When ideology fails: Iron Council, by China Mieville

 I'm-a-gonna grumble.  Iron Council is the third book in the Bas-Lag series, by China Mieville, and in previous posts, I have lauded the first two books--  Perdido Street Station, and The Scar.  In fact, I was so enamored of Perdido Street Station that I spent time thinking about the book before I wrote anything (!), and I wrote two posts, instead of one.  I will still recommend, in the strongest possible terms, that you read both of those books, especially Perdido Street Station.  Do not bother with Iron Council unless you simply must read the complete series.  I have observations, and perhaps they can be categorized as meta-observations, but I think it is a failure of a book, not merely because it does not live up to the first two in the series, but because the book just sucked.  It sucked for some important reasons, though, so instead of it being one of those books that I read, ignore and forget (and hence don't bother with a post), I have some observations on ideology, when ideology fails, and when even the author seems to understand that the ideology isn't working.

Let us note, first, where China Mieville is on the ideological spectrum.  Hard left.  Far left.  Basically, he's a commie, which from an authorial perspective, is fine.  All that matters to me is whether or not he can write, and for the most part, he can write.  Among what I have read, he has at least two flat-out classics-- Perdido Street Station and The City & The City, and I'll keep reading through his back-catalog, being somewhat late to the party on this guy.  Yet no author is perfect.  He is, however, far to the left of me, which is going to be true for most people in the arts, just as most people is business will be to the right of me.  I don't fit.  Whatever.

In Perdido Street Station and The Scar, there were interesting and thoughtful commentaries on politics in which one could see Mieville's perspective, but without feeling like one has been beaten over the head with that perspective, and that is an important thing for a writer.  The best books are nuanced, and if you are overly concerned with beating an ideological point into the ground like a railroad spike (gettin' there), you won't have the nuance necessary for a good work of art.  Hence, a good artist's politics will be, not irrelevant per se, but no true obstacle, Scottish or otherwise.  Mieville is from Norwich, which is a little South of there anyway.  Point being, I don't agree with anyone.  Not even myself, because as soon as I think a thing, I start arguing in my own head, and I don't let myself believe that thing because that's how contrarian I am.  That does mean, though, that I'm pretty open about reading people with whom I disagree.

Including, obviously, China Mieville.

It's just that Iron Council sucked.

So let's deal with this number three, in which Mieville blithely laid a number two on his readers.  Trump clogs toilets with classified documents, Mieville clogs 'em with gigantic novels.  Hey Donnie!  Any room left in Old Yeller?!  I don't know how many courics this one is, but it might set a record!

Anywho, here's the deal.  Bas-Lag is a steampunk+magic world, with various races that combine human and animal physiologies.  The main location is the city-state of New Crobuzon, which is vaguely cosmopolitan, but also corrupt, and not a happy-fun place.  Do not taunt New Crobuzon.

So a dude named Weather Wrightby is building a transcontinental railroad, which is especially hard, because the continent isn't just geographically messy, there's crazy magic shit.  But he's doin' it.  He has a combination of regular, old-fashioned underpaid labor, and the "Remade."  I've written about them in the previous Bas-Lag posts.  Basically, when you commit a crime in New Crobuzon, they use a combination of steampunk technology and thaumaturgy to give you surgical alterations for the purposes of making you either useful, or just to fuck with you.  The Remade are prison labor/slave labor.

So the railroad is gettin' built, and there's a workers' revolt along the way.  OK, so far so good.  The Remade and various other exploited workers who haven't been paid in a while manage to beat their overseers.  Standoff occurs.  More are comin', but the workers and slaves win at least a temporary victory.

Here's where things go off the rails, so to speak.  The railroad is being built as a train moves directly behind the track being laid down.  Y'all are free now.  What do you do?  You fucking run and hide, right?  Go off, maybe create your own settlement in hiding somewhere, whatever.  Here's what you don't do.  You don't take the tracks behind the train, lay them in front of the train, move the train onto those tracks, then take the tracks you just freed up, move them to in front of the train to keep the train moving forward, always doing so in such a way that you only have whatever track you have just taken from behind you, laying it down in front of you, as a method of travel.

Have you ever been stuck in traffic?  Kind of frustrating, right?  You know that feeling that it would be faster to get out and walk?

Would you do this while trying to run from overseers and slave-masters?  Or would you just get the fuck out and run?!

And really, what is the utility of the train, itself?  It has no value, unless it can run along these things called, "tracks," which it can't do because you are taking it by taking the tracks on which it just traveled and putting them in front of you to move it just a bit farther.  That means there's no fucking track.  What good does the train do you?  If you just want to keep it out of the hands of Wrightby, then blow it the fuck up, crash it, whatever.  But what value do you derive from it?

