Miévillians discussion

This is the final discussion thread for Iron Council. We'll be discussing Parts 9 and 10 (Sound & Light and The Monument) and the epilogue.

Final impressions of the book overall, are welcome.

In this section, the Iron Council manages to defeat the arm of the militia which had followed them through the Stain, with the help of Drogon and his cavalry.

We then find out Drogon's true identity, and we find out that Wrightby is not just a run of the mill capitalist, but some kind of semi-nut visionary, bent on seeing his dream come true, even if it means playing three different hands all at the same time.

The perpetual train (how apt that name seems now, given the ending! ) approaches New Crobuzon, into the waiting arms of the militia, and Judah unfolds his time golem to enshrine the perpetual train in an isntant mingled with eternity.

I couldn't help thinking: If he can't bring them back anymore, what is the difference to actually killing them? Simply that they have now become a visible monument?

..and wasn't Ann Hari correct in feeling that he had robbed them of their final glorious moments, of the way they had chosen to die?

But on the other hand, didn't Ann-Hari also rob the Iron Councillors trapped in time, of potential eventual release by killing Judah?

Of course, there is an irony in Judah dying at the hands of his erstwhile lover. It is apparent that she had loved the Council more than she had loved him.

Of course, Judah's messianic status now becomes clear, but as usual, Mièville subverts. This messiah seems to be an unwanted one, one who has foisted salvation upon those who did not want to be saved.

As for the train, the symbolism of the 'perpetual' train seems to me to be pointing at the idea that an ideology outlives its adherents.

This idea seems to be further underscored by the fact that the Runagate Rampant lives on, renews itself despite the defeat of the Collective.

I guess humanity will always strive towards freedom. :)

I found a bit of gold re IC: an online conference in which CM himself was involved.
Here is the intro:
http://crookedtimber.org/2005/01/11/d...

Here is the bit where CM responds:
http://crookedtimber.org/2005/01/11/w...

..and here is the whole thing including all of the participants' pieces in PDF form:
http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/...

Didn't we always know that Wrightby was a visionary nut? [and I wouldn't say "semi-nut"]. In the first encounter we're shown between Wrightby and Judah, he says "Every one of us here, and every one com­ing, the dusti­est navvy, each clerk, each camp whore, each cook and horse­man and each Re­made, every one of us is a mis­sion­ary of a new church and there is noth­ing that will stop holy work."

Yikes!

Yes, Ann-Hari was right that Judah had robbed the Iron Council of its chance to go out in a blaze of glory, but I definitely don't blame him. What would be the point? Heroism isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I'm not sure that Ann-Hari can have prevented the eventual return of the Iron Council. Judah's magic always took too much out of him: I can't imagine, even though he'd clearly found a new way to power his golems, that without him the spell won't eventually wind down. Anything else seems too much like perpetual motion—which doesn't work in Bas Lag any better than it does here (it was, in fact, what Isaac was researching in PSS, and eventually he conceded it wasn't possible). Even if he didn't know whether he could stop the golem, if there was a possibility—even a large one—that they would be lost in time forever, Judah gave them a chance at survival, versus certain death if the train continued.

And I don't agree that "…Mièville subverts. This messiah seems to be an unwanted one, one who has foisted salvation upon those who did not want to be saved." I'm still not convinced he's supposed to be a messiah, but in fact that is the story of the Christian messiah, too. He is supposed to have come to save the Jews, but they rejected him: but still, they have only to believe to be saved. I still think he fits the Mosaic tradition better.

Hmm. Moses as in he delivered them to their new land? Or brought them out of slavery, then?

brought them out of slavery, and then marched around in the wilderness for 40 years (a bit less in Iron Council, I think)

Okay, the Mosaic glove fits, though I must say that for me, there is also a messianic element in Judah's constant sacrifices.

Regarding the element of subversion, to me Mièville shows a constant trendency (how do you like my very own accidental neologism!?) towards subversion. Besides that we see evidence of it in his work, it is also one of his stated intentions in his criticisms of Tolkien for instance, where CM decries 'rural nostalgia' :P

Being a person with 'rural nostalgia' myself, of course I don't agree with CM on that particular little point, much as I enjoy Mievilles subversiveness.

...but back to the ending of IC.
So, Derek, you among others feel that the train will become unfrozen again sometime? Okay.

