Railsea - China Mieville

Back in 2017 when I read Kraken (that review here) and had a mixed review, other reviewers who felt the same as me said something along the lines of, "good, but not as good as Railsea." So Railsea has been on my to-read list since and I have to agree, it is a much better book than Kraken. Sham am Soorap is a doctor's apprentice on the mole train Medes. Hopelessly hopeless, Sham seems to not be very good at much of anything. But he's a likeable sort and somehow the train crew grows fond of him. 

In the world of Railsea, train tracks criss-cross the land for as far as anyone knows and in between the land lives subterranean animals of horrifying size and appearance, the largest of which are the Great Southern Moldywarpes. The mole train's purpose is to hunt down, slaughter, and sell the moldywarpes for meat and fur. The captain of the Medes, Captain Naphi, has taken on the hunt for a pale gigantic moldywarpe (her "philosophy" in Railsea speak) and she hunts him from end to end of the Railsea.

But you see, there is no end the Railsea. It's unthinkable. That is until the Medes comes upon a wrecked train and Sham finds inside a disk containing photographs of a single line leading into nothing. On the disk are also pictures of children and a home. Sham, an orphan himself, believes those children are owed and explanation of what happened to their parents. The rest of the book takes Sham and his train crew on an exploration of the end of the Railsea, of what the railfolk refer to as "heaven" and the forwards and backwards of history. 

The language of Railsea, the unapologetic drop into its world and its history without a guide are captivating stuff. The cadence and rhythm were made all the better by narrator Jonathan Cowley who does a spectacular job with all the varied and various characters in this creative re-imagination of Moby Dick.

4.5/5 Stars.