When such questions are posed within the novel, no concrete answers are given.  Just a bunch of abstract, highfalutin blather.  Why doesn't New Crobuzon catch up, like with their dirigibles, horses, 'n stuff from the last outposts?  'Cuz then there wouldn't be a novel.  But seriously, this is fucking stupid.  There is no reason for them to try to "escape" this way, and no rationale for it working.

Mieville just wanted the escaped slaves and laborers who then formed the titular "Iron Council" to become a symbol of resistance in New Crobuzon, upon their disappearance into lands unknown and unreachable.

But let's say we grant Mieville the dumbest escape ever.  The Iron Council is off on the other side of the continent, hangin' out in their idyllic, communist utopia, with their disappearance serving as a symbol to the would-be communist organizers in New Crobuzon, which is going to shit.  The city is at war with Tesh, because everyone hates Tesh.  So, I type, "Tesh," and do you still think of John Tesh, and get triggered?  Yeah, we all hate Tesh.  Fuck Tesh.

Just lookin' for some Tesh, right?

I don't even like ZZ Top.  I'm sorry.  Anyway, the war is going badly, and they're doing a bunch of weird, mystical shit, and New Crobuzon's economy is collapsing, and blah-fucking-blah.  This serves as fodder to organize uprisings.  Amid this, a few characters set out to find the Iron Council, first Judah Low, who was one of the people involved in the first place, and then a few more characters to find Judah, led by Cutter, but the novel is told non-linearly, so you get Cutter first, and Judah's involvement in the founding second.  Anyway, while Cutter heads off to find Judah and the Iron Council, shit goes crazy in New Crobuzon.  One group forms "the Collective," as a, you guessed it, commie enclave to fight the militia and Parliament, while an anarchist/terrorist whose motives are secretly more personal than political (Toro) manages to kill the mayor, all hell breaks loose, and then the militia just cracks the fuck down.  Why?

OK, here's the deal.  You have these commie organizers, but Mieville is smarter than they are.  Mieville created New Crobuzon such that the militia just have the weapons, 'n shit.  There was just no way.  Yeah, fine, you kill one mayor, but another's just gonna take her place.  Toro just wanted personal vengeance anyway.  The Collective couldn't win, and Mieville couldn't pretend that they could win, because at the end of the day, he couldn't write such a stupid, ridiculous sequence of events in which that was plausible, given how he constructed New Crobuzon.

But while that's happening, Cutter, Judah and that crowd are telling the Iron Council that New Crobuzon sent a special team.  They know where the Iron Council is.  They're coming, and they're going to kill 'em all, fuckin' dead.  Your hiding place ain't hidden no more.  Run, kiddies, run.

So what do these morons do?  They decide that they need to go back to New Crobuzon.  Worse, they need to go back the same way they came, taking their train, moving the tracks from behind them to their front, slower'n'slow, while being chased by magical commando motherfuckers.

Why?

Because we are history!!!  We are bringing history and destiny and...

Fuck, I can't even type the shit they say, it's so beyond stupid.

And like I said, at some level, Mieville gets how stupid it is, because ultimately, Judah and Cutter are both telling them, what, are you fucking stupid?!  There's a militia force of, like, thousands, waiting for them right outside New Crobozon.  They're literally on the fucking train tracks, at that point, and not the ones they have to lay.  The old ones.  All the militia has to do is wait in formation, and shoot a train on a track that can't go anywhere else.  Come to poppa!

The idiots of the Iron Council have this pointed out to them, repeatedly, and just get this totally delusional ideological fervor of reality denial, treating Cutter or whoever else with this infuriating condescension.

And honestly, this is what gets me.  Morons who think they're the smart ones.  Dunning-Kruger.  Change the name.  It's the Dunning-Kruger Council, and the condescension with which they treat anyone who confronts them with fucking reality.  Worse still, Mieville's ideological sympathies are clearly with the Council.  He sets up the leader, Ann-Hari, as the inspirational, moral force, and you get the clear sense that you are supposed to look to her as, not precisely "the voice of the author," but something close to it, and more of a moral force than Cutter.  Except that not only is she full of shit, and called on being full of shit...

She is shown to be full of shit, by the plot itself, because Mieville can't find a way to write it otherwise.  He set the plot on a track, and... well, right into those militia guns.  Sorry, lady.

So yes, Cutter tells her the militia are waiting.  Then he is confronted by a spy in their ranks, who is actually working for Wrightby.  They confirm that, yup, the militia are waiting!  (Not like this is a hard thing to predict!)  Cutter goes to Ann-Hari again.  More self-righteously stupid, condescending bullshit from an ideologically blind fool in denial of reality.

