{"id":6567,"date":"2014-12-13T10:45:22","date_gmt":"2014-12-13T15:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=6567"},"modified":"2014-12-13T10:45:22","modified_gmt":"2014-12-13T15:45:22","slug":"railsea-by-china-mivilledel-rey-2013-originally-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/railsea-by-china-mivilledel-rey-2013-originally-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Railsea by China Mi\u00e9villeDel Rey, 2013 (Originally 2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The style of Railsea<\/em>, the language and syntax, won me over at the start. Plot-wise, Miéville is playing with Moby-Dick<\/em> crossed with Treasure Island<\/em>, with some nods to Robinson Crusoe<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em>, but weird, because this is China Miéville. Our protagonist is Sham, or, really, Shamus Yes ap Soorap, and when the book opens he’s a doctor’s assistant on a moler, a train that hunts giant moles. Or, really, one particular giant mole, a giant ivory mole that is the captain’s obsession, or “philosophy”: she calls it Mocker-Jack, and ponders what it symbolizes as she travels the tangle of railroad tracks called the railsea in pursuit of it. <\/p>\n

I love how Miéville plays with narrative and structure and style: the book’s first sentence is this: “This is the story of a bloodstained boy” (3). But then, farther down that page, the narrator pulls back: “The situation is not as macabre as it sounds. The boy isn’t the only bloody person there: he’s surrounded by others as red & sodden as he. & they are cheerfully singing” (ibid<\/em>). And then, the narrator pulls back farther, “Just to before the boy was bloodied, there to pause & go forward again to see how we got here, to red, to music, to chaos, to a big question mark in a young man’s head” (4). And oh, there are so many good phrases and sentences: Sham watches “everyone wetly unmaking what had been a mole” (16); he “[runs] about on inventy errands” (36); when a giant creature attacks Sham sees “a glimpse of great mouthness” (49). The captain’s quarry is “that burrowing signifier,” which she hopes to subject “to a sharp & bladey interpretation” (105, 104). There are sentences like this, which made me laugh out loud on the subway: “Their cold accidental pursuer accidentally pursued” (241). <\/p>\n

And oh, man, the whole thing about captains and their philosophies: Sham notes that not every captain has one, <\/p>\n

\nbut a fair proportion grew into a close antipathy-cum-connection with one particular animal, which they came to realise or decide—to decidalise—embodied meanings, potentialities, ways of looking at the world. At a certain point, & it was hard to be exact but you knew it when you saw it, the usual cunning thinking about professional prey switched onto a new rail & became something else—a faithfulness to an animal that was now a worldview. (95)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is too much plot to try to summarize—there’s a pair of precocious siblings Sham meets, who set off on a quest of their own as a result of news he brings them, and there are pirates, and nomads with wind-powered trains, and prophecies and rumors and the possibility of treasure, and sometimes the plot drags or feels overstuffed, but overall I found this book pretty delightful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The style of Railsea, the language and syntax, won me over at the start. Plot-wise, Miéville is playing with Moby-Dick crossed with Treasure Island, with some nods to Robinson Crusoe and the Odyssey, but weird, because this is China Miéville. Our protagonist is Sham, or, really, Shamus Yes ap Soorap, and when the book opens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adultchildrens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}