Railsea | |||||||||||
China Miéville | |||||||||||
Del Rey, 431 pages | |||||||||||
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A review by Christopher DeFilippis
Miéville won the 2008 Locus Award for his first YA novel, Un Lun Dun, and Railsea is a worthy successor,
a rollicking adventure book for boys that liberally plies the classic tropes of swashbuckling romances
like Treasure Island and Kidnapped, with a dash of The Odyssey thrown in for good measure. But
at its core, Railsea is a retelling of Moby Dick. Only instead of taking place on a whaling ship, it
takes place on a train traversing the railsea -- a jumbled landscape of rails extending in every direction as far as the eye can see.
Riding this tangle of tracks is Sham ap Soorap, a young doctor's assistant aboard the Medes, a mole train in pursuit
of Mocker-Jack, a giant ivory-colored moldywarpe that has become the "philosophy" or obsession of Captain Abacat Naphi,
who lost her arm to the immense burrowing mole.
Though a passable medical apprentice, Sham dreams of becoming a salvager, riding the railsea in search of bits of
alt-salvage, discards from off-world visitors who had once frequented Earth as a way station. And when the Medes comes
across a deserted wreck, Sham's investigation turns up a bit of salvage the likes of which no one has ever seen before,
tossing him into an increasingly dangerous adventure that spans the railsea and beyond.
What stands out most about Railsea is Miéville's unfettered and playful use of language and style. He's
clearly having a ball as the omniscient narrator here, taking a break from the heady and heavy-handed themes he's been
exploring in his more recent books like The City & The City and Embassytown and simply reveling in his creativity and craft.
Still, it wouldn't be a Miéville book without a political message -- in this case a cautionary satire about
capitalism run amok. But while that message provides the warp and weft of this far-future tale, he never bashes you
over the head it. It is simply a foregone conclusion, manifested (quite literally) by the railsea itself.
To nitpick, the railsea is a somewhat clunky conceit, as the ground it sits on is riddled with giant burrowing
creatures -- in addition to moldywarpes there are antlions, burrowing owls and tortoises, giant earwigs and blood
rabbits. How several metric tons of continent-spanning iron rails fail to collapse into this undermined strata
Miéville never addresses.
But in the end it doesn't matter, because Railsea not only works, it shines, mainly due to the caliber of
Miéville's writing, which hasn't been so arresting since Perdido Street Station, as demonstrated by
this sampling of the book's opening passages:
At once visceral and allegorical, Railsea is an engaging, funny and thoroughly charming coming-of-age tale,
and teens and adults alike will be rooting for that bloodstained boy, swept along the high rails as Sham finds
friendship, danger, a hint of romance and -- ultimately -- himself.
Christopher DeFilippis is a serial book buyer, journalist and author. He published the novel Foreknowledge 100 years ago in Berkley's Quantum Leap series. He has high hopes for the next hundred years. In the meantime, his "DeFlip Side" radio segments are featured monthly on "Destinies: The Voice of Science Fiction." Listen up at DeFlipSide.com. |
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