The City & the City

The premise is spectacular. Mieville did an amazing job world building two cities in the same geographic footprint that have separate languages, customs, mannerisms and aesthetics. They remain separate because the citizens don't acknowledge each other under the threat of customs and the law.

It's a noir detective story through and through. The prose is overwrought and full of garden path sentences. It reinforces the cramped warren-like feel of Beszel but I don't think it was intentional. I kept having to reread sentences because their baroque construction. It really took me out of the story. It's still worth a read.

Amazingly well-realized murder mystery in an imagined "pair" of cities. Great noir atmosphere. Evokes living behind the Iron Curtain, the many-layered history of Eastern Europe's cities (many spent several hundred years as Ottoman towns before being recaptured and remade into Austrian/Hungarian/Serbian/etc ones), and the social strains from gentrification, all in one.

The only ding I have is that it's told in the first person, but the narrator is sort of transparent. That is, they didn't seem to have a strong POV to me, so it reads more like third-person than anything else.

Still, it's well done, with a solution (and an ending) that I did not see coming, but felt natural and, really, perfectly encapsulates the themes of the book.

I suppose it wasn't enough for China Miéville to write a gripping thriller with likeable characters that are recognizably tropey without becoming cliché.

It wasn't enough either to write the said thriller in a very rich and flowing style, with a mastery of structure and rhythm that makes of this book a page-turner in which you nevertheless want to stop to taste what you've just read, to think about it--perpetually torn, in a good way, between plot, style and ideas.

On top of that, I guess he HAD to set this brilliant thriller in a world like no other, an uncanny urban environment that challenges your understanding at every corner without being too confusing.

A great, great read; the first book I've read by that author, and certainly not the last.

It's a mystery, so I was biased against it from the start, but it had enough quirks and weirdness to keep me interested all the way through. Even so it's my least favorite Miéville so far. The present-day eastern european setting brings something different to the genre and it works well for me. (Btw, is it scifi or fantasy, I'm not quite sure?)