physique and multiple earrings, China Miéville looks just like a genie newly emerged from Aladdin's lamp. But this dazzling young novelist (born in 1972) isn't doing anyone's bidding. Miéville has reshaped modern fantasy, as readers of the award-winning Perdido Street Station and The Scar know very well, and he's done so by rejecting epic romance à la Tolkien for what one might call Zolaesque magic naturalism. Miéville's signature city, New Crobuzon, is populated by the human, the insectoid, the genetically remade, and altogether teems with the kind of grotesques one associates with Bosch paintings, the gnarly art (both verbal and pictorial) of Mervyn Peake or the night-club scene in "Star Wars." There are no generic happy endings here. In Iron Council Miéville returns to New Crobuzon with an elegiac paean to Utopian socialism, romantic revolutionaries and the European radical tradition. Miéville has himself been active in left-wing politics in Britain, and knows through university study and street-corner experience whereof he speaks. As a result, Iron Council portrays myriad forms of political dissent, from underground pamphleteering to urban terrorism, from heroic myth-making to the "necessary" murder. Its characters range from the philosophical to the pragmatic to the downright suicidal. To echo the title of Edmund Wilson's classic study of the 19th-century socialist tradition, a tradition culminating in Lenin's famous train journey back to Russia, Iron Council might well be called "To the Perdido Street Station." Miéville sets up three main narrative threads, two in the present and one in the past. When the book opens, a man is running through Rudewood, hoping to lose the nameless Terminator-like assassin on his trail. Cutter, it turns out, is searching for a gentle visionary named Judah Lowe, who can fabricate immensely strong golems out of nearly any kind of matter. (Judah Lowe's name pays homage to the Rabbi Loewe who made the first golem.) Cutter will accumulate a number of companions as he goes deeper into the outback on his quest for Lowe, the man he loves. Meanwhile, in New Crobuzon itself, the restless Uri longs to strike a blow for social justice. He participates in a cell of the Runagate Rampant but has come to feel that all his comrades do is talk, talk, talk, unlike the extremist Toro, whose gang acts, even when it's sometimes hard to tell if they are criminals or freedom fighters. Gradually, Uri, like other young men before him, will be drawn ever deeper into the claustrophobic ethos of terrorism and revenge. Giving meaning to the lives of both these men, and to the city's oppressed and disenfranchised, is the heroic story -- some say myth -- of the Iron Council. More than 20 years earlier, the TRT corporation started to build a railroad around the world. Exploiting the Remade (humans gruesomely altered as punishment for relatively venial crimes or unpopular political opinions), various humanoid species (cactuslike men, flying wyrmen) and some whole humans, the railroad had pushed its way into the wilds, heedless of both the indigenous peoples and the environment. But a strike for back pay unexpectedly leads to armed struggle and the eventual establishment of a workers' commune. Its driving force is the charismatic and eloquent Ann-Hari, a representative of the railroad's camp followers (and a former lover of Judah Lowe's). Think Flora Tristan, Rosa Luxemburg, La Passionara, Evita. Ann-Hari realizes that the one force that binds this disparate group of workers together is the great train that supplies them with food, lodging and protection. Rather than flee into the hills when the New Crobuzon militia attacks, she persuades her comrades and sisters to fight and, when they win, to build their community around the steam locomotive. And so is born a perpetual train, moving ever deeper into unknown territory, its citizens laying down rails before them as they take up those behind. The nomadic rebels endure, and the rumor of their promethean achievement reaches back to New Crobuzon. These one-time whores, slaves and misfits pass into legend. They become the Iron Council. Judah Lowe is one of the original Councillors, and his golemic skills help preserve the train and its people from numerous threats. But eventually he recognizes that his calling is to go back to New Crobuzon and spread the story and rallying cry of Iron Council, this locus of long-deferred hopes and dreams. But, then, after 20 or more years, Judah suddenly flees the corrupt metropolis to rejoin the Council, with Cutter doggedly following, even as Uri stays to take up the gun. Historical forces are approaching a nodal point: The war against the alien Tesh goes on and on, there is rising discontent among the indigenes of the city, uncanny spirals have begun to appear on walls throughout New Crobuzon. It is time, perhaps, for the Iron Council to pass back from the mists of legend into the fire of history. There's a lot more to this long novel, not least its subtlety of structure and its deep understanding of the revolutionary impulse. Characters act selflessly or selfishly, and sometimes good results, and sometimes bad. At key moments one hardly knows who is right, who is wrong, or even whether such categorical alternatives may be appropriate. Nearly everyone in the book betrays the Iron Council in one way or another -- or becomes its martyr. As one highly ambiguous figure asserts: History "is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible." This, then, is a gripping political novel set in a fantastic other-world. But it is almost equally