BOOK REVIEW: China Miéville's THE CITY & THE CITY

China Miéville, brilliant author of The Scar and Perdido Street Station is back on the top of the critics lists with his latest work, The City & The City.

I am a huge fan of China Miéville's previous fantasy work, and I'm also a big fan of mysteries, so when I heard that the genre-defying British author's latest book was a noir thriller I was excited and intrigued.

The City & The City is a very unusual book (as expected from Miéville) built from a mundane beginning: the body of a murdered woman is found in a bad part of a city and an experienced detective is assigned to the case.

The detective is Inspector Tyador Borlu and the city is Beszel. The other city is Ul Qoma. The city & the city somehow occupy the same geographical space, in what the author calls a "crosshatching" where the residents of each city have their own language, food, culture, dress but have to consciously avoid acknowledging the existence of the other twin city, or be accused of "Breach."

Breach are the mysterious enforcers of the separation between the two cities. Both sides fear breach, and as the story unfolds breach takes on larger-than-life status.

Miéville does an interesting job of subverting and supporting the murder mystery/detective thriller format.

Overall, I was somewhat disappointed by The City & The City. I'm not sure if it is because I had such high expectations from Miéville due to my love of his previous fantasy novels The Scar and Perdido Street Station. One big difference between those works and this latest work is the length. The City & The City is barely half the length of either of those works, and is nowhere as multi-threaded and multi-faceted as those works. This may be due to the form, itself, which of course has an overarching plot imperative: Will the detective solve the mystery and catch who committed the murder?

I think what happens in The City & The City is that the plot is so dominated by this one theme that even the bizarre setting of the two cities is not enough to maintain the level of fascination that Miéville is usually able to sustain when he is creating a work free of the constraints of a specific format like that imposed by the detective procedural.

If you have already read the other Miéville books, I would recommend starting with those and skipping the trip to The City & The City.

Author: China Miéville.
Title: The City & The City.
Length: 336 pages.
Publisher: Del Rey.
Date: May 26, 2009.

OVERALL GRADE: B+ (3.4/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B.
WRITING: B+.