Railsea : China Miéville

This is a Young Adult novel by Miéville (whose adult works I have yet to read, but must). It has a completely whacky premise: a world in which there are no oceans, and where in their place is the endless ‘railsea’: a vast tangle of railroad tracks over which trains hurtle between islands of higher land, throwing switches on the run to change direction.

This is the story of a bloodstained boy.

Thus we are introduced to Sham ap Soorap, a young man on board the moletrain Medes, whose captain is driven by an obsession to catch and kill a great white mole which has in the past severed her arm. Well, you get the idea. If the trick was only this recasting of Moby-Dick then there wouldn’t be much to the book. But Miéville spins out a much more interesting and complex story, full of sly references to books like Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.

I did like the way Miéville keeps breaking the ‘fourth wall’ and discussing what is going to happen with the reader. (Since I’ve just finished reading Barchester Chronicles, this reminds me a lot of Anthony Trollope doing the same thing). There’s a typographical quirk to the text too. Each and every instance of the word ‘and’ is replaced by the ampersand ‘&’. At first this annoyed me, but then I got used to it, and it does give an interesting feel to the story.

Lots of exciting adventure and interest. And in the end, there’s almost (stress almost) a justification revealed for the existence of the railsea. I really liked it.

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Originally published at rightword.com.au on March 25, 2016.