2005 Arthur C. Clarke and Locus Fantasy – IRON COUNCIL by China Miéville

I’m going to warn readers in advance that this review might dance the edge of spoilers. I’m not going to say much that you can’t get from reading the front and back cover, but Mieville writes this novel as if everything is a giant mystery.  The entire first part involves a group of characters searching for a mysterious someone.  Who is it?  Mieville won’t say!  It’s mysterious.  And then, you finally discover that it’s…Judah Low, a new character.  There’s a similar tease and reveal with the “Iron Council.” I think these sorts of mysteries for mystery’s sake are good examples of what’s annoyed me about Mieville’s earlier works.  That said, as a whole, I liked this novel much better than the two previous novels set on the Weird world of Bas-Lag.

As I said, a group of adventurers from New Crobuzon are off in the wilderness looking for Judah Low. Among them is Judah’s lover Cutter, who exhibits some of the greatest character depth I’ve seen from Mieville so far. There’s not much more to him than his obsession with Judah, but Mieville handles that with a defter touch than I’ve seen in the previous works.  Judah, in turn, is looking for the Iron Council, a revolutionary collective of former rail workers who stole the entire railroad (it’s sort of a stretch, but a fun one, and this is Bas-Lag we’re talking about). Judah can create magical golems, and he was one of the heroes of the revolution that created the Iron Council, which is narrated in the novel’s driving, exciting centerpiece. Judah left the Iron Council to connect with protest movements in New Crobuzon, but he now wants to return. Meanwhile, we also get the story of a brewing revolution in the city itself that parallels some of the history of the Paris Commune. We follow one of the revolutionaries named Ori, who has to navigate some conflicting motives from some of the movements’ leaders. Disenchanted with an ongoing war with the Tesh, and sick of the city government’s brutal oppression, the people rise up, and look to the fabled Iron Council’s return as their best hope of victory.

This is the first time that the story of a Bas-Lag novel felt big enough to match the majesty of the setting and epic enough to befit the significant page-length. Mieville is no longer dancing around the themes he cares about with obfuscated mutant bug metaphors; he’s a Marxist, and this book is about revolution.  It can be heavy-handed at times, and I’m not sure I’d agree with all of Mieville’s politics, but it really does feel like THE story he’s been trying to tell. The word “history” echoes through the book, replete with all of the teleological connotations of Mieville’s beliefs – is it the inexorable expansion of industrial capitalism, represented by the octopus-like tentacles of rail, or is it the march to a workers’ utopia? Mieville uses these question as a backdrop that, most importantly, heightens the character drama, something that I felt was missing from The Scar and Perdido Street Station.

That’s not to say that this novel solves all of the problems of its predecessors.  I’m not positive that Cutter and Jonah and their laconic love story, are that much richer than Bellis or Isaac.  Maybe they just felt that way to me because I enjoyed the plot more. And, I did not connect to Ori, who did feel as passive and immaterial as the characters of the earlier books. The worst offender is Drogon, a susurrating vaquero.  He has magical powers based on whispers, which is pretty cool, and his ranch-hand get-up adds to the vaguely western feel of portions of the book, but he doesn’t contribute much else.  He arrives, makes a big splash with his power and aesthetic, and then disappears until he has a role to play at the end. It seems that Mieville has to force every bit of weirdness into Bas-Lag that he can; no need to develop the ideas into a coherent world/plot/character.  I’m starting to suspect that I preferred The City & The City because the clarity and focus of the central concept forced Mieville to develop things a bit more, and maybe the same can be said about this book as well. The Revolution at the book’s core gives it a stronger structure and message than the bug hunt of Perdido Street Station or the vague unfinished quest of The Scar.  I’m certainly not one to complain about a new twist on fantasy, but I have to declare Bas-Lag a slight disappointment.  There’s a lot of new, but still not as much of the depth I’m looking for in fantasy world-building.

Grade: B+

2003 BFS and Locus Fantasy – THE SCAR by China Miéville

Bas-Lag round 2.  As in Perdido Street Station, I really want to love Mieville’s merging of different oddball concepts and his working to look at fantasy at new angles, and again, I didn’t feel like the novel delivered on the potential of Mieville’s world.

The Scar begins with a new character, Bellis Coldwine fleeing the city of New Crobuzon (due to the events of Perdido Street Station – I guess that’s a spoiler, but the eventual revelation is more fan service than plot service).  She joins an oceanic voyage to a distant colony, but her ship is overtaken, and she winds up in the floating pirate city of Armada instead.  She and her fellow travelers are impressed into serving in Armada, and she begins to build relationships with them.  She teaches cabin boy Shekel how to read, she learns of scholar Johannes Tearfly’s new research agenda, and she befriends a Remade prisoner from the ship named Tanner Sack.  A spy from New Crobuzon named Silas Fennec warns her that her home city might be in danger, but she also learns more about the leaders of Armada, including a scarred pair called the Lovers, a mercernary with a mystic sword named Uther Doul, and a shifty vampire called The Brucolac.

It kind of feels like I just listed characters there rather than describing the plot, but there’s not a whole lot of plot.  The leaders of the Armada do have an elaborate plan that involves some mystical exploration, but I don’t want to spoil it.  Most of the novel is just Bellis sitting around, pondering her allegiances or speculating on the Armada with her friends. It all feels a bit aimless.  In some ways, this novel has the opposite problem of Perdido Street Station’s transition to lengthy, single-minded bug hunt.  That novel became too focused, The Scar never quite gets focused enough.

