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    Iron Council
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    Iron Council
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    Iron Council
    Audiobook21 hours

    Iron Council

    Written by China Miéville

    Narrated by Gildart Jackson

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon-this time, decades later.

    It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.
    In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.
    In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon's most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council. . . .

    The bold originality that broke Miéville out as a new force of the genre is here once more in Iron Council: the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 28, 2014
    ISBN9780553551280
    Unavailable
    Iron Council
    Author

    China Miéville

    China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell and Philip K. Dick. His novel Embassytown was a first and widely praised foray into science fiction.

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    Reviews for Iron Council

    3.5/5

    895 ratings41 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed the first two books of this series. This one was nowhere near as good, and the world-building wasn't as fresh. If I hadn't loved the first two, this one would have been intolerable and nonsensical. It took a long time to get going, and probably could have been about half as long. Iron Council is like a New Crobuzon Western, complete with trains and outlaws. The image of the stolen train, with the rail workers building tracks ahead of themselves and pulling the tracks up behind them, is amazing and will stick with me for a long time.
    • 5/5
      Mieville crafts a story the way a sculptor crafts with stone. He brings a muscular way with words, inventing phrases and combinations of words, creating new expressions through a mash-up. The story is compelling, a story of exploration, of pioneering, of a diaspora, the escape into the dangerous wilderness, of political repression, racism, and the strength of the human (and other-than-human) spirit. Dense and challenging. I tried to make it last by reading the last sections as slowly as I could.
    • 5/5
      I read this when it came out, but didn't review it for some reason. All I have in my notes is "Original, cool ideas, with meaning and depth. All hail Mieville." Anyway, it's about time for a re-read, especially because my wife hasn't read it yet and this time I'll be reading it to her.So first I read Perdido Street Station and it was perfect and I loved it more than any other book. Then I read the The Scar and liked it, but was disappointed. Then I read Iron Council and thought that if I would have read it before Perdido Street Station I would have loved it the most. THEN I reread PSS with my wife and thought the first 50-75 pages were REALLY slow, we almost gave up. In the end we both loved it, but thought it could have used an editor. NOW we just finished reading Iron Council and felt the same way. It could have been much shorter and that would have been an improvement. I also felt that after rereading both PSS was better than Iron Council.Mieville is a force of abnature. His crazy-ideas-per-page ratio is some irrational number that exists both within and without our minds. The puissance of his writing pullulates with thaumaturgy and chymical eructations over a landscape of puna, studded with monadnocks and sarsen blocks.So yea, make sure you have your dictionary handy before you read his books.
    • 5/5
      An amazing book, perhaps my favourite of his work, right up there with The Scar and Kraken.
    • 4/5
      An amazing conclusion (sort of the trilogy inhabits the same space but doesn't need to be read as a trilogy) that achieves not much ultimately. Great world building and imagination.
    • 3/5
      This was the most conventional and least subtle novel I've read by Miéville.
    • 3/5
      This is the sixth Mièville book I have read and it turned out to be the weakest. The central conceit (the train) just didn't work for me. Lots of body-horror stuff also didn't help. The gross-out elements were there in both Perdido Street Station and The Scar as well but those books both had more compelling plots and more interesting characters. Central character motivation especially was much better developed in the earlier Bas-Lag books. This novel might have been more enjoyable if it were shorter; 550+ pages seemed to contain a lot of unnecessary descriptive passages and that bloat just became tiresome after a while.
    • 4/5
      An amazing conclusion (sort of the trilogy inhabits the same space but doesn't need to be read as a trilogy) that achieves not much ultimately. Great world building and imagination.
    • 4/5
      A satisfying conclusion to Mieville's Bas-Lag trilogy, Iron Council is both more political and more literary than its predecessors.
    • 3/5
      Masturbation, trains, golems. That's what I remember of this book. Decidedly my least favorite of the Bas-Lag series.
    • 2/5
      I was a bit underwhelmed by this. Maybe it is just that the novelty of the Bas-Lag setting had worn off, but this felt less weird and more pedestrian than the other books in the series.

