The Mysterious Character Of Sham In Railsea

‘Railsea’ is a story about a young doctor’s apprentice – Sham Yes ap Soorap – aboard a mole-hunting train exploring his dystopian world. Through his travels Sham finds two other characters determined to set out on an odyssey to the mysterious and controversial ‘end of the world’. All three characters develop a strong friendship as the book progresses. The story takes the reader through an amazingly creative and bizarre setting with some strange and extraordinary creatures. At the beginning of the tale, the main character Sham seems to be a victim of fate, as his job aboard the moletrain – the Medes – only came about due to his cousins’ organisation, Sham had no preference of his own. However throughout the story, he begins to make choices of …show more content…
Sham has just been kidnapped by pirates, and the Manihiki navy has destroyed their train Tarralesh. However, the young doctor’s apprentice is saved from a death from the sub-terrestrial beasts, and instead lands on a barren island to be marooned. Sham’s situation seems dire, as the island contains no edible food and only a small source of mineral-tasting water. But despite his near-death condition, he manages to spot an old ‘jollycart’, and walks across the rails – so near the flat earth – to it and his liberation from the lethal island. This obviously took a great amount of courage and bravery, as everyone in ‘Railsea’ knows the peril of the flat earth, and particularly the monsters that live beneath it. On the other hand, Sham could have simply stayed on the island for the remainder of his life, though Mieville purposely constructed this chapter to express the main character’s will to live, and again his conversion from a ‘victim of fate’ to a character making conscious choices. This event inspires the reader to replicate this behaviour and attitude of courage in undesirable situations they may face in the real