I personally feel that that would detract somewhat from the symbolism for me, since I see the train as a kind of immortal monument (there does appear to be mention of this in the book itself).

Of course, if it does become undone and they re-appear in time, (at which point in time will it be?), one would not be able to compare what Judah did to them with killing them; but yet--if it only takes place in a few hundred years, they would have lost a great deal, since all that they knew and loved would be dead and/or changed.

What do you guys think of Ann-Hari's killing of Judah? Was she at all justified? Does this reveal an incredibly one-track mind on her part?

Would Judah have expected anything like that to happen?

Was this just a plot-device to make Judah "not enter the promised land"? (And/)or, to make him turn into a sacrifice? Note that after unlocking the time-golem, he was bleeding; - we all know the significance of "he bled for us".

I always had the impression the time golem would eventually run down. It's stated several times that Iron Council exists at the wrong time. I wouldn't be surprised if Judah designed the golem with a lifespan.

I do like the notion of the Council as living art. It's a nice counterpoint to the khepri sculptures, which are always described as sad and/or pathetic. Iron Council is instead a symbol of hope and defiance---one which, moreover, will not weather and cannot be destroyed as the khepri sculptures were.

Nice thoughts, J! Interesting parallels too. :)

Hmm, I wonder if you guys would mind if I posted some of the passages that made the think the train was going to stay that way?

Before Ann-Hari shoots Judah, their convo goes:

“Ann-Hari,” Judah said, his voice gentle though he must know. “Would you have had them die ? Would you have died? I tried to turn you, we tried to . . .”
You knew they wouldn’t, thought Cutter. “They’re safe now. They’re safe now. The Iron Council remains.”
“You’ve pickled us, you bastard . . .”
“You’d all have died . . .”
“End it.”
“I don’t know how. I wouldn’t, besides—you know that.”
“ End it.”
“No. You’d all have died.”
“You’ve no fucking right, Judah . . .”
“You’d have died.”

Then, there is the fact that part ten is named: MONUMENT.

There's also the bit that appears in the Rungate Rampant at the very end, that seems to me to imply that the train has been frozen into immortality:

"There. There we will come to Iron Council. There we will come to the perpetual train, truly perpetual now perhaps poised always poised forever just about its wheels just about to finish turning. It waits. By its iron axles are devils of motion, waiting an eternal second.

{...}
Through the selvage of history toward that moment become a place, that history instant a splinter in now, under now’s skin.
We are incessant despite the penalties. Old women, young, men, human cactus khepri hotchi vodyanoi and Remade, even Remade.

Here in the environs of the train those Remade who make the dangerous pilgrimage are given something, are for these yards around this moment equals. And scores of children. Rude little roughnecks, orphans living animal in New Crobuzon’s streets self-organised in troupes to come to this strange playground.
Through runoff and flyblown trains made of rust, the aggregate of industry in the TRT sidings, reaccreting power as its new projects begin, through beetle-tracked wasteland, through miles of greyed nothing and stones like the ghosts of stones the alley children come to the Iron Council.

There is a circuit. There are routes to be followed.

Climb the scree slopes to look down on the flash-frozen smoking from the chimneys. Stand on the very tongue of tracks between the iron to look into the face of the train. Slow circle widdershins the whole Council, a some-minutes’ walk. No one can touch it. Everyone tries. Time slips around it. They are coming. Everyone can see it. The Iron Council is not stopped it is onrushing it is immanent and we see it only in this one moment.

But I guess it just shows you that everybody reads something different in the same text. Maybe that's just what I want to see, because it fits in with the symbolism for me?

J. wrote: "I always had the impression the time golem would eventually run down. It's stated several times that Iron Council exists at the wrong time. I wouldn't be surprised if Judah designed the golem with ..."
Do you mean the part where Judah tells Cutter while they are walking away from the freezing scene?

I took that to mean as that the IC approached NC at the wrong time, though?
More or less close to the start of Chapter 34:

I’ll not ask you anything. I’ll not ask you why you did what you did. Ain’t got time.

But even unbidden Judah began to speak.
“There was nothing that could be done, not really. Nothing to keep them from harm. History had gone on. It was the wrong time.”

He was very calm. He spoke not to Cutter but to the world. Like one delirious. He was still utterly weak, but he spoke strongly. “History’d gone and that was . . . I never knew! I never knew I could do it.
It was so hard, all the planning, trying to work it out, such learning, and it was . . . so—” He shook his hands at his head. “—so draining . . .”
“All right, Judah, all right.” Cutter patted him and did not take his hand away.

