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I can envisage, in years to come, someone who read Railsea in their youth happening to pick up a copy of Herman Melville's Moby Dick and thinking to themselves: Hang on, I've already read this!

For the first third or so of the novel, China Miéville is fairly true to his source material. The setting is transformed from the southern oceans to a landscape criss-crossed by a seemingly infinite number of railway lines. Trains of many kinds run on these lines, but the one we're particularly interested in is the equivalent of a whaler, hunting for the gigantic beasts that live under the soil: rats and antlions and especially the mole or moldywarpe. Our particular Ishmael is Sham Yes ap Soorap, who signs aboard the Medes as surgeon's mate. Captain Naphi is a woman driven by obsession or, in the language of the novel, a 'philosophy'; she dreams of killing the great ivory moldywarpe, 'Mocker Jack.' The great white mole, it seems, has already cost her an arm.

It is not just in plot that Miéville echoes Melville, for this novel's story is consistently interrupted by essays on the life and traditions of the Railsea, though Miéville's essays are considerably shorter than those in Moby Dick. And with an ongoing quest for the meaning of things, and glimpses from afar of angels maintaining the lines, he even captures something of the spiritual quality of the original.

Miéville is clearly having a lot of fun transplanting a tale of 19th century life at sea to a far distant future of decayed technology. Nevertheless he soon begins to tire of stepping so closely in Melville's footsteps, and suddenly a profusion of other influences erupt into the text. There is wholesale plundering from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatski; there are echoes of Wallace and Gromit and the Rev. W. Awdry's Thomas the Tank Engine; here, surely, we detect traces of Buster Keaton's The General (and also, perhaps, The Railrodder), while over there is lots of Robert Louis Stevenson (and perhaps High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes); there's even a flavor of Lassie. In other words, the novel becomes, by turn, a pirate adventure and a quest story, a chase novel and an existential search, even a little sentimental coming-of-age story, all overlaid by a metafictional knowingness with which Miéville constantly interrupts the narrative to comment on his own tale. (Chapter Sixty-Four in full: 'Time for the Shroakes? Not yet.').

As befits a work that takes so much of its inspiration from the 19th century, this is a novel that proceeds mostly by startling coincidence and breath-taking happenstance, with people regularly turning up in the very nick of time. It starts with Sham who has been apprenticed to the surgeon on the Medes, though he doesn't feel this is what he really wants to do. In fact he is rather more drawn to the idea of being a salvor, one of those who salvage anything from wrecked trains to weird alien artifacts. When the Medes comes upon a train wreck, he gets his chance; and finds a bunch of pictures hidden near two skeletons, one of them clearly the train captain. He takes his find to Captain Naphi, who keeps them for herself, but Sham manages to get copies of two of the most interesting photographs. One shows a pair of children by a curious arch; the other, far more mysterious, shows an expanse of empty land with only a solitary railway line stretching away into the distance.

Sham becomes obsessed with finding both the children and the inexplicable emptiness. He gets his chance when the Medes comes in to Manihiki, one of the great port cities, home to salvage markets and pirates and much more besides. Here Sham finds the Shroakes, Dero and Caldera, the two children in the photograph. The two skeletons were their parents, explorers out to find the edge of the Railsea. With Sham's confirmation of the fate of the last expedition, they resolve to set out themselves. Sham is invited to join them, but chickens out. Unfortunately, the Shroakes have attracted a lot of attention from various unsavoury groups who believe that the parents must have found some great treasure. When the children disappear, therefore, Sham finds himself kidnapped by pirates who expect him to be able to lead them to the treasure.

From this point on, the narrative splits into three fast-paced threads. We follow Captain Naphi and her crew on their quest for the great white mole; we follow Dero and Caldera as they encounter the weird beasts and fantastic landscapes of the uncharted stretches of the Railsea; and, of course, we follow Sham as he is held by pirates, caught up in a Railsea battle, cast away on a desert island, and rescued by a nomadic tribe of what, frankly, seem to be Railsea hippies. Eventually the rules of plot and coincidence bring all these three strands together for the inevitable climax of epic encounters and astounding discoveries.

It is that rather old-fashioned thing, a rollicking adventure, full of incident, sudden changes of pace, unexpected revelations, rescues in the nick of time, and so on. In fact, it is rather too full of all this, too full also of borrowings from a plethora of sources. There is so much going on, and the plotting is so restless, that it isn't entirely satisfying. If you like to skim along the surface of a novel at high speed, feverishly turning the pages to discover the next twist, then this is the book for you. But it's not a book to think about. There's too much crowded into the pages for it all to make sense; and Miéville is so clearly in love with the whole fantasmagoria of the Railsea that when we eventually get to the end of the rails, as we must, what we find there is rather bathetic, as if he never quite knew what to put beyond the edge.

Actually a labour of love doesn't quite describe this novel, it is more like an infatuation. There is a big, breathtaking invention into which Miéville has poured not only libraries of influences, but all sorts of his familiar obsessions. There are the trains from Iron Council, the reversals of expectations from Un Lun Dun, the play with language from Embassytown, and the monsters from just about everything he has ever written. The poor book is simply bursting at the seams. And all of this is told in a language that is, by turns, vivid, playful and infuriating. There are masses of neologisms, lots of real but unfamiliar words, words used to mean something other than they would normally do ('philosophy,' for instance), and some of the ugliest portmanteau words it has been my misfortune to encounter. On top of all this there is Miéville the postmodernist, teasing us with switches of viewpoint, or comments upon where the story should start or where it should go next or what we the readers should be thinking about.

He has, in short, done everything with this novel. Item by item, he hasn't done any of it particularly badly; but there's too much to allow it all to be done particularly well.

Paul Kincaid is the recipient of the SFRA's Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service for 2006. His collection of essays and reviews, What it is we do when we read science fiction is published by Beccon Publications.