Railsea

Railsea, China Mieville, is sort of a steampunk/sci-fi take on the fate of a world with a twist of Moby Dick. 
      Sham ap Soorap is a doctor's apprentice on the moling train the Medes.  The captain, Captain Naphi, has a philosophy:  A big, ivory colored mole.  The Medes and crew search the southern part of the Railsea, searching for the captain's philosophy and moles that they can hunt for blubber. Sham ap Soorap has higher aspirations, though.  He wants to be a salvor.
      To be a salvor is to be one of the courageous few who prowl the the Railsea, looking for train wrecks and other ruins to discover and sell.  Trying to prove himself to his crew, Sham does a bit of salvage work and he finds a roll of old camera film hidden in a train that has been destroyed.  The contents of that roll of film means different things to different people:  To Captain Naphi it means the end of her search for her philosophy, to Sham it means something that he cannot even begin to comprehend, to the Rumour Sellers of Manihiki it means that there might be treasure, and the the Shroake siblings it means that they have to finish the work that their parents started.

One of the things that really bugged me about this book was the fact that ampersands ( '&') were used instead of the word 'and'.  Around chapter 45 you get an explanation of the symbolism, and eventually you get used to it, but it took a while to re-train my brain.
      The author is almost conversational in part of his writing, and that's sort of comforting.  It's like he's reaching out of the pages and actually telling you the story.  He also refers to the Railsea and the lands around like it is the only time period anyone has ever known, and like you've grown up going to school there.  It makes everything seem more real, that Sham might not be some figment of imagination, he might've been an actual kid who actually lost his parents who really does want to be a salvor. 
      China Mieville is also very humorous, in small ways.  Like, I won't go into fine detail, but Sham was stranded somewhere and it said something like "He dug around in the wreck, found himself some boards, and built himself a house.  After that, he was lucky to find some seeds so he planted himself a garden and ate the food that grew.  When he grew up he went back to Streggeye with the wind blowing in his hair."  I don't know, it was longer than that.  But I stared at the paragraph for a minute or so because I was only on, like, page 300, and the book was nowhere near done.  The next line, though, was "That didn't really happen."  It was sort of funny.
     The reason why that stood out is because some of the writing, to my opinion, is detailed.  Not dry, per say, but very detailed.  And sort of roundabout.  Maybe it's just that I'm reading too fast and I keep skipping over stuff, but it seems that there is almost as much detail in this book as there is in A Horse and His Boy by C.S. Lewis. 
     For the first fifty pages, at least, I was a bit lost. This seems to be the point,  but I couldn't tell you exactly why.  When it does get explained, 'it' being the Railsea and what it connects, the various layers of this world, the moling business, and salvage, sometimes it makes even less sense than before it had been explained at all.  You have to sort of think yourself through it.  It eventually makes sense.  Sort of.
      This book could be classified as steampunk.  The trains are windup, diesel, windblown, or something else, and the dress described of the salvors could very well be what they wore on the Everness (Planesrunner, Ian McDonald). 
      Technology, pirates, mystery, gypsies, chases for ivory-colored beasts, a boy who wants to be something else, and children who want to be exactly who they are combine to create a noise you won't forget:  the sound of a train running over the endless rails of the Railsea.