Fucking communists.

But we're supposed to see her as virtuous!

And then... yeah, they get to the end of the line.  Hello, militia!

As I was reading, I was getting a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that Mieville was going to create some deus ex machina ending.  Here's the thing.  Judah Low is massively powerful.  He creates golems, and he can make golems out of all sorts of shit.  So the Council is doing something beyond stupid.  Judah'll save 'em, because otherwise, Mieville is writing a commie revolution that fails!  Problem being, Judah is powerful enough that he is almost godlike, and while he hasn't been Remade into a steampunk machine, we're still in deus ex machina territory.

So here's what Judah does.  With minimal set-up (hello, god machine!), he makes a "time golem," which basically means that he creates a bubble of frozen time around the train before it gets to the militia at New Crobuzon's edge.  They never reach the... I can't call it an ambush, because everyone who isn't riding the shortened bus of that train knows it's there, but they never get to the thousands of soldiers ready to kill the fuck out of them.  That way, they can keep being some kind of inspiration, saved from their own idiocy, and at some indeterminate point in the future, it'll probably unfreeze.

But Ann-Hari was convinced that there were, like, a bunch of her commie soldiers behind the militia ready to fight and defend her!  And all sorts of other shit.  Which was all wrong.

They were all going to fucking die.  The Collectivist revolution got put down, because it couldn't win, the Iron Council was stupid, their belief that they could "inspire" the revolution was wrong, their foolhardy decision to ride the train into New Crobuzon was beyond stupid, and the only thing that saved them from dying was a deus ex machina character who, admittedly, was shown to be massively powerful throughout the novel.

Still, my point remains.  These people are morons.  Judah isn't.  Cutter isn't.  A few of them are pragmatic.  Toro is driven by revenge, and as a general rule, I'm against "revenge," but at least she is goal oriented towards an achievable goal.  (Yeah, "Toro," she...  There's a lot of that.  Published in 2004, and woke before woke was woke, so actually, give Mieville credit for subversiveness rather than going along with the crowd.)  But at the basic level, the communist uprising was not a practical thing.  And Mieville knew it.  The Iron Council acted stupidly.  And Mieville knew it.

How, then, do we think about a novel like Iron Council?  Mieville wanted to write about a communist revolution, but he was torn between the desire to be constrained by plot coherence and the ideological demands of the concept.  He sacrificed plot coherence in the train itself.  He liked the image of the tracks being taken from behind the train, and moved to the space ahead, and it is an amusing, surrealist/absurdist image, so he sacrificed realism there, but when pushed, he could not figure out a coherent path to victory for the collectivists in New Crobuzon, nor a way for the train to ride into New Crobuzon.

Along the route, he needed a few gimmicks to allow the Council to get out of a few scrapes, and gimmicks that allow the underdog to win a fight?  That's the stuff of basic plotting.  Writing 101.  But having that train plow into the station at New Crobuzon without getting blown to smithereens?  That's not 101, nor 201.  Even Judah Low couldn't make that happen.  I was nervous how far Mieville would push Judah's powers, and Mieville went as far as he could, so consider the tension.

How far do you want your ideology to go?  Do you recognize constraints?  It is to Mieville's credit that he at least recognized the constraint of realism here.  The Marxist couldn't look at this and give the commies the win.  It wouldn't have worked.

So... note.  It is so noted.  The commie wrote a plot in which he wanted a commie uprising.  The moral frustration is that in a series filled with fascinating, intellectual meditations on shades of grey and complexity, we come to a black & white commie uprising, where the only real distinction is between the intelligence of one like Cutter or Judah, and the idiocy of Ann-Hari.  Sure, we can talk about Ori getting duped, and other such stuff, but basically, this is a "commie revolutions are good," plot, except... that they don't work.  Or at least, they don't work here.  Mieville couldn't make it work.  He couldn't figure out how, in a world of his own creation.  The mayor?  Parliament?  Corrupt, of course.  It's hard to defend the penal system, and plenty of other shit that goes on in New Crobuzon.  How far do we want to push the metaphors?  Happy to explore.

Revolutions, though?  Funny, but as it turns out, they're hard!  Commie revolutions?  They never work.  Ever.  When the Iron Council ran off, grant them their escape, and given the small society, they can run it in a way that wouldn't work in a larger group.  OK, I'll even explore that.

But revolutions?  Tricky business, when even the writer can't make it work.

Warren Haynes has done many versions of this, on his own, with the Allman Brothers, and with Gov't Mule, but in my opinion, it sounds best when he does it solo acoustic.  His voice and his guitar.  That's it.  "End Of The Line."