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Iron Council by China Mieville
01/10/2004 . Source: Jennifer Howell 
pub: Macmillan. 471 page enlarged paperback. Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-333-98973-2. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.panmacmillan.com
href="http://www.panmacmillan.com"> Macmillan
There's a moment at the start of chapter 6 of 'Iron Council' when you're practically told what to expect, if only you want to take notice of it. A section entitled 'Returns' begins 'A window burst open high above the market. Windows everywhere opened above markets. A city of markets, a city of windows.' The many people who loved 'Perdido Street Station' will recognise that opening when they read 'Iron Council' for their next New Crobuzon fix and yet...not. This is not another 'Perdido' or another 'Scar' come to that. 'Iron Council' is something new, different and almost perversely much harder to love. Harder to like, certainly.
The writing is still astounding on a sentence level, wrangling language in new and unexpected ways. In the bigger picture, it's a vast and intricate accomplishment. So large that it's hard to keep it all in your head at once. Your key to understanding, let alone enjoying, 'Iron Council' is, I feel, to have read 'Perdido' very recently. Whole chunks of narrative may well pass you by without a glance otherwise and a state of general confusion is not a good way to read this book. Like living in New Crobuzon, you seriously need your wits about you.
Yes, New Crobuzon is still New Crobuzon, but not as we knew it. What that line in chapter six is telling you, I think, is that the city's story is being told in another way now. We're not about to go through one of those windows into a cosy domestic situation. Indeed, we've already spent the first five chapters running away from the city with Cutter and his cohorts, chasing his erstwhile lover, Judah Low, who has received a message from the legendary Iron Council. The monsters make an early appearance this time, both human and fantastic, but the whole first section feels rushed and uninvolving, something you read whilst waiting for the real story to start and the real characters to step in.
When the next character does appear, with the rebellious Ori Ciuraz about to step from talking about sedition to actually doing something about it, the sense of anti-climax intensifies: we're not going to get another Isaac or even a Bellis Coldwine. No one character is going to guide the audience viewpoint along and it only serves to make you feel lost and lonely within the book. New Crobuzon without a guide is not such a pleasant place anymore. Especially a New Crobuzon headed for war with Tesh and worse, war with itself.
It was only inevitable that the sense of wonder would start to pall. 'The Scar' offset this by moving away to Armada, a flotilla city, but kept New Crobuzon at heart all the while Bellis wanted to go home. 'Council' skips in and out of NC frequently, settling on several more effective situations at different times - the best of which is always going to be the Stiltspear sequence. Nothing else in the entire book is as affecting or tragic as far as I'm concerned or quietly grabs you quite so much. Judah, surprisingly, turns out to be the most sympathetic character when we see him in the extended scenes set in his past. His symbolically loaded science of golem-making is fascinating, becoming more a question of what can't you make a golem from. There's a gorgeously Wild West feel to the initial building of the railway line, a sense that the land can be tamed by the progress of technology if you only let it try and resonates better than most elements of the story with our world.
The problem 'Iron Council' is always going to have, I fear, is that there are too many narratives jostling for attention throughout, only a few of which are worth it. Maybe it's my short attention span kicking in but I seemed to be slogging through so many sections treading water, enjoying the wording if not the content and waiting for something I could connect to. After the personalities of the last two books, there's a worrying void when we spend time with the nonentity of Cutter and the frankly irritating Ori. I was spending the first half of the book mourning the non-existence of any significant female characters whatsoever, when low and behold, they suddenly kick in all at once with the introduction of Ann-Hari, who turns out to be complex in all the right ways. After a few more choice twists, all is forgiven after that. Mostly.
Be warned if you hate being kept in suspense, you aren't about to find out what the whole story of the 'Iron Council' itself is for a good long while. When it does appear, it's like a whole new story emerging from the dust. The images of a train pulling up its own tracks, creating history as it goes along, has just the right impact and keeps the story's shape while it's descending into a mess of anarchy back in New Crobuzon.
It ends in a wonderfully eccentric, unexpected moment of clarity - not something you can really see coming or guess at. It leaves the New Crobuzon that you thought you knew behind it in metaphorical smoking ruins. It becomes more and more impossible to ever label 'Iron Council' as a success or failure, however you look at it. There are moments of absolute brilliance there but they do lessen in comparison to what Mieville has written before. Most of it is not what you could call a pleasurable experience but much of it is important to read. It will make you want to go back and re-read the first two Bas-Lag books more than anything, if only to try and recapture that sense of the new and wonderful, but since when has that ever been a bad thing?
Jennifer Howell 
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