Book review: Iron Council by China Miéville

It's bad and you shouldn't read it

I’m a book masochist: I basically always finish a book even when I really don’t like it. This is bad enough on its own, but even worse when you consider that it takes me twice as long to finish a book I’m not enjoying. I always read for 20 minutes or so in bed before falling asleep, but the rest is variable. Whether I open my book instead of my phone during lunch or on the bus is really a function of how much I’m looking forward to getting back to a particular narrative. For this book, the phone won nine times out of ten, and it took me over a month to get through as a result.

“deeply rewarding” the Times tells us

So what makes it bad? Well, a lot of things. But primarily, the fact that Miéville is an actual, modern day, not joking communist.

This is the third book in the New Crobuzon trilogy, following the electric Perdido Street Station and very solid The Scar. For his finale, Miéville decided to center the narrative on the Remade, a criminal class who have been punished in New Crobuzon’s punishment factories by being magically (sorry, thaumaturgically) altered into various fantastic forms. Some get living body parts attached to them in weird places like a bunch of extra feet all over their torso. Or their hands and feet will get switched, or their heads will be turned around backwards, or some other cruel prank. Some get mixed with animal parts, like having their head attached to a horse’s body. And some get turned into Victorian steampunk cyborgs with the addition of pistons, boilers, wheels and so on. It’s obvious how this is punishment in a moral sense, but not as a matter of public policy in most cases. The idea seems to be: we captured a thief, let’s sew some balls onto his chin and turn him back on the street immediately, that will surely lower the crime rate.

In the first novel, the Remade are just a bit of background color with no real role in the story. In the sequel, the Remade get more expansive and sympathetic treatment, with a gang of Remade prisoners comprising important side characters on the floating pirate city and one in particular getting several viewpoint chapters to himself.

In this third book in the series, the Remade are the stars of the show. I’m going to spoil the plot a bit, but I think that’s fine because this is an anti-recommendation, I’m trying to save you the interminable irritation of reading this novel. But if you really want to read it anyway and don’t like spoilers, please close the tab now.

The main plot device is that a visionary railroad tycoon wants to build a railroad across the continent from New Crobuzon, which nobody has ever done for some reason despite already having a giant rail network in the city. He’s doing this with the assistance of a great many Remade prisoners, especially ones that have been specifically altered to have greatly augmented mechanical strength. But he runs into money trouble during this process, there’s a labor strike, and the Remade join forces with a large group of camp-following whores and they steal the train whose line they are currently building. Yes, they steal the train, ripping up a few miles of track from behind it and then laying it down in front of the engine again, over and over, in a very stupid slow-motion getaway. The Militia, the all-purpose stand-in for government authority, wants to stop this and recover their train so badly that they chase the whores and deformed freaks all the way into the Cacotopic Stain, a surreal tear in the fabric of reality, losing hundreds of Militiamen in the process. Why they’re doing this, why they can’t just let the whores and mutants escape with the dumb locomotive and build a new one, is as mysterious and dumb as the theft of the train in the first place. The idea that people building a rail line in front of themselves can outrun mounted men, or even men on foot, even for a little while, is also titanically dumb, but hey, it’s just a metaphor about the power of labor against corrupt capital, right? (You see, the train is the means of production, they have literally seized it. The power of labor is literally prostitutes and deformed criminals, what did communist Miéville mean by this?)

The freaks get away with their train, safely cross the Cacotopic Stain, and live happily ever after. That is, until twenty some years later, when the same visionary tycoon sends hundreds of more Militiamen across the entire continent to attack them for no apparent reason. Later we learn he sacrificed these hundreds of more troops as a ploy to get the Iron Council (the name the runaways choose) to come back to New Crobuzon because only they know the route, which he needs to complete his train track after all these years. Which also makes very limited sense, but again, it’s a metaphor.

Very literally, it’s a metaphor: while all this is happening, there’s an uprising against the government in New Crobuzon itself, and it’s explained that Iron Council has achieved mythic status among the labor class, an important symbol of the enduring power of [you get the idea] and ultimately hope for [it goes on like this for some time]. This is very explicit, over and over we’re told that Iron Council is a vital symbol for the resistance, and their return to the city would demonstrate once and for all that the government, or maybe capital (?) can be beaten. The uprising would rally to their flag and drive the Mayor and her cronies out for good, ushering in a new egalitarian society guided by a worker’s Collective. Yes, the rebels call themselves that. There are chapters and chapters dedicated to the underground agitators drumming up this revolution before it pops off, and they’re mostly pretty tedious, full of unlikable characters with inscrutable motivations.

Finally the train of freaks comes home for a final confrontation with the Militia, and gets frozen in time at the last moment before being annihilated by a vastly superior force, transformed into an ab-living monument to the memory of those brave train thieves that will persist for all time. The Collective is also crushed, but hey, at least the survivors can go look at the train any time they want and be reminded of what could one day be. The train is a symbol, you see. Of the hope of the glorious revolution, just around the corner, and so on and so forth, don’t think about it too hard.

None of this works. It’s supposed to work as a metaphor, a very explicit and clunky one, one you’re reminded by multiple characters is a literal symbol in the verbatim text, over and over. The problem is it’s not inspiring, it’s tedious and trite and silly, and not in a good way. The problem is that Miéville is a communist, and he wanted so badly to tell the story of a glorious but failed worker’s revolution that he wrote a bad, boring book in the attempt. I’m reminded of Lomez’s recent office hours, about right wing art.

What constitutes “right-wing art” — which is, by the way, labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact, so it’s actually a very flimsy labeling, but what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people.

My thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art.

…

We don’t want to make the same mistake the left did by insisting that art satisfy our political priors. This will distort our creative undertakings in all sorts of ways that will reduce the quality of art and therefore reduce its cultural power (and therefore its political power). Instead, all a new cultural right has to do is tell the truth.

This is art that wants, first and foremost, to satisfy its political priors. And this cringing need indeed distorts the narrative Miéville tried to tell, from the colorful and rousing fantasy of the first two books in the series into this sad, lumpy mess. It’s a shame, and the only of the half dozen of Miéville’s books I’ve read that I didn’t like.

There are parts of the narrative that work. Specifically, the origin story of Judah Low, a golemist and purportedly the main protagonist, learning how to create golems from a bunch of weird swamp creatures while being paid to scout for the railroad, then honing his skills and getting rich by starting a golem-fighting league with some rich kids from the university. There are also lots of Miéville’s colorful fantasy touches sprinkled throughout, and they’re almost enough to keep the narrative engaging. But just as often it feels overstuffed and unwieldy, and in the end the entire enterprise is bogged down by its insistence that the whores and freaks who stole a train and its tracks are the real point of the story.

Overall rating: Do not recommend. Please don’t read this book.