fantastic in its prose, combining blunt-hammered sentences and sentence fragments with an astonishingly arcane diction. For good or ill, Miéville sometimes sounds as if his vocabulary derives from a dictionary, and he is certainly a writer who would make even Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Theroux reach for theirs. Gnathic, striae, unguligrade, indurate, ontic, pavonine -- all good words, but indicative of a fearless, even a dandy, stylist. Many descriptive passages achieve a kind of fustian poetry: "People came back who had become gnawed by the radula of impossibly fast vermiform predators." Eventually, one recognizes the strange beauty of Miéville's uncompromising diction, but it may take a little time. And just as the reader must be willing to glory in Miéville's idiosyncratic English, so too must one rejoice in his zoological and technological inventiveness. Listen to his description of some of the Remade: "Here a crawling man spiral-shelled in iron and venting smoke. Here a woman working, because there are women among the Remade, a woman become a guttered pillar, her organic parts like afterthoughts. A man -- or is it a woman? -- whose flesh moves with tides, with eructations like an octopus. People with their faces relocated, bodies made of iron and rubber cables, and steam-engine arms, and animal arms, and arms that are body-length pistons on which the Remade walk, their legs replaced with monkey's paws so they reach out from below their own waists." In his visionary fiction Miéville creates, with god-like fecundity, khepri women with insect heads, the handlinger parasites who take over their hosts and give them supernatural powers, helmets that allow one to pierce the fabric of space, golems made of clay or air or time itself, and haints and stiltspears and borinatch, monks who must lose something of themselves each time they commune with their deity, and, not least, the uncanny Cacotopic Stain, where a rip in the universe has allowed a mutant leakage into our world. In myriad ways, China Miéville's New Crobuzon is an unweeded garden of unearthly delights, and Iron Council a work of both passionate conviction and the highest artistry. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter OneA man runs. Pushes through thin bark-and-leaf walls, through the purposeless rooms of Rudewood. The trees crowd him. This far in the forest there are aboriginal noises. The canopy rocks. The man is heavy-burdened, and sweated by the unseen sun. He is trying to follow a trail. Just before dark he found his place. Dim hotchi paths led him to a basin ringed by roots and stone-packed soil. Trees gave out. The earth was tramped down and stained with scorching and blood. The man spread out his pack and blanket, a few books and clothes. He laid down something well-wrapped and heavy among loam and centipedes.Rudewood was cold. The man built a fire, and with it so close the darkness shut him quite out, but he stared into it as if he might see something emergent. Things came close. There were constant bits of sound like the bronchial call of a nightbird or the breath and shucking of some unseen predator. The man was wary. He had pistol and rifle, and one at least was always in his hand.By flamelight he saw hours pass. Sleep took him and led him away again in little gusts. Each time he woke he breathed as if coming out of water. He was stricken. Sadness and anger went across his face.“I’ll come find you,” he said.He did not notice the moment of dawn, only that time skidded again and he could see the edges of the clearing. He moved like he was made of twigs, as if he had stored up the night’s damp cold. Chewing on dry meat, he listened to the forest’s shuffling and paced the dirt depression.When finally he heard voices he flattened against the bank and looked out between the trunks. Three people approached on the paths of leaf-mould and forest debris. The man watched them, his rifle steadied. When they trudged into thicker shanks of light, he saw them clearly and let his rifle fall.“Here,” he shouted. They dropped foolishly and looked for him. He raised his hand above the earth rise.They were a woman and two men, dressed in clothes more ill-suited to Rudewood than his own. They stood before him in the arena and smiled. “Cutter.” They gripped arms and slapped his back.“I heard you for yards. What if you was followed? Who else is coming?”They did not know. “We got your message,” the smaller man said. He spoke fast and looked about him. “I went and seen. We were arguing. The others were saying, you know, we should stay. You know what they said.”“Yeah, Drey. Said I’m mad.”“Not you.”They did not look at him. The woman sat, her skirt filling with air. She was breathing fast with anxiety. She bit her nails.“Thank you. For coming.” They nodded or shook Cutter’s gratitude off: it sounded strange to him, and he was sure to them too. He tried not to make it sound like his sardonic norm. “It means a lot.” * * * They waited in the sunken ground, scratched motifs in the earth or carved figures from dead wood. There was too much to say.“So they told you not to come?”The woman, Elsie, told him no, not so much, not in those words, but the Caucus had been dismissive of Cutter’s call. She looked up at him and down quickly as she spoke. He nodded, and did not criticise.“Are you sure about this?” he said, and would not accept their desultory nods. “Godsdammit are you sure? Turn your back on the Caucus? You ready to do that? For him? It’s a long way we’ve got to go.”“We already come miles in Rudewood,” said Pomeroy.