One could interpret that either way, I guess. I find both to be attractive alternative, regardless of which is implied by the text.

By the way, RR isn't exactly a useful source of information in this regard. The writers can guess as to the nature of the Perpetual Train, and they only suggest it is -perhaps- poised forever.

J. wrote: "By the way, RR isn't exactly a useful source of information in this regard. The writers can guess as to the nature of the Perpetual Train, and they only suggest it is -perhaps- poised forever."

Phew, J... I had taken the RR piece as the epilogue to the novel... but, once again, even China Mièville himself says that he wouldn't argue with a reader's interpretation, even if it clashes with his own intent--so, who am I to disagree with a fellow reader? ;)

I still find it interesting to see how each person extracts his own interpretation of a text, and I guess this kaleidoscope of meaning and interpretation is what makes fiction wonderful.

You know, I've been thinking that this ambiguity in the text that leaves it open to multiple interpretations, is (for me, at least) one of the characteristics that distinguishes 'good' fiction.

One of the interpretations that I very much enjoyed reading, is sologdin's excellent review. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

(Sologdin is a friend and a member here)

I couldn't agree more. Fiction which ties up all loose ends and hands you all conclusions are worse than useless. I'm looking at you, Battlefield Earth.

Traveller wrote: "You know, I've been thinking that this ambiguity in the text that leaves it open to multiple interpretations, is (for me, at least) one of the characteristics that distinguishes 'good' fiction."

Exactly. It goes back to what we talked about with his use of language; how he won't use a word with one meaning if he can use one with multiple meanings.

I think I actually have to agree with CM about Tolkien's "rural nostalgia", though it's not a criticism he invented (I think that was Moorcock, but it certainly goes back before Miéville's own writing), but like you, I'm inflicted with rural nostalgia myself, and don't see the problem. I've never liked cities, while it's clear from CM's writing that he's purely a city boy.

And I agree with J about the Runagate Rampant. I'd hate to take the Runagate Rampant as gospel on the state of the "perpetual train". They were always given to hyperbole, and I very much doubt they have an expert thaumaturge on staff, let alone a golemancer of Judah's stature, but I imagine you're right that if they do return to time, the Iron Council is going to be a long way into Bas Lag's future. But I'd still take a second chance at life a millenium from now over immediate and permanent death now.

Sure, CM used the RR piece as epilogue, but he could have said the same thing in a high-level briefing to the new mayor, by some of the cities top thaumaturges. The fact that he didn't, suggests that we shouldn't take it as even expert opinion.

What do you guys think of Ann-Hari's killing of Judah? Was she at all justified? Does this reveal an incredibly one-track mind on her part?

Yes? :)

Ann-Hari pretty much had no life until the Iron Council, and as one of the few who was present for the entire existence of Iron Council, she identified with it. So, yes, she had a one-track mind. It might even be relevant, that the Iron Council literally had only one-track! I wouldn't say that she was well justified, but I'd say she felt as if Judah had just destroyed Iron Council (whether or not it's ever coming back) denying them their chance to have any meaning, and she was left to be judge, jury and executioner.

Oh, J, you've just ruined it. I'm going to have to take Battlefield Earth off the top of my to-read list, now.

I personally don't feel that Anne-Hari was justified in killing Judah. Maybe that's why it felt like a plot-device to me; I mean it seems very ironic, too.

On the other hand, the way Mieville paints her as a firebrand from early on in the novel, does make her action seem not all that uncharacteristic.

I can see why she did it, but I don't feel sympathetic with her action. I felt Judah meant it well.

I was actually expecting him to make some other kind of golem, as I suspect many other readers must have, but what he did, seems to me to fit in with a certain pattern of symbolism that I feel CM might have been trying to get at, which is the only way I find I can emotionally accept what he's done with the ending there...

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Oh, J, you've just ruined it. I'm going to have to take Battlefield Earth off the top of my to-read list, now. "

Glad I could help. ;)

I suppose what I really meant was that I don't think she was "justified", but that she felt she had a "justification". I'm sure that makes things so much more clear…

Heh, yeah, she was pretty angry at the time. I wonder if she cooled off at some stage and regretted it, but hey, I supposed she's just a character in a book... XD

In any case, it made both myself and Cutter feel very sad.