      Part of the problem was that it has a very slow start, and in some ways it never really gets going. It rambles more than the other Mieville books I've read. It was also less challenging to read, but again that could just be that I've gotten more used to the author's style.
    • 3/5
      I had eagerly anticipated reading Mieville's latest - but while I certainly enjoyed returning to the world of New Crobuzon, I have to admit that I did not like this book nearly as much as either 'The Scar' or 'Perdido Street Station.' Of course, I love both of those books, so my expectations for this one were very high. Still, I felt that the concepts in this book overwhelmed the story - the characters and events were secondary to Mieville's thoughts about repressive societies, social economics, the motivations of revolutionaries and seditionists, crime and punishment, the destructive cost of 'progress' etc. Not that these are not interesting topics - and admittedly, his other novels may also be more about milieu than about character.... but I just didn't get into this one as much.
      The setting of this story is conceptually interesting - a train, which is taken over in a workers' revolt, and which becomes an itinerant legend, laying tracks before itself and taking them up afterward... Meanwhile, seditionists in New Crobuzon ready for revolt...
      This would be a good candidate for a book club discussion - there are a lot of political parallels, a lot of comments on human nature... a lot of ideas.
      I'd definitely recommend it - but only to those who have already read The Scar' or 'Perdido Street Station.'

    • 3/5
      I'm still not sure what I think about this one. China's series, Bas Lag, is one that is equally appealing and annoying. I like his style and the characters are engaging. The world is still a mystery and I find I really want to understand more about it. There always seem to be elements that are left unexplained and that can be frustrating to someone like me who just wants to know and understand.
      The world is also so far removed from our own and may other fantastical lands that there is often little point if reference to work from.
      Iron Council tells a tale that is worth reading especially for someone invested in China's world. But it was a struggle at times and I'm not sure how to fix that.
    • 3/5
      Iron Council by China Miéville is set in New Crobuzon, the city-state on Bas-Lag, the mythical world he created in previous novels (Perdido Street Station, The Scar). Reading Perdido Street Station before Iron Council is highly recommended because it will give you the insight you need into the complex population of Bas-Lag and New Crobuzon. This is considered the third book in his series of novels in this world.

      The political atmosphere is exceptionally charged in Iron Council and that is the crux of this novel, although there are certainly other plot elements pulled into the mix. This is, perhaps, the most socialist of Miéville's novels. The Iron Council is a train with crew and passengers that was expelled from the city years ago. Since that time it has stayed hidden from the militia who seek it. But now may be the time to call the Iron Council back.

      After the lengthy background of the Iron Council is established, the political/social revolution is underway. But, of course, since this is Miéville it's not quite as simple as that. Prepare yourself for the previous insect and cactus races, along with all manner of golems, Remades, alchemy, magic, interdemensional travel, native races, and much, much more.

      Certainly the writing is exceptional and the characterizations well developed and the descriptions are substantial. This time around, however, Miéville throws so much into the mix that it became almost too much - something I never could have imagine typing before this. Am I glad I read it? Certainly! I was looking forward to it. But I could only recommend Iron Council to others who have read Perdido Street Station, The Scar and want to finish Miéville's three New Crobuzon novels.
    • 3/5
      I didn't enjoy Iron Council anywhere near as much as I did Miéville's other books. I'm not sure quite why, to be honest. Parts of it irritated me stylistically -- the large section which follows Judah in the middle, mainly -- but that wouldn't automatically lower my enjoyment of the whole book. I didn't find the writing as descriptive, although there were some very interesting descriptions, mostly the parts where the train goes through the stain. Whyever it was, I just didn't get into this book that much. I did enjoy it, and if you enjoy the other Bas-Lag books and know what to expect from Miéville's writing, then I'm sure you'd get a lot out of it. I just didn't.

      Part of it is that it isn't as focused. It's not just one city, but two. The train-city is built up and described, but I don't feel as strongly connected and rooted to it as I do to New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station and Armada in The Scar. If the cities are characters, Iron Council falls a little flat. There are interesting characters, mostly Cutter and Judah, who I think I got more attached to than other characters of similar importance in the other two Bas-Lag books. I think Cutter was the character I got most attached to. Judah being all saint-like all the time kind of made me want to hit him sometimes, but Cutter's feelings were so honest and open in the narrative.