“There’s hundreds more. Hundreds. It’ll be bastard hard. A long time. I can’t swear we’ll come back.”I can’t swear we’ll come back.Pomeroy said, “Only tell me again your message was true. Tell me again he’s gone, and where he’s gone and what for. Tell me that’s true.” The big man glowered and waited, and at Cutter’s brief nod and closed eyes, he said, “Well then.” Others arrived then. First another woman, Ihona; and then as they welcomed her they heard stick-litter being destroyed in heavy leaps, and a vodyanoi came through the brush. He squatted in the froggish way of his race and raised webbed hands. When he jumped from the bank, his body—head and trunk all one fat sac—rippled with impact. Fejhechrillen was besmirched and tired, his motion ill-suited to woodland.They were anxious, not knowing how long they should wait, if any others would come. Cutter kept asking how they had heard his message. He made them unhappy. They did not want to consider their decision to join him: they knew there were many who would think it a betrayal.“He’ll be grateful,” Cutter said. “He’s a funny bugger and might be he’ll not show it, but this’ll mean a lot, to me and to him.”After silence Elsie said: “You don’t know that. He didn’t ask us, Cutter. He just got some message, you said. He might be angry that we’ve come.”Cutter could not tell her she was wrong. Instead he said: “I don’t see you leaving, though. We’re here for us, maybe, as well as for him.”He began to tell them what might be ahead, emphasising dangers. It seemed as if he wanted to dissuade them though they knew he did not. Drey argued with him in a rapid and nervy voice. He assured Cutter they understood. Cutter saw him persuading himself, and was silent. Drey said repeatedly that his mind was made up.“We best move,” said Elsie, when noon went. “We can’t wait forever. Anyone else is coming, they’ve obviously got lost. They’ll have to go back to the Caucus, do what’s needed in the city.” Someone gave a little cry and the company turned.At the hollow’s edge a hotchi rider was watching them, astride his gallus. The big war-cockerel plumped its breastfeathers and raised one spurred claw-foot in curious pose. The hotchi, squat and tough hedgehog man, stroked his mount’s red comb.“Militia coming.” His accent was strong and snarling. “Two men militia coming, a minute, two.” He sat forward in the ornate saddle and turned his bird around. With very little sound, with no metal to jangle on wood-and-leather straps and stirrups, it picked away high-clawed and belligerent, and was hidden by the forest.“Was that—?” “What—?” “Did you fucking—?”But Cutter and his companions were shushed by the sound of approach. They looked in unsaid panic, too late to hide.Two men came stepping over fungused stumps into view. They were masked and uniformed in the militia’s dark grey. Each had a mirrored shield and ungainly pepperpot revolver slack at his side. As they came into the clearing they faltered and were still, taking in the men and women waiting for them.There was a dragged-out second when no one moved, when befuddled and silent conference was held—are you, are they, what, should we, should we—?—till someone shot. Then there were a spate of sounds, screams and the percussion of shots. People fell. Cutter could not follow who was where and was gut-terrified that he had been hit and not yet felt it. When the guns’ heinous syncopation stopped, he unclenched his jaw.Someone was calling Oh gods oh fucking gods. It was a militiaman, sitting bleeding from a belly-wound beside his dead friend and trying to hold his heavy pistol up. Cutter heard the curt torn-cloth sound of archery and the militia man lay back with an arrow in him and stopped his noise.Again a beat of silence then “Jabber—” “Are you, is everyone—?” “Drey? Pomeroy?”First Cutter thought none of his own were hit. Then he saw how Drey was white and held his shoulder, and that blood dyed his palsying hands.“Sweet Jabber, man.” Cutter made Drey sit (Is it all right? the little man kept saying.) Bullet had taken muscle. Cutter tore strips from Drey’s shirt, and wound those cleanest around the hole. The pain made Drey fight, and Pomeroy and Fejh had to hold him. They gave him a thumb-thick branch to bite while they bandaged him.“They must’ve fucking followed you, you halfwit bastards.” Cutter was raging while he worked. “I told you to be fucking careful—”“We were,” Pomeroy shouted, jabbing his finger at Cutter.“Didn’t follow them.” The hotchi reappeared, its rooster picking. “Them patrol the pits. You been here long time, a day nearly.” It dismounted and walked the rim of the arena. “You been too long.”It showed the teeth in its snout in some opaque expression. Lower than Cutter’s chest but rotundly muscular, it strutted like a bigger man. By the militia it stopped and sniffed. It sat up the one killed by its arrow and began to push the missile through the body.“When them don’t come back, them send more,” it said. “Them come after you. Maybe now.” It steered the arrow past bones through the dead chest. It gripped the shaft when it came out the corpse’s back, and pulled the fletch through with a wet sound. The hotchi tucked it bloody into his belt, picked the revolving pistol from the militiaman’s stiffening fingers and fired it against the hole.Birds rose up again at the shot. The hotchi snarled with the unfamiliar recoil and shook its hand. The arrow’s fingerthick burrow had become a cavity.Pomeroy said: “Godspit . . . who in hell are you?”“Hotchi man. Cock-fighting man. Alectryomach. Help you.”“Your tribe . . .” said Cutter. “They’re with us? On our side? Some of the... Read more