Iron Council

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Several decades after the events described in ‘Perdido Street Station’ and the city-state of New Crobuzon is in uproar. The town’s militia has turned from covert policing to unhidden repression while the underground movements are gaining popularity and influence. At the same time a war is raging between New Crobuzon and the southern state of Tesh.

The perspective in this novel switches between Judah who is looking for the mysterious Iron Council to warn it of New Crobuzon’s plan to destroy it, Cutter, one of Judah’s hangers-on, and Ori who is ascending in the ranks of one of New Crobuzon’s guerrilla underground movements. Certainly in the first half of the book the author uses a more or less detached third person perspective so that regularly the motivations of the lead characters are not very obvious. China Mieville’s storytelling which was so creative and imaginative in the two previous Bas-Lag novels has in this book turned into an unnecessarily tedious vocabulary jungle. The reader will often be forced to return to the dictionary and the encyclopedia to make sense of large parts of the prose. The story becomes more engaging and compelling around halfway through, though the events become increasingly unimaginable as well.

The story as well as the writing style of this book makes it a quite inaccessible work. It is recommended to anyone who has read ‘Perdido Street Station’ and ‘The Scar’ and would like to immerse themselves further into the Bas-Lag world. However, for everyone else it is an inadequate introduction to both the work of China Mieville as to the Bas-Lag world and is best left aside.

Geschreven bij Iron Council

Gekende Mieville stijl, leest als een trein.