      In terms of plot, I spent a lot of time wondering where it was actually going. It never came together as strongly as I expected it to, and the climax wasn't much of a climax. The end is appropriate, and makes sense, but I think the book could have been edited/reordered for better effect.
    • 5/5
      This is the only Bas-Lag book I've read by Mieville but would happily read more. Essentially a dissection of a political idea more than a novel, it's nevertheless wildly imaginative and compulsive reading. And it has some great monsters in it...
    • 3/5
      Like all of China Mieville's books, full of tasty tasty surrealism, but I felt that the political commentary was getting a little too heavy-handed in this one.
    • 3/5
      Unlike Mieville's earlier works, this one seemed to have an American West vibe to it. I had trouble really getting into this book, especially since Cutter and Ori, the point-of-view characters in the first and last part of the book, were neither particularly likable or compelling. The book is basically split into three parts, with a big flashback section in the middle. I found that I struggled to figure out what was going on in the first section, as I didn't yet have the background. The flashback was by far the best part of the book, as it's easy to identify with the passion of the narrator Judah, and his backstory is actually pretty interesting. We return to the present in the third section, which almost immediately becomes depressing. We find out that many of the major characters are being used, and their lofty ideals are squashed. The ending just reinforces this, as tyranny and exploitation prevail, while the concepts of equality are essentially preserved as a museum. If his previous book The Scar weren't so good I'd be tempted to end my exploration of Mieville's works here; nonetheless, I think I'll take a break for a while.
    • 4/5
      I really liked this. It's full of interesting characters which populate a rich world full of New Weird detail. Moreover, it uses various literary devices that you don't see that often. Wonderful wordsmithing in my opinion. Of course, some people take exception with the author's style. China does tend to lean towards narration and long monologues, and dialog's can be anemic at times. But it's not really a problem, just style.If you give it try, you'll get hooked on it like I did. I consider this a must read for anyone who's a fan of the New Weird.
    • 3/5
      Embassytown and The City & The City appear to be the books that are giving Mieville his reptuation as the Literary Saint of Speculative Fiction, but before reading those I wanted to finish off his Bas-Lag trilogy. His previous outings – Perdido Street Station and The Scar – both displayed tremendous worldbuilding and a capacious imagination, but fell short in areas like plot, characters and dialogue, and demonstrated Mieville’s irritating love of flowery prose.Iron Council is Mieville’s most overtly political book, and he’s never been a writer to shy away from politics. It opens with a group of characters searching for the legendary Iron Council across the hostile landscapes of Bas-Lag, and then throws the reader into a flashback to show how the Iron Council was formed. A wealthy industrialist from New Crobuzon is sending out railways across the continent, in a long and relatively enjoyable section of the book that’s a sort of crazy fantasy Wild West. After some strikes and demonstrations, the workers revolt and steal one of the trains, tearing up the tracks behind them and laying them down again ahead, to create a perpetually moving train, a free and equal society called the Iron Council. The story jumps around in space and time, linking back with events in New Crobuzon, where many decades of secret rebellion have culminated in open warfare against the tyrannical government.As I said, it’s Mieville’s most political book, but I think it’s for precisely this reason that it fails. I remember thinking in the early sections that his ability for prose had developed (taking clear inspiration from Cormac McCarthy) but later in the book it shifted from descriptions of the landscape and bizarre creatures, and became solely dedicated to building a sense of drama and importance about the characters and events. There’s not even any of the simple slice of life stuff we saw in Perdido Street Station and even The Scar. Everything the characters say and do is weighted down with attempted emotional anguish. People are rising up against cruel governments or struggling with their misgivings about doing so or arguing about what’s best for the people they’re trying to protect. I could pick almost any random line of dialogue out of this book and see it being acted out by a grizzled-jaw American hunk narrowing his eyes, looking into the distance and intoning something cheesy like, "People need somethin' to believe in." I never cared. I’ve read three of Mieville’s books now, and found not a sympathetic or memorable character in any of them, so I frankly don't give a fuck if they all have to live underneath a dictatorial regime.You can tell that this is the book he really wanted to write, that he couldn’t wait to write