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Loading... Iron Council (2004)by China Miéville
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Ohhhh well. I remain interested in this world and the world-building, the whirlwind of ideas and stories, the writing style even when it irritates me. This particular book is just a lot of battle. Preparing for battle, fighting battles, recovering from battle, anticipating future battle... I find it exhausting. I blame a high school translation project of the Gallic wars for using up my lifetime tolerance for battle description. I'm also realizing more and more differences in the way our minds work, and while that's not a reason to not enjoy an author, it affects my potential joy in these worlds and ideas. i wish i hadn't read this book. there was so much time between my reading of the second book, the scar, and this one, the third in mieville's new crobuzon trilogy anyway, and then i started it once and couldn't get into it. i don't know. i feel like he lost the heart of it somewhere in the midst of this, and there is no hope to it, no light amidst the darkness, which is part of what i like him for. another thing i like him for is his complete uniformity of reality; he creates full environments that you cannot doubt exist. this book seemed to counteract some of what he had written in the past, and even, on occasion, itself. grrr. 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.
Aside from his high-end prose style, Miéville’s characters, with their conceits and weaknesses abraded as moral choices play themselves out, secure their author’s place among the top-flight novelists of today. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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The City and the City is by far superior though, ( )