What I Am Reading: "Iron Council" by China Miéville
This book, the last in the New Crobuzon kind-of-a-trilogy, has a lot to say about revolution. It was the shortest of these books, and the first one to have a non-linear narrative, with a long flashback in the middle.
The story is about the frontier, and about change coming to New Crobuzon at last, and how the two intersect (but not in a Frederick Jackson Turner way). Set about a quarter-century after the previous two books in the series, the novel follows two plot threads. New Crobuzon is at war with the shadowy, darkly magical city-state of Tesh, and the war, a far-off Vietnamesque slog, is not going well. Unrest has come to New Crobuzon, and the militia (who've started operating openly) are losing their grip on parts of the city. Technology has advanced to the point of pepperpot revolvers and neon lights. A loose underground of revolutionary groups and gangs operates as "the Collective," coordinating anti-government activities as best they can. The story opens with some members of the Collective leaving the city on a quest. At the head, a man named Cutter brings a few followers to catch up with his lover and their leader, Judah. Judah leads them out into the hinterland in pursuit of the Iron Council.
As is told in flashback, the Iron Council was a revolutionary society born from labor unrest, as a tycoon attempted to make a railroad from New Crobuzon across the continent. That tycoon, Weather Wrightby, was monomaniacal about traveling westward across the continent, and reluctantly firm against any who stood in the railroad's way. When Judah was young, he was employed by the railroad to scout out a swampland region, and came to identify strongly with its natives, the Stiltspears. It was from they that he first learned how to make golems, inanimate matter breathed to life and given orders by magic. He was unable to save the Stiltspears from the encroaching railroad, but did take strongly to the craft of golem-making.
The flashback where Judah's life is filled in is heavily colored by American Westerns, as one could imagine about a transcontinental railroad across the frontier. Judah drifts through the boomtowns that migrate along with the train, traveling with gamblers, outlaws, and bounty hunters (the casino scenes sneak in a nice little Surrealist card deck reference, with its wheels, flames, black stars, and keyholes). Throughout the time he feels himself inhabited by some kind of force passed into him by the Stiltspears, urging him to do the right thing. He eventually comes to kill the bounty hunter he is tagging along with using a golem when the bounty hunter is trying to smoke another group of natives out of a cave. After meeting a woman named Ann-Hari in one of the existing towns overrun and corrupted by the rough railroad workers, Judah returns to New Crobuzon with her, and the two learn the ways of the city. Judah learns about golemetry in the city, starting the golem fight circuit; but eventually both he and Anne-Hari feel the call of the railroad. He makes another check-in with the surviving Stiltspear golemists then returns to work on the track, and eventually discovers that Ann-Hari has taken up with the prostitute camp-followers.
After considerable labor difficulty, it comes about that the train advances to a mountain where the rock-blasters have been held up, so the blasters, the levelers, and the track-layers are all bunched together idle in a camp. Many of these are free men, but some are Remade, the city's grotesquely bioengineered penitents. However, as it transpires, the money is not getting through, and the simmering discontent finally comes to a head when the prostitutes refuse to accept credit any longer, and stand firm in the face of threats. A strike by all workers turns into violent revolt when the overseers attempt to coerce the Remade to work, and the latter stand their ground. The striking workers take to the barricades and overwhelm the guards of the work train. Considerable debate and discussion follows, and after a counterattack is fought off with the help of another tribe of frontier natives, a decision is made. The train blasts through the last of the mountain and across the already-completed trestle on the other side, blowing it behind them. Despite taking considerable losses in the initial battles and through the escape process, the railroad, which works now by taking the track from behind and building it in front like a locomotive ouroboros, escapes its pursuers by skirting close to a cacotopic stain, a kind of magical radiation zone. Thus was established the folk legend of the Iron Council, attracting downtrodden refugees from across the continent. A mobile train city, like the ship-city of Armada in the last book, definitely has precursors in science fiction and fantasy (Snowpiercer for example) but the writing is lively enough not to fall into pastiche. Judah had returned to New Crobuzon to spread the legend, while Ann-Hari, as the leader of the women in the initial revolt, is a respected Councillor (fleeing was her idea, and it was her messenger who brought the native help during the assault).
As Judah seeks out the Iron Council, there are other revolutionary developments back in the city. Ori is presented as a young revolutionary sort, running in bohemian circles who put on seditious puppet shows and scuffle with the brownshirt New Quillers (humans opposed to the other (“xenian”) species). He is a member of the Runagate Rampant group, an outgrowth of the seditious paper in the original novel, whose activities largely focus on propagandizing and debate, counseling patience and a slow organizational build-up. Ori feels stifled by this slow pace, especially after he meets Spiral Jacobs, a homeless man who knew the bandit/folk hero from the first novel, the Remade Jack Half-a-Prayer. We are told through flashback that Jack was eventually caught and put in the stockade, then mercy-killed by someone who appears to have been Yagharek from the first book, living as a de-feathered vagabond (after having declined to join Jack's group). Inspired by Jack's legend and by Spiral, Ori falls in with Toro's gang, a group led by a figure in a metal-and-magic bull mask, focused more on propaganda of the deed. Specifically, they are interested in assassinating the city's mayor.
To make a long story short, they do, though Toro's actual motivation turns out to have been killing the mayor's lover, a judge who ordered her to be Remade. In fact, the mayoralty is the subject of the other character connection to previous books, as the mayor is revealed to be Eliza Stem-Fulcher, the serene, pipe-smoking patrician woman who served as Mayor Rudgutter's home secretary in Perdido Street Station, helping contain the slake-moth threat. However, her killing is not what brings about the revolution. As Ori takes the Toro helmet and escapes interdimensionally, he reappears Anticitizen One-like to find that the revolution is in progress, though barely anyone knows about the mayor and her death had nothing to do with it. Instead, the revolution arose organically, as a crowd overwhelmed militia posts after a threat from Tesh was not contained and protest turned to riot. From there territory was seized, organization was ad-hoc’ed, and celebration and debate rang in the streets before the fighting intensified.
