RAILSEA by China Miéville

Between work and sinus surgery, it's taken me far too long to finish this book.

 

Which in some ways was good. Because it's a fantastic book, and I'm slightly sad I've finished it.

 

In the distant future, the earth is covered with a vast tangle of criss-crossing railway lines. Burrowing in the soil beneath them are all manner of enormous and deadly creatures: giant earwigs, carnivorous rabbits, hives of naked mole rats big enough to eat a man. Trains cross the railsea, hunting the most dangerous and most prized of all: the Great Southern Moldywarpe, the giant mole.

 

RAILSEA is the story of Sham ap Soorap, a young doctor's apprentice on one of these moletrains. Sham dreams of being a salvor, one of the treasure-hunters who dig up scraps of ancient and alien technology from the railsea. But when he finally gets to explore a wrecked train, the secrets he finds there lead him to being hunted across the railsea by pirates and wartrains and the occasional monster.

 

This book is Miéville's love-letter to the classic adventure novel, filtered through his own baroque and weird sensibilities. It's Treasure Island with trains, Moby Dick with giant moles. Even the language is wonderfully archaic. I was dreaming of ampersands by the time I finished.  

 

Miéville lists the authors who have inspired him a the back of the book, and the references to Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson are quite deliberate. 

But it also struck me that there's something very Doctor Who about this book: that same sense of taking something familiar and blowing it up into something fantastistical and strange. Miéville has said he would love to write for the Doctor, and this book convinced me he could do it.

Not that it's perfect. Miéville isn't great at distinguishing characters, so the large cast of trainsfolk often blur together. And there's a revelation at the end that I suspect was meant to be Douglas Adams-esque satire, but is too rushed to work properly. 

 

Overall, however, RAILSEA is a wonder.