about an open struggle against an evil government, but he lost control of himself and got too swept up in it. He forgot that not everybody else is going to be as invested in that as he is. I liked Iron Council even less than the previous two Bas-Lag books, because those were about characters just trying to get by and handle their own business, people who got swept up in events rather than orchestrated them. Iron Council is weighed down by its political baggage and sense of self-importance. I can understand what Mieville was trying to do here, and it’s nice to see some left-wing content in an inherently conservative genre, but I found Iron Counvil was one of those books where I was wearily counting how many pages were left until I was done with it.I’ll still check out The City & The City at some point, but if I don’t like that, I may give up on Mieville and forget about Embassytown.
    • 2/5
      I wanted to like this book...but the pretentious, heavy-handed, socialist bullshit just got in the way. Additionally, the characters just weren't that likable (a flaw found in The Scar as well) and the plot just was not as compelling as the other two Bas-Lag novels.
    • 4/5
      It's about 20 years after the events in The Scar and New Crobuzon is at war with Tesh, to the detriment (as is always the case) of its citizens. We follow Ori on his quest for revolutionary social justice, Cutter on his quest for Judah Low, and Judah Low on his quest for the Iron Council, the socialist train and people that he hopes will save New Crobuzon. As this is a Miéville story and its writer never a one-trick-pony, the reader will be treated to huge pieces of the social awareness cake along with breakneck speed steampunk action sequences, discussions about love (and how far one goes for it), Manifest Destiny, trade unionism, labor rights, racism, and imperialism. Although not quite as enthralling as its predecessors, Iron Council is a true Miéville story, so fasten your seatbelt, make sure you have a dictionary close at hand, and enjoy the ride.
    • 5/5
      Of what I've read so far, this was to me Mieville's most satisfying work, if slightly uneven. Mieville is remarkably good at coming up with creative ideas and settings and characters, but less good at building a plot that ends in a consistent and deus-ex-machina-free manner. In this case, I think he succeeds in tying together the clever framework of the Iron Council and the hope it inspires in a frustrated people, along with a compelling story of individuals, magical powers, and realistic personal and political challenges. Very much recommended, but read the other New Crobuzon novels first, in publication order!
    • 4/5
      A rail link to span the continent. Make New Crobuzon the hub of Bas-Lag. That was the idea when it started but with conditions worsening and money running out it didn't quite make it. When the pay starts drying up then the workers start getting disgruntled and a revolution occurs. The train that's leading the way with supplies and equipment gets taken. Off into the wilds it goes and becomes the legend that is the Iron Council. A place where even the Remade are treated as equals.Back in New Crobuzon there's a war with Tesh to deal with and rebellion is also in the air. Not content with Runagate Rampant meetings where all they seem to do is talk, Ori manages to insinuate himself into a rebel group led by Toro. Could Toro be the natural successor to Jack Half-a-Prayer? There's certainly plans afoot to change the order of how things are run in the city and Ori becomes a part of that.With insurrection brewing, Judah Low sets off to find the Iron Council and having learned that's where he's gone Cutter and a small band of others follow after to catch him up and continue on their journey. Can they make it through to where the Iron Council is purported to be and does it still even exist or has it passed into nothing more than legends and rumours after all that time? Although this was the shortest of the 3 novels in the series it was, at times, feeling like the longest. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy it (how can you not enjoy Mr Miéville's work?) but I didn't pick it up as often as I could have done. Still, a good story that was told with all the imagination that the author brings to his work and worth the effort of reading. 4★'s
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed the book immensely. Mieville is inventive as usual. The other reviews said that this book is overtly political but I never found it to be so. I always thought it was being taken to its logical conclusion.The story contains three separate threads which of course converge at the end. The city of New Crobuzon is at war with Tesh. They are building a railroad to conduct the war. The workers aren't getting paid, they strike, they fight and eventually break away across unknown frontiers. It is against this backdrop that the tales of the Judah, Cuter and Ori unfold.This is a challenging book but the sort of challenge that one enjoys(or at least one that I enjoyed).Mieville seems to have an insanely keen grasp of characters and he writes like one possessed. There is lesser exposition than his previous works. A lot of the creatures are described with economy and precision with words that sends one hunting for the dictionary (but then you find that the word that has been used could have been replaced by none other).Mieville is adept at entrenching images in your head. The characters, the races, the monsters are all etched, better than the way any movie could depict them.