Railsea

China Miéville is one of my favorite authors even though I find a lot of his books to be pretty hot and miss, just because he swings for the fences a lot and has a wonderful imagination.

Unfortunately, this one was not a hit. I probably would have stopped reading it had I not been listening to it via audiobook, instead I just listened passively as I did other things. The concept and characters just didn't grab me (though there are some interesting ideas) and I never really ended up paying close attention to the rest of it. I might give it another chance sometime with more focus.

DNF at 43%. Yes, I know it's frowned upon, but I absolutely did not feel this book. At all and I just didn't feel patient enough to drag myself through it. Now you can call me lazy or horrible or “OMG, you can't have an opinion on a book without reading the whole freaking thing”, at this point I don't particularly care. Reading is my fun and this book... wasn't too fun to me.

The story is played out in some post-apocalyptic wasteland kind of world, where crazy jumbles of rails spread out between city states. People hunt for salvageable things or the crazy, gigantic animals, like moles from their trains. The protagonist, Sham SomethingSomething (names in this book are really random, more about that later) is training to be a moler train doctor, so he travels with a bunch of people. Then he finds photos from the dead couple on a crashed train and he feels obliged to find their kids and bring them the news of their parents' death.

My issue with this book is that it lacks any form of explanation or freaking foreplay to make you understand what is going on, there was no easing us in gently. Right away you get a ton of weird words, names, creatures and basically everything that I personally couldn't freaking remember, so I was skimming more than reading to actually get anywhere and hope for an explanation. Don't get me wrong, I didn't expect Mr. Miéville to play nanny and nicely lay out everything, especially not in a one off book with only about 400 pages, but shit. Sometimes it felt like he was messing with me when he introduced some new crew member with a name that sounded like a Polish person sneezing, who I wasn't going to remember. Sure, there are some interesting snippets of ideas, but to me they were way too deep under bullcrap I didn't get.

Another thing was the prose. To me it felt directionless, kind of like he was just drifting with whatever was coming. I didn't find it enjoyable and combined with my previous issue, it just didn't let me get really caught up in the story itself. What's with the & placed instead of writing ‘and' every single time? Later on it gets explained, but while it was intended as a quirky little thing about the world, it annoyed me to no end. I'm generally a pretty fast reader and this damn book didn't work with that, it distracted and confused me.
I think of this as that rule about clothes. If you show a lot of cleavage, then showing a lot of leg as well can be a bit much. It's probably better to just do one or the other. So yeah, either do kind of floaty prose OR drop us right into the middle of some crazy world without an explanation.

I don't want to give it one star, though. It wasn't really horrid, I don't think. More like something that you either really enjoy or feel completely unaffected by, the latter was the case for me. I knew Mr. Miéville was weird, that is his thing, but apparently we're weird in a completely different way, so this love affair ended really fast. I'm not saying I won't read anything else by him, it can happen I will, but right now I am not convinced by him being for me.
So long & have fun, Mr. Miéville.

Imagine a landscape filled with rails and switches, old trains littered here and there among “islands” of civilization. Within the land of this “railsea” are giant moles, some as big as whales, digging tunnels everywhere. Plying this railsea are moletrains and salvors, hunting moles for meat and oil, and salvaging various parts for resale. This is the world where young Sham ap Soorap finds himself, apprenticed to the train doctor aboard a moletrain with a captain obsessed with locating a giant yellow-tinged mole.
Great set-up, but I was not too enthused with the writing style. It seemed very choppy and often too vague about what was going on. Sham was a nice character, but we don't get to know him all that well. Also, I was not a fan of the author's decision to replace every instance of the world “and” with an ampersand ( & ). Just annoying. The ending felt a bit rushed as well. Not my favorite outing with this author. I still plan on re-reading both Perdido Street Station and The Scar.