This uprising renders Ori's propaganda of the deed hollow, and similarly out in the prairie the Iron Council does not prove to be a revolutionary vanguard, despite how Judah thinks that their approach must have been what sparked the uprising. Judah, Cutter, and their decimated band brought word that New Crobuzon had sent an expedition to flank the Council, and wipe it out. Combining this warning with news of the city's simmering discontent, the Council decided to head back to the city to take part in the uprising. One of Judah's band is a monk from Tesh, a refugee from the New Crobuzon war parties who have torn apart the Tesh hinterland. The monk, Qurabin, is a follower of the Moment of Lost Things, and is able to use their powers to reveal secrets, though something is sacrificed in return. As part of their initiation, the sacrifice that Qurabin made was the knowledge of their own gender. After their monastery was destroyed, Qurabin had nothing to live for, and is slowly whittling down to nothing as they reveal secrets to help the party find the Iron Council and the Council find its way home. Now, as news of the fighting comes from New Crobuzon, Qurabin realizes that the spiral symbol that many revolutionaries have been using, taken up from the graffiti of Spiral Jacobs, is actually the magic that can be used by Tesh to cause a city-leveling attack. Judah's band heads back to the city to prepare the way for the Iron Council, and to prevent the city from being destroyed.
This fight costs many lives, including Ori's and Qurabin's, but Spiral Jacobs is stopped at the apex of his ritual atop Perdido Street Station itself. The Collective, however, is not doing well. Besieged in a few neighborhoods south of the river, the street fighting is romantic and heroic, but ultimately futile. Like scenes out of the Siege of Madrid, the revolutionaries are being pushed back street-by-street, and Judah sends Cutter back to the Iron Council to tell them to turn away, fearing the destruction of the revolutionary symbol. When he arrives, however, Ann-Hari decides instead that the train-city should embrace its place in history; and after they turn around and defeat the militia who had pursued them even back through the cacotopic stain, they speed to the revolutionaries' rescue.
Judah knew that Cutter would be unable to convince the train to turn off and run. So he, who must be the greatest golemist in the world, has prepared one final golem, a golem warping time itself. As the train approaches the rail terminus, where the militia, fresh from crushing the collective, waits for it, this golem is unleashed, draining all of Judah's power. It envelops the Iron Council on its final charge, rendering the revolution frozen in time, safe from the militia. Ann-Hari, who had gone ahead with Cutter, tells Judah that there was no way to know what would have happened, and that he took away the revolution’s agency. She kills her old lover, and Cutter, defeated, retreats into the city, to take up the urban dissident flag anew.
As I said, this book has a lot to say about revolution, and how heroic it can be, even in its doom. The message is pessimistic yet hopeful, as the Iron Council may ride again someday, when the time is right. Revolution is also done the right way, coming from the people, not through planning from above; and it is the slave Remade and the prostitutes who kick everything off. Miéville is an Old Left type, and the book was written in the heyday of neoliberalism, so it's perhaps not surprising that even in fantasy he can't bring himself to let the left win. Then again, the uprising and the Council bear resemblance to many romantic revolutions that actually happened and were beaten, so this does at least dream a better history for them, frozen in time.
I've been going hard through the New Crobuzon novels for a dozen days now, and I’ve concluded that I liked them a lot. Miéville has, as noted at length, a fluent understanding of the city, but this story moves out to rural areas. Miéville may be British, but he has a reasonably good sense of the injustices and genocide of the American Frontier; though sometimes he lays it on a bit thick, what with the Stiltspears injecting some kind of moral conscience into Judah through their touch. On the series-wide scale, I also appreciate the lack of fanservice, and how he divorces the novels from each other at least in terms of characters. We never find out what happened to Isaac, or Bellis Coldwine; Jack Half-a-Prayer dies in flashback (though with maybe-Yag's mercy kill, we are let down somewhat easy here). Instead we have new characters, the gay Cutter and his object of fierce love, the bisexual Judah, a respected, almost saintly character who was never going to survive the book. I appreciate also how the novels are clearly steampunk, but don’t wallow in the excess of it. The weird species, systematized magic, and anachronistic technological and social concepts meld together into an elegant whole, when it could have easily been otherwise. It doesn't seem to me that, after over a decade and a half, Miéville will write any more New Crobuzon novels, but I am happy to report that they lived up to the hype.
Bonus Review: “Jack” (8/15/2020)
The only other New Crobuzon story is the short story "Jack," in the Miéville short story collection Looking for Jake. The story is a brief oral reminisce about the absolutely top-notch side character, Jack Half-a-Prayer, fReemade bandit bedeviling the New Crobuzon militia. The narrator, in second person, implies that he was part of Jack's network in some way, and describes Jack's daring exploits, intended to infuriate the militia and rally the populace. The narrator always sincerely roots for Jack, even though he isn't allowed to say so at his workplace. He believes that Jack's exploits are important to give hope and meaning to the lives of the common people of the slums.
Eventually though, this taunting and, worse, targeting the informants of the Militia catch up with Jack; leading to what the narrator describes as an inevitable downfall. Due to a non-specified lowlife informant saving his own skin, Jack meets his dignified end as described through punk folklore at the beginning of The Iron Council. In describing how he vengefully upped the ante in the remaking of the snitch in question, the narrator reveals that he was one of the bio-thaumaturges who had shaped Jack originally, thus making him part of Jack’s “story.” It was a nice little "Form of the Sword" / "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" style plot twist, though I anticipated it as the story reached its conclusion. I'm glad that Jack was the character to get more attention.