Iron Council

Iron Council is China Mieville‘s fourth novel, and the third set in the fantasy world of Bas-Lag (after Perdido Street Station and The Scar).
I’ve written about Mieville here before, so I will just go over briefly how he’s a brilliant writer of “speculative fiction” — or of what Mieville himself prefers to call (with a not to Lovecraft and the old pulps) “weird fiction” — basically fantasy, though tinged with elements of both alternative-Victorian science fiction and of Lovecraftian horror; how he’s created as rich and strange an alternative world as any writer has ever done; how he might be thought of as the anti-Tolkien, since his major effort is to rescue fantasy literature from Tolkien’s Medievalizing, moral simplemindedness, reactionary-nostalgic politics, and vision of literature as “consolation”; and how, beyond this, Mieville is actively engaged in rethinking every aspect of fantasy literature, in critiquing and revising its myths, as well as in renewing its links with many aspects of both high culture and low, particularly with surrealism and with pulp writing.
In all these ways, Iron Council is of a piece with Mieville’s earlier books. The urban density and sheer materiality of the immense (and politically repressive) city of New Crobuzon, the strange physics, the monsters, the magical technologies — all of them are here.
What’s new and startling in this novel is how, instead of being about an individual quest, as Perdido Street Station and The Scar both arguably were, Iron Council is about a collective quest, and a political one at that. Mieville has tried for nothing less than to write a myth (if that’s the right word, which I am not sure it is, for something that is both magical and material, but has none of the pompous and reactionary Jungian connotations that invocations of ‘myth’ usually have) of political Revolution.
Iron Council contains echoes both of the Paris Commune of 1871, and of labor struggles in the American West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book is split between three characters, and between two major plotlines (which of course converge by the end). One plotline involves striking railway workers who literally steal the train and the tracks they are working on, and construct a “line of flight” away from their oppressors: it is only by disappearing from public view and official knowledge that they have the leisure to reinvent society along non-coercive lines. The other plotline, back in New Crobuzon, focuses on a disgruntled militant, who becomes increasingly involved with a fringe group of “infantile leftists” (as Lenin called them), while around him, and almost unbeknownst to him, events are fast approaching a point of revolutionary effervescence.
But wait. What I wrote in the last paragraph, if taken by itself, might well be the description of a “social realist” or “proletarian” novel of the 1920s or 1930s. What is it doing in a fantasy novel, filled with occult happenings and monstrosities worthy of Lovecraft (who, of course, also wrote his major works in the 1920s and 1930s)? Can the same novel possibly dramatize both the evolution of class consciousness, and the visceral, nightmarish experience of fighting with monstrous “inchmen,” who have human heads and arms, mouths with shark-sharp teeth, and the torsos and bodies of enormous, yards-long caterpillars?
Mieville’s accomplishment in Iron Council is to make such a fusion work: to carry it off so seamlessly that when reading the book the thought of a possible contradiction doesn’t even enter one’s mind. It’s only in retrospect that one even wonders about it. The politics of Bas-Lag, with heavy state repression, continual war, and feuding leftist factions, and the presence within this world of the Cacotopic Stain, a mysterious region that causes bizarre, cancerous mutations in whomever or whatever approaches it too closely, both seem equally concrete.
Not to mention the presence of the Remade, who are among the most haunting figures in all three of Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels. The technology of New Crobuzon seems especially oriented towards torturing criminals, convicts, and political dissidents by surgically altering their bodies in grotesque ways, combining the organic with the mechanical, or the human with the animal. A man will have been transformed into a centaur or a satyr, or will have a coal stove on wheels replacing his torso, belly, and legs. A woman will have animate babies’ arms attached to her head, in punishment for the poverty that led to the death of her child.
When the human imagination can reach extremes of hypermoralistic cruelty like these, Mieville seems to be saying, the dream of a relatively egalitarian and uncoercive society is really rather a modest one.

Iron Council is China Mieville‘s fourth novel, and the third set in the fantasy world of Bas-Lag (after Perdido Street Station and The Scar).
