I read (and loved) Perdido Street Station, I read (and liked a lot) The Scar. So it stands to reason that I would also read The Iron Council: part three of the Bas-Lag-Trilogy about and around the crazy chaotic city of New Crobuzon. So here’s my take on it.

It is a highly political book.

The others were also political in their own way, critical of the corrupt oppressive power and taking a stance for the exploited. But the story of the characters was still the main topic. The Iron Council changes that. It brings politics front and center, and the story of the characters becomes more like a vehicle, dare I say carriage, pulled onward by the increasingly violent political struggle between the iron fisted rule of New Crobuzon’s upper crust and the downtrodden masses of poor, alien, and remade — the working class, if you will.

The politics

The political stance of China Miéville is quite obvious in all his works. But that does not narrow the sharpness of his perception. He is an excellent author: therefore he does not simply sprout his dogmata like a second rate hack but takes the time to understand … and his attention to detail and eye for “real” characters allows him to see quite clearly what strengths, but also what weaknesses both sides harbour, the other as well as his own.
He coolly and factually describes … that is, shows, not tells … of the shortcomings of capital and working class, of regime and revolutionary, and the psychological interplay between them and among the members of each side. We follow the lower-class people though, so they get way more time in the limelight, but we get a good look at both.

The result is quite a realistic portrait of how a revolution starts, how it could be prevented but isn’t, how it works, how it pans out, depending on all sorts of factors.

Interdependence

The weird core is that both sides fight each other tooth and nails, but are both riddled with traitors and also need each other very much.

Without the Railway Coproporation and the Gouvernment, there would never be a railway. Without the workers there would also never be a railway. The city exists because it was built by people, and it functions because someone keeps it running, fed, protected.

The Greater Good and its Victims

The fact that rich and poor both stomp on the little man in their respective quests for what each of them perceives as the Greater Good, and the fact that they both rely on charismatic leadership and a system resilient enough to replace charismatic leaders with new faces. The gouvernment sends its little soldiers into hell and destruction against foes external and internal, and leaves its veterans in squalor – and some of them face death bravely, believing in their cause. The revolutionaries are quick to kill and sacrifice for their own high aspirations, and some of them likewise face death bravely, believing in their cause.

China Miéville is not afraid to show all this as simple events that just happen, without pointing it out. This look at the struggle, unafraid of its warts and dirt, makes the tale realistic despite its over-the-top technological hyperbole; so close to real in the human and relationship department that it is easy to read very different messages out of the book, depending on the reader’s personal preference and political leaning.

You can read it and shudder at the reckless way in which the revolution wrecks the economy and wastes resources that could be invested much better; the unproductive futility of it, and the wastful deaths of an internal revolution when there would be a chilling outside threat to face. At the same time and from the same situations you can read it horrified how cold-hearted the powerful run roughshod over poor and criminal, native and workforce, and be excited about the well deserved resistance that arises, and taken aback by the setbacks of the Iron Council.

Quick & Dirty Characters

Of course, it has to be noted that putting so much stress on politics and conflict, this time around he does not have that much time to truly develope the characters, lest this becomes a 400.000 word epos.

The big picture drives the book, and the character development must wait.

He still does it well between the lines. Even indirectly … like Cutter barely perceiving what’s going on with Elsie and Pomeroy because he does not truly care — there’s only one person he really cares about: Judah — or rather, not Judah as a person, but as Judah being there for Cutter. Consequently we, the reader, can see hints that Elsie and Pomeroy have their own book worth of adventure and drama going on, but it remains background noise. Just a hint that Cutter is not the only one here, even though he is hardly concerned with anyone else.
Miéville focuses on the main storyline and at the same time makes us see how Cutter ticks. A smart way to turn the problem of keeping things short-ish into an asset for characterisation.

Which brings us to…

The plot

What happens in The Iron Council?

Time has moved on since The Scar. A generation has passed. Small side-characters from back in Perdido Street Station have grown old and made careers, and new people have been born and are now the main cast. We have a new mayor.

We covered the age of sail in The Scar, now we cover the age of rail: Muskets have become six-shooters, railway companies feed the dream and suck up enormous resources, iron rails change lives, landscapes and the destinies of landscapes.