I think the common denominator might be the characters.  Isaac der Grinebulin bounced between opportunistic bastard, bohemian romantic, absent-minded professor, and action hero without really developing a distinctive voice, other than a very funny foul mouth.  Bellis doesn’t even have the foul mouth going for her.  There’s a nice bit about her writing letters to an undetermined audience, but otherwise, she’s a very passive protagonist.  I suppose that’s her character arc, but since we spend most of the novel's 575 pages with her, she should at least be interesting.

There is plenty to like here.  Armada is another fun creation (though I wish it had done more), as are some of the magic monsters, items, and phenomena in the book (the “might sword” is one of the coolest ideas I've seen in fantasy in a long time).  The themes are more cohesive than Perdido, too. Every significant character ends up with mental and/or physical scars that nicely echo the mysterious Scar of the title, but Mieville keeps it from getting too heavy handed.  And there are nice allusions to the likes of Moby Dick (Melville, Mieville?). His prose is, well, a bit more restrained, which I think is mostly for the best (this novel is “wobbling testicle” free).

It’s the many strengths of The Scar and Perdido Street Station that make me so frustrated that I haven’t really connected with either. I’m still going to come back for The Iron Council.

Grade: B-

2001 Arthur C. Clarke and BFS – PERDIDO STREET STATION by China Mieville

There’s no denying that expectations play a big role in how I see these books.  Here we have a book by an author whose work I've liked, who has the sort of social science perspective that I love in my sf, and it’s one of the foundational works of the intriguing “New Weird” sub-genre.  I really wanted to love this novel, and I’m pretty bummed that I didn’t.

It gets off to a great start.  The main attraction here is the world-building, and the opening chapters are chock full of it.  The setting is the city of New Crobuzon on the fantasy world of Bas-Lag.  There’s magic, steampunk technology, and a variety of weird, hybrid sentient species, taken from different world myths.  The khepri have insect heads like an Egyptian god, the vodyanoi are frog people from Russian folklore, the garuda have wings and bird heads and are inspired by Hindi stories, the cactacae are cactus people based on the venerable folk story Final Fantasy.  There are also odd-looking people called Remade, deformed in imaginative ways by magic (er… “thaumaturgy”).  The infrastructure of the city is wonderfully described – part of it is in the massive skeletal ribcage of a long-dead giant beast, it’s full of zepellins and trains, and there's a rich sense of the geography from the gritty streets to the high spire in the center.  Mieville’s descriptions not only evoke a fully-formed urban aesthetic, but also a whole host of accompanying suggestions of class and race, which are missing from most nobility-obsessed high fantasy.

The protagonist is Isaac der Grimnebulin, a human scientist who’s dissatisfied with academic life.  He lives in a bad part of town, and often visits an even worse part of town to hang out with his artist friends, including his khepri girlfriend Lin.  Around the same time Lin and Isaac both get big commissions.  Lin is to sculpt (out of khepri-mucous and berries) a statue of a horrifically self-Remade druglord named Mr. Motley.  Isaac is to create a flying apparatus for a garuda who’s lost his wings, named Yagharek.  Improbably, these plot lines come together when a super-drug producing Lovecraftian moth-thing escapes Isaac’s care and rampages throughout the city.  Isaac must team up with Yagharek, sentient steampunk constructs, a demented giant spider called The Weaver, and others, to hunt down the moths.

Yes, it’s self-consciously weird.  I like that about the novel, but I think there’s a fundamental schizophrenia here.  Mieville wants to have crazy beasties, perpetual motion machines, magic, and steampunk, and he wants to tell a straightforward action tale.  He’s not able to pull off both.  Most of the book, including the entire second half, bogs down in endless fights, chases, and climbs, and Mieville seems committed to giving us a detailed play by play of every move.  The hunt for the moth monsters comes to consume the book, pushing aside its weirdness and any deeper significance.  Did Mieville really come up with all of these ingenious freaks just to have them team up for a super-battle?

Among the things that get lost in Mieville’s pursuit of Weird action is social commentary.  As I said, there are rich suggestions of class and race as issues, and there’s a vague critique of the city’s authoritarian government, but Mieville never really develops these ideas.  Mieville has a Ph.D. in International Relations (though I guess he was still finishing up when this came out), so I expected the novel to be about society on some level.  It seems that Mieville is creating metaphors in New Crobuzon, but they’re not particularly well-developed or evocative.   Again, action and self-conscious weirdness get in the way.

I can’t say I particularly cared about the characters either.  Isaac is grumpy, consumed by work, and ambivalent about his feelings for Lin, which adds up to something that’s certainly not generic, but not particularly compelling either.  Everyone else is pretty much a cipher, at least until the final chapter adds layers to Yagharek.  Not being invested in the characters made those endless second-half action sequences even more interminable. Weird also gets in the way of the prose at times. Mieville shows flashes of his talent here, and the descriptions are far richer than your average sf, but he comes up with some off-putting metaphors (e.g. “his body wobbling like a bloated testicle”) and strange diction (“his body was thin…with a healthy emaciation”).  I might applaud the originality of his language if I wasn’t so busy throwing up. Add in the aforementioned overwrought descriptions, and I wanted to yell at Mieville to put the thesaurus down and get on with it.

It was almost like I could see Mieville finding his voice as a writer throughout the novel.  He immediately turns the fantasy genre on its head, but then he doesn’t do much with the new world he’s made.  The ideas are there, but they need to be more developed in less space (I suspect I’m going to find many more books about a 1/3^rd too long in this decade, as pagecounts continue to grow, more due to trends in publishing than to any actual artistic reason).  I wanted this book to be so much more than it is, but I am still going to check out the other two Bas-Lag books.

Grade: B-