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564 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2004
"When Cutter understood that the sex would only ever be an act of patrician friendship, profane and saintly generosity would only ever be a gift from Judah, he tried to bring it to a close, but could not sustain the abstinence."Judah, with his "parasite innard goodness", with his never-ending devotion to and obsession with the Iron Council - to the point where we, along with Ann-Hari, question whether his love gives him the right to do what he ended up doing. Ann-Hari and Ori, with their longing to change history, to find something bigger than them, to help make something better. Toro, longing for revenge long-overdue. All of them are desperate, unhappy, driven by forces that they may not comprehend and yet cannot resist. So heartbreaking.
"He feels pinioned by history. He can wriggle like a stuck butterfly but can go nowhere."And this leads me to another theme that I felt I was not even qualified to talk about as I think I may have missed the significance of it in quite a few parts of the book was the power of history, its relentless march, sweeping everything in its wake towards... something. The relentless pull of history that makes you feel small and insignificant. I may need a reread to fully grasp the implications.
There were none of the chances Cutter had wanted, no opportunity to tell the stories of the Collective, to ask for the stories of the Council. It was rushed and ugly. He felt desperately angry as the Councillors prepared to die. He felt as well a sense of his own failure, that he was letting down Judah. You knew I couldn't do it, you bastard. That's why you're still there. Getting ready some plan or other for when I fail. Still, even though Judah had expected it, Cutter hated that he had not succeeded.
"Did you hear? That the war’s over, that we beat the Tesh, the Mayor took control again, and everything was sorted, and the Collective went under?...The Collective was a dream, but it’s over. It failed. If it ain’t dead by now it’ll be dead in days...You have to turn. The Iron Council has to turn. Or leave the train. You come on to New Crobuzon, it’s suicide. You’ll die. They’ll destroy you...Here’s how it will be. They’re waiting for you. The Collective’s dead...and the militia knows you’re coming. They’re waiting. They know where you’ll arrive...There’ll be plenty of them.
"I wish, you know I really wish you’d been here in the early days. We didn’t know what we were doing. People on the streets were moving much faster than the Caucus. Even some militia were coming over to us. We had to run to catch up...The train will come, the last of the Collective will rise, and the government will fall."
“...their nihilist depredations risked bringing the militia.”
“Salacus Fields itself was becoming colonised by the weekend bohemians. There had always been moneyed slummers, bad-boy younger children seeking tawdry redemption or dissolution, but now their visits were temporary and their transformations tourist.”
“He smiles not cunning nor sated nor secure, but in joy because he knows his plans are holy.”
“In years gone, women and men are cutting a line across the dirtland and dragging history with them.”
“We’ll gather people with us, we’ll be an army, we’ll sweep in. We’ll turn things around. We’re bringing history."
“We unrolled history. We made history. We cast history in iron and the train shat it out behind it. Now we’ve ploughed that up. We’ll go on, and we’ll take our history with us. Remake. It’s all our wealth, it’s everything, it’s all we have.
“Miles of track, reused, reused, it is the train’s future and its present, and it emerges a fraction more scarred as history and is hauled up again and becomes another future. The train carries its track with it, picking it up and laying it down: a sliver, a moment of railroad. No longer a line split through time, but contingent and fleeting, recurring beneath the train, leaving only its footprint.”
“Wherever it went it was intruder. It was never part of the land. It was an incursion of history in stubby hillside woodland…”
“There was nothing that could be done, not really. Nothing to keep them from harm. History had gone on. It was the wrong time.
“We were never yours, Judah. We were something real, and we came in our time, and we made our decision, and it was not yours. Whether we were right or wrong, it was our history. You were never our augur Judah. Never our saviour.”
“The train edged forward along the unrolling tracks, the line behind it dismantled as it went. In its wake was debris, a cut of altered ground...It was a just-railroad, existing in the moment for the train to pass, then gone again.”
“...A golem of sound and time stood and did what it was instructed to do, its instruction become it, its instruction its existence, its command ‘just be’, and so it was...The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was. It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it paid the outrage of ontology no mind.”
“We were, we are, we will be.”
“Years might pass and we will tell the story of the Iron Council and how it was made, how it made itself and went, and how it came back, and is coming, is still coming. Women and men cut a line across the dirtland and dragged history out and back across the world. They are coming...They are always coming.”
Runagate
Runagate.
Mean mean mean to be free.