Judah Low, a messianic charisma-bomb, has gone missing, and some of his disciples — members of the Caucus, one of several splintered and partially organised socialist resistance groups — set out to find him, closely followed, harrassed, and some of them even killed, by the militia. By the state. Because these resistance groups, back in Perdido mostly printing underground newspapers, are now doing a lot more. They are printing multiple different underground newspapers, and some of them call for open violence, and others actually DO violence.

These disciples discover that aside from the open war between New Crobuzon and Tesh [yes, there is finally someone actually fighting the big steamroller New Crobuzon, in earnest, and the fallout of the war is traumatized, cripples, and dead] there is also a guerilla war out in the deep country: not only between runaway Remade (called fReemade) who support themselves through banditry, but also with the militia and allied assassins trying to find and destroy “The Iron Council”, a mythic force of long-time revolutionaries who have evaded the long arm of the gouvernment for many, many years.

We learn in a side arc what happened 20 years before that: Judah Low was actually working for a big corporation, the railroad company, and its visionary CEO. They were destroying the environment and the natives, to create something monumental: a railroad to connect the big hubs of Bas-Lag and bring civilization to the outback.

That’s where this book feels much like a western — or as if westerns, colonisation, fantasy and the communist manifesto had a baby.

Force

Anyway, this titanic railway project that does not turn out well, because of bureaucracy and careless powerplay on the part of the gouvernment, which lead to strikes, which lead to strike-breaking, which leads to violence. One look at European history and we know the drill.

The railroad building effort is its own industry, almost a living organism, and when they are disrespected, not paid, shot at, and riled up by agitators, the workers rebel, and then, confronted with the wrath of the gouvernment after killing lawmen, they take the big construction train and hide in the deep wilderness (laying tracks, rolling across them, and pulling them out behind them, eternal) and form a commune of free equals, led by a small oligarchy of orators who keep them organised, in line, and with a purpose.

Revolution

Word of their rebellion is brought to the city by Judah and slowly helps feed revolutionaries who have formed around the revolutionary newspaper Runagate Rampant and the remembrance of the fallen Rebel “Jack Half-a-Prayer”, who was also encountered back in the first book.

This rebellion, initially a bunch of separate conflicting dissenters, finally unites and rises up when one of their splinter cells assassinates the mayor. Then whole city districts barricade the roads, arm up, and demand change. And the gouvernment has to bend considerable resources to fight them. Bombs are dropped within city limits, artillery and cavalry charges, burning rubble … we are looking at a full on civil war.

When the hidden Iron Council in the wilderness hear that the revolution is there, and the struggle is now, they know that they have their part to play, and decide to come back. To support their brothers and sisters on the barricades, not only as the idea of some commune that made it out there in the woods, but for real, physically, by riding their free people’s train into the embattled megalopolis.

And yet,
the great dream of the people’s revolution and the arrival of the working classes’ utopia is not that easily won, and even less easily defended.

Complex and heavy

Each of the three Bas-Lag books unfolds before the backdrop of a rich and vibrant living world, but this one is the most heavy of them, and the most difficult. It bridges times and lives, technologies and ecosystems, as well as world views, and follows a set of very different main characters, and thus peels back layers of the world and its history and powers over time.

The modern reader will also notice the sexual lives of the characters, which come in all sorts from simple homosexuality over casual sex without emotion to straight up prostitution, and heterosexuality too.

And it throws situations at the reader that ask for qualifying: Where do morals lie? What course of action is justified, necessary, desirable or enforced? Who has the right to do what? Who has the right to decide what for whom? When is it right to kill? And when is it important to save enemies in order to save friends as well? And what believes are worth laying down lives for?

China Miéville refuses to answer these questions. He simply presents us with situations, zooms in on some characters and their motives and opinions, and tells this story. It falls to us, the readers, to draw our conclusions and decide who is good, who is bad, and how grey everyone else is, who is right, wrong, or misguided, whom we like and don’t like, agree or disagree with, based on the information that we have.

Just as in life.

A good book and worthy finale of the Bas-Lag-Trilogy,
but hard to carry, not suited for everyone, and a difficult reflection of our imperfect world with its imperfect societies and their imperfect ideologies — which may sometimes be better off as a myth, or perhaps in a bubble like in a museum, frozen in time, to inspire thinking and belief, rather than in an actual, bloody battle on our actual streets … and railroads.

Picture: pixabay.