Iron Council

China Miéville
Iron Council Cover

An Unconvincing Concept...

ScoLgo
4/8/2021
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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.