Iron Council

by China Miéville

469pp, Macmillan, £17.99

A fantasy novel is a one-man arms race. No treaties hinder the ontological proliferation: each new creature must be bigger, more powerful or weirder than the last. Here is a dark man floating eerily above the treetops, here big cactus-men, here amphibious monsters than can sculpt water. By the time we get to a giant tortoise - "more than 100 yards long," we are solemnly informed - the novelty of sheer scale begins to pall. Still, we haven't got to the golems yet.

China Miéville's new novel takes place in the same world as Perdido Street Station and The Scar, a kind of steampunk milieu furnished by clockwork engines (here we see the invention of the phonograph), electrified by magic ("thaumaturgy"), and populated by an improbable variety of sentient life-forms. It tells the story of industrial action on a railway - which, this being fantasy fiction, is more colourful than a day of commuter misery at Waterloo.

It is rumoured there is a train called Iron Council that wanders the wastelands, laying track before it and pulling it up after, populated by workers and escaped prisoners. It is pursued implacably by the militia of the city-state of New Crobuzon, from where the train first set out in an effort to build the first transcontinental line. Now, back in the oppressed city, there is ferment. A strange spiral-drawing man gives the people dreams of freedom. Something like revolution or total war is coming. Judah Low, a golemist who can conjure and direct monsters made of rock, iron and dust, sets out to find the legendary train. Can it escape its hunters? Can it help its comrade citizens? Thus, a Marxian romance, a quest narrative of revolutionary politics.

There are many wondrous scenes and sequences. The section describing the birth of the railway, as it pulls shanty towns, whores, gamblers and gunslingers in its wake, is a rather splendid reimagining of the wild west. There are innumerable nasty monsters, though Miéville saves his most horrible ideas for the depredations suffered by the Remade: criminals who have been subjected to surgical and mechanical graftings in the punishment factories: an infanticide woman with a baby's wriggling arms growing out of her head; a man with another man imprisoned inside his torso and only the latter's hindquarters sticking out behind, like a pantomime horse.

The clenched precision of the prose is studded with perfectly pitched metaphors, as when bullets are described as "typing" on the surface of the train's carriages.

There are borrowings from Alien and The Matrix Revolutions, and what seems like a deliberate, jokey tribute to the videogame tradition of the "boss fight", in which, at the end of a level, the protagonist must contend with a larger and stronger enemy than usual. Meanwhile, Miéville's signature tangential inventions, included just for the pleasure of fancy, include "demons of motion", which are born from and eat rhythm, and the lovely idea of "slow sculpture". "Huge sedimentary stones... each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths."

But, in comparison with The Scar, such ideas are fewer and less indulgently elaborated. Iron Council feels more po-faced, more weighed down by its tonnage of political baggage. A fair proportion of the book, describing a secondary character's adventures in the factioneering of revolutionary New Crobuzon, is clotted and unsatisfying compared with the wild journeys of Low and the train gang. Still, fantasy fiction is usually fabulously conservative, and Iron Council - with its implicit trade unionism, as well as the fact that many characters are casually bisexual - stands as a rebuke to the genre's medieval politics.

In the end it is tempting to read the thaumaturge, Judah the golemist, as an avatar of the fantasy author himself. Heroically clutching at his head and magicking ever more improbable monsters out of thin air, the engine of the story and its deus ex machina, he finally arrests his perpetual train in a moment that is at once a narrative cop-out and a rather beautiful image. It was a good ride.