(I hope they never film these books because so much would be lost and no matter how good a job they do, they cannot be better than the actors in our heads.). The sheer number of races that interact with each other is a delight in itself.What I don't understand is the mixed reception that Iron Council received. It is a riveting and magnificent tale full of fantastic characters. This is writing of the highest quality, a work of pure art that transcends genre and defies classification.Despite the above praise I would recommend the book only to fans of Mieville or those who liked Perdido Street Station. This is a heavy read and I was exhausted(but pleased) at the end of it.
    • 3/5
      I was keen to catch up with the last of the Bas-Lag trilogy, and revisit Miéville’s amazing imagination, full of ingenious ideas and fantastic races and their cultures, like the khepri, vodyanoi and the Remade.The story is the complex saga of a group of revolutionaries looking for the legendary Iron Council, who they believe will bring them their ultimate success. Along the way you get the background and politics of this world and its characters and as I often find with Miéville, a perceptive insight into many political and social situations in our own reality. I find his writing challenging but ultimately rewarding. Having read the first 2 books gave me the background, particularly Perdido Street Station, and consequently a more complete appreciation of the story.
    • 5/5
      The third book set in Miéville's bizarre world of Bas-Lag, which sees the city of New Cobruzon experiencing a difficult time of war, unrest, and insurrection. It's a good story, but as always it's the world itself that truly captures the imagination, with its casual strangeness, its horrors and wonders. I think Miéville is as good at this particular kind of slightly surreal world-building as anyone ever has been. He seems to have an excellent instinctive sense of how much to explain and how much to leave mysterious, and he blends the familiar and the uncanny together as seamlessly as a recurring dream.I suspect this may be a minority opinion, but I think I may like this book the best of the three. Unlike Perdido Street Station or The Scar, it never dragged for me, even for a moment. And while I can imagine that some might find the ending unsatisfying, I thought it felt very, very right.
    • 2/5
      The first China Mieville book I read was Perdido Street Station, and I was blown away. The Scar made an excellent follow up. For me, Iron Council was a real let-down by comparison, and if I'd read it first, I might not have read more Mieville. Part of it might be that I just didn't resonate with the subject matter; the Western railroad setting; the messiah-type, the Collective idea. But I don't think so, because Perdido was so strange that I don't think I could say I "resonated" with it, either. Unlike King Rat, I liked the very ending of Iron Council. It seemed to take forever to get there, though.
    • 3/5
      After reading this, the last of Mieville's trio of Bas Lag novels, I have to say I was a bit disappointed. Iron Council is definitely my least favorite of the three, despite (or perhaps because of) being the most overtly political. Perhaps because of the focus on revolution, I felt the characters of this novel were much less interesting then the previous two. Unlike Isaac or Bellis, I never really connected with or identified with Cutter, Ori, Ann Hari or any other person or felt drawn into their conflicts (which I was completely with Perdido Street Station and the Scar). In particular, I felt the character of Judah to be fairly bland and I admit to being a bit bored with him and the whole Iron Council saga that took up a majority of the middle of the novel.However, Mieville does continue with his unique brand of world building, making the blend of a corrupt industrial-magical society seem not only completely alien but also very real, from the bizarre Cacotopic Stain to the various neighborhoods of New Crobozon.I also liked that, as in his previous novels, there is a bit of genre blending taking place in Bas Lag, which I find interesting. Perdido Street Station, for instance mixed a lot of horror and some noir into its fantasy while the Scar was very much a swashbuckling adventure story. In Iron Council, there is some definite Western stylings showing up, though the extra genre is a little less evident then in previous Bas Lag stories.In conclusion, I felt that Iron Council was a bit slow moving with comparatively undeveloped characters, though I enjoyed this last exploration of the world of Bas Lag and particularly, the city of New Crobozon and continues with Mieville's brand of genre blending.
    • 2/5
      A Book I really wanted to like - but didn't particularly.