I’ve written about Mieville here before, so I will just go over briefly how he’s a brilliant writer of “speculative fiction” — or of what Mieville himself prefers to call (with a not to Lovecraft and the old pulps) “weird fiction” — basically fantasy, though tinged with elements of both alternative-Victorian science fiction and of Lovecraftian horror; how he’s created as rich and strange an alternative world as any writer has ever done; how he might be thought of as the anti-Tolkien, since his major effort is to rescue fantasy literature from Tolkien’s Medievalizing, moral simplemindedness, reactionary-nostalgic politics, and vision of literature as “consolation”; and how, beyond this, Mieville is actively engaged in rethinking every aspect of fantasy literature, in critiquing and revising its myths, as well as in renewing its links with many aspects of both high culture and low, particularly with surrealism and with pulp writing.
In all these ways, Iron Council is of a piece with Mieville’s earlier books. The urban density and sheer materiality of the immense (and politically repressive) city of New Crobuzon, the strange physics, the monsters, the magical technologies — all of them are here. Also the intoxicating prose, sometimes down-to-earth, more often lush and luxurious. Mieville is a writer so full of ideas that even in a long book — and Iron Council, at 564 pages, is the shortest of the three Bas-Lag novels — seems not long enough to contain them all.
What’s new and startling in this novel is how, instead of being about an individual quest, as Perdido Street Station and The Scar both arguably were, Iron Council is about a collective quest, and a political one at that. Mieville has tried for nothing less than to write a myth (if that’s the right word, which I am not sure it is, for something that is both magical and material, but has none of the pompous and reactionary Jungian connotations that invocations of ‘myth’ usually have) of political Revolution.
Iron Council contains echoes both of the Paris Commune of 1871, and of labor struggles in the American West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book is split between three characters, and between two major plotlines (which of course converge by the end). One plotline involves striking railway workers who literally steal the train and the tracks they are working on, and construct a “line of flight” away from their oppressors: it is only by disappearing from public view and official knowledge that they have the leisure to reinvent society along non-coercive lines. The other plotline, back in New Crobuzon, focuses on a disgruntled militant, who becomes increasingly involved with a fringe group of “infantile leftists” (as Lenin called them), while around him, and almost unbeknownst to him, events are fast approaching a point of revolutionary effervescence.
But wait. What I wrote in the last paragraph, if taken by itself, might well be the description of a “social realist” or “proletarian” novel of the 1920s or 1930s. What is it doing in a fantasy novel, filled with occult happenings and monstrosities worthy of Lovecraft (who, of course, also wrote his major works in the 1920s and 1930s)? Can the same novel possibly dramatize both the evolution of class consciousness, and the visceral, nightmarish experience of fighting with monstrous “inchmen,” who have human heads and arms, mouths with shark-sharp teeth, and the torsos and bodies of enormous, yards-long caterpillars?
Mieville’s accomplishment in Iron Council is to make such a fusion work: to carry it off so seamlessly that when reading the book the thought of a possible contradiction doesn’t even enter one’s mind. It’s only in retrospect that one even wonders about it. The politics of Bas-Lag, with heavy state repression, continual war, and feuding leftist factions, and the presence within this world of the Cacotopic Stain, a mysterious region that causes bizarre, cancerous mutations in whomever or whatever approaches it too closely, both seem equally concrete.
Not to mention the presence of the Remade, who are among the most haunting figures in all three of Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels. The technology of New Crobuzon seems especially oriented towards torturing criminals, convicts, and political dissidents by surgically altering their bodies in grotesque ways, combining the organic with the mechanical, or the human with the animal. A man will have been transformed into a centaur or a satyr, or will have a coal stove on wheels replacing his torso, belly, and legs. A woman will have animate babies’ arms attached to her head, in punishment for the poverty that led to the death of her child.
When the human imagination can reach extremes of hypermoralistic cruelty like these, Mieville seems to be saying, the dream of a relatively egalitarian and uncoercive society is really rather a modest one.