Railsea

[starlady]

Miéville, China. Railsea. New York: Del Rey Books, 2012.

China Miéville is one of the authors I consider a must-read, and I heard a lot of good things about this book before I read it. I was not disappointed! I don't think this is as good a book as Embassytown, but it is very, very good, and I certainly enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed Embassytown and Kraken. Like Kraken, it is at times laugh outloud funny; like Kraken, it is not afraid to quarrel with literature--I particularly liked the bit towards the end when Robinson Crusoe was summoned up and dismissed in the space of two paragraphs, and as much as Moby-Dick is being put in the blender in, intermittently, the fore and background, there are hints of older narratives in here too, such as the Odyssey.

I wish I had finished the book in time to copy down some of the passages I dog-eared, because one of the pleasures of this book, as always, is Miéville's flair and verve with language, particularly his willingness to hack and poke and remake English into what he wants it to be. The book follows one Shem ap Soorap, a listless youth whose cousins get him a post as an apprentice medic on a moletrain, riding through the railsea in search of the giant mouldywarpes. (My sister, when I was trying to explain this to her: "How was I supposed to intuit the giant moles?") Shem's captain is searching for the great custard-yellow ivory mole that took her arm, Mocker-Jack; it is her Philosophy, and she is its, and like all captains of moletrains she dreams of fulfilling her quest and recording it in the Museum of Completion. Shem, an orphan, however, finds an artifact in the wreckage of an old moletrain that leads him down a different path, into the acquaintance of the explorer children, Caldera and Dero Shroake, who are determined to follow the traintracks of their lost parents.

This being Miéville, there is a lot in here about narratives and stories and intermittent passages in which the narrator addresses the reader directly, and this is the sort of thing that I eat up with a spoon; if all this metafictional meditation on story and fiction isn't to your taste, you may find yourself disliking the book. But I thought this was a great novel, and I loved the great and unremarked-upon number of female characters, and I really enjoyed the ending. (It doesn't hurt that I have a thing for trains in SFF novels, obviously.)

Has anyone been reading Dial H?

Comments

[sanet]

I loved Railsea too, especially the concept of Mocker-Jack as a "Philosophy" and the comparisons of the rails to the symbol "&". That embodiment of linguistic concepts like the infinite deferral of meaning links Railsea to Embassytown in my mind. Mieville makes my theorist heart go pit-a-pat!

Also, I hadn't even heard of Dial H, but looking it up, I will have to check it out. Thanks for the mention!

[seekingferret]

My DM's been raving about Dial H, but I haven't checked it out yet.

I liked Railsea, but not anywhere near as much as I liked Embassytown. I just wanted Railsea to be much more ambitious than it was. It was a setting that called for bigness more than it delivered bigness. (You know my feelings about macrofiction.)

I will say that Mieville had a fantastic answer to the question "What's beyond the railsea?"

[lian]

My reaction to Railsea was "ah, so this is Miéville when he writes YA." (And no, I haven't read Un Lun Dun.) The protagonists were weirdly lifeless for me, although I liked it well enough. Rather unmemorable, though. & I suppose I'm just not that easy to please :) But I'll forever buy his books unseen because he's not afraid to put himself out there and chance failure, and I find he fails very very often, but when he succeeds, oh. (<3 Embassytown <3)

(Which is sort of why I sooort of understand why people accuse him of insufferable pomposity/density but otoh I'm puzzled by that criticism -- it's like, I always feel like they just don't get the joke, in a way? Like, the language is its own protagonist! And sometimes it's too unstable and teeters and totters and collapses under its own weight, and then I can see all the scaffolding and I roll my eyes a bit [oh, his love of German vocab], but mostly it isn't,and it doesn't, if you extend that extra level of linguistic disbelief, in a way.)

ETA: it occurs to me you could say that about pretty much any author with aspiraitons of style (some of which I loathe), so to differentiate a bit -- like, I always feel like Miéville has that duality of being tongue in cheek and at the same time being completely serious pat down? And I don't feel that meta-level of, idk, self-awareness from many other authors. If that makes sense.

[starlady]

Everybody but me seems to have loathed Un Lun Dun - I liked it, but not as much as his other books; I'm perpetually on the point of pruning it from the library, but haven't done so yet.

I agree that Miéville definitely always seems to consciously know what he's doing, which is a treat, though I feel that it's only in his last few novels that he's actually fully succeeded in his attempts at doing what he wants to do.

Like, the language is its own protagonist!

That is a really good way of putting it--and I agree, his language is such a pleasure that I can't imagine calling him pompous.