Actually, China himself had something interesting to say in this regard:

"What I’m striving for is precisely for bad things to happen to people but that are not punishments. Bad things happen to them, whether or not they did things that are reprehensible.

Having said which, I acknowledge that the structure of narrative, particularly tradition three-act narrative is to a certain extent intrinsically moralistic, so whether I intend it or not, that may be a ramification, but fwiw, I’ve been trying not to punish. (Also why IC is furthest from the three-act structure of all the books. "

As for the piece in the Runagate Rampant, well, I think it had various purposes. Firstly, just the fact that they are congregating still(/again), and circulating the paper, I think is meant as a thread of hope in the eternal struggle against the government.
Just like the eternal train, their spirit had not died.

Secondly, since this whole book is told from the POV of the "Collective" or the 'rebels'; or whatever you want to call them, it illustrates their POV on what happened.

Which reminds me of one of my own criticisms that I had wanted to level (or had already leveled) against CM, being that his militia mostly seem all bad.
China actually replied to this on that discussion I had linked to:

"[A critic] tempers his original comments that the ‘baddies’ in New Crobuzon – crucially, the government – are depicted as entirely bad. ‘[I]t may be the result of the main characters’ perceptions, and those perceptions may tie into the novels’ central ideas – the double-edged power of passion that both motivates people toward heroic acts and blinds them to the subtleties of the world’.

It is true that I intend the one-sidedness of the novel’s moral schema to be the result of the narrative’s location among the insurgents, where the individual members of the government are hated. The crimes of the Mayor are known and enumerated, but are somewhat abstractly conceived, such that when Ori finally comes face to face with her, while he feels little pity, he can’t relate to her concretely as the purveyor of these things.[8]
The first draft of IC, in fact, included a ‘sympathetic’ militiaman. I took him out. The careful intrusion of such ‘balance’ felt forced, a frankly trite nod to moral complexity that a novel in any way ‘sophisticated’, or at least not ‘simplistic’, is usually vaguely deemed to have to acknowledge.

But this is a novel seen through protagonists steeped in conflict, who relate not necessarily simplistically but thoroughly antagonistically with their enemies. Just as few Bolsheviks in 1917 or supporters of Allende in 1973 constantly reminded themselves that some tsarists or some of Pinochet’s officers might be good people, so Ori and the councillors and their comrades do not focus on the perhaps-honourable motivations of their oppressors.

It is not the responsibility of a novel written in an attempt to depict that revolutionary fervour to break what intensity it can achieve with a dutiful reminder that there are other points of view. (Of course the stacked deck of my political examples makes it clear that IC doesn’t just depict fervour: it takes sides.)

This single-mindedness doesn’t mean revolutionaries don’t at some level know that there are layers of complexity to the motivations of opponents, nor does it make them (either in the book or in real life) unsophisticated: it is a corollary of the fact that they are facing enemies.

In Weather Wrightby I wanted precisely to provide a character who was believable, impressive, moved by absolutely opposing motivations than the protagonists’, but one who has to be taken seriously, and is not cipher-like ‘evil’.

I don’t believe that any of the baddies are ‘entirely loathsome’, though the protagonists doubtless want to conceive them as so. Even the Mayor, at the point of her death, is a person, not a snarling banshee of capitalist hate. But Wrightby in particular is an enemy, yes, but is also a visionary.

Traveller wrote: "As for the piece in the Runagate Rampant, well, I think it had various purposes. Firstly, just the fact that they are congregating still(/again), and circulating the paper, I think is meant as a thread of hope in the eternal struggle against the government."

Yes, I'd had that same thought.

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "I think I actually have to agree with CM about Tolkien's "rural nostalgia" (though it's not a criticism he invented (I think that was Moorcock, but it certainly goes back before Miéville's own writing), ..."

Yeah, it was Moorcock. CM jokingly calls himself a "cheerleader" in reference to Moorcock's spoutings forth against poor old Tolkien. :P

Reading the Believer interview that Allen just cited in the Anamnesis thread, China sums this book up beautifully: "If I’ve done my job well, Iron Council is not a kind of postmodern, ironic wink at the western. It’s a fucking western. It’s got cowboys in it, for fuck’s sake."

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, eh?

Well, sometimes it's a fucking cigar, OK?

Ha. A fucking Western is a good description. Even better: "A Fucking Weird Western" or, "A Weird Fucking Western?" ;)