RAILSEA by China Miéville (Del Rey), 424 pages, $21 cloth. Rating: NNNN
Credited with revitalizing contemporary fantasy, China Miéville combines a rich writing style and fascinating, quirky plots that grab readers from their first pages.
His latest, Railsea, may be marketed to young audiences, but it’s as multifaceted as earlier works Perdido Street Station and The City & The City.
A blend of Moby Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson’s pirate tales, boys’-own adventure stories, steampunk, a chapter of the Odyssey and a dollop of Dickens, Railsea is set in a dystopic, oceanless world. Trains crisscross seemingly endless miles of tracks across dangerous earth, the land riddled with subterranean, carnivorous animals that include voracious rabbits, rats, insects and gigantic moles called moldywarpes, the equivalent of whales, and hunted for their skins and meat.
Its central character, the young Shamus Yes ap Soorap, is a doctor’s apprentice on the Medes, a train commanded by Captain Naphi, a woman who’s lost an arm to a great ivory-coloured moldywarpe named Mocker-Jack and is fixated on tracking the beast down.
Sham’s own journey becomes linked to that of the Shroake children – orphans like himself – whose daring parents disappeared seeking whatever lies beyond the railsea.
Plot aside, what draws Miéville’s fans is his stylistically complex but never impenetrable prose, his creation of a magical world filled with tantalizing names and places, and his unexpected descriptions. His is a language to be savoured slowly, not skimmed, and one that’s sure to intrigue any adventuresome reader.
Miéville delivers an IFOA keynote alongside Miriam Toews on October 25, and reads with Cory Doctorow on October 26.