Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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64 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredibly Realized Setting, April 27, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I have awarded five stars to lesser books in the past, but now the bar has been raised; I know what a five-star novel is really like after reading _The City & The City_.
It's a detective novel written in the first-person; the narrator is Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. The writing style is relatively spare, reminescent of Dashiell Hammett. The narrator constrains himself strictly to observable phenomena and tells us nothing of characters' inner thoughts or emotional states, which makes the action seem very immediate and the narration very stark. Police procedures are presented believably but without too much detail. The case itself is not terribly elaborate. It starts with a murder, but about two-thirds of the way through I felt that the murder was no longer the focus. Inspector Borlu's investigation leads to fringe political groups, an archaeological site, a foreign country, and to somewhere else entirely. The setting of the novel is what makes the story work. There wouldn't be a story if it wasn't set in Beszel and Ul Qoma. It's a totally original concept, like nothing I have ever read before.
Beszel is a gloomy, decaying city which seems to be located somewhere in Eastern Europe. Ul Qoma is a bright, bustling city that seems either Arabic or Turkish. The relationship between the two cities is the central theme of the book. I can't tell you much about it without spoiling the beautiful unfolding of the novel. Of course Inspector Borlu takes everything for granted because he lives there; it's all familiar to him .. so instead of explaining things as one would to a foreign visitor, he lets details emerge through descriptions of sights and events, and the reader slowly pieces together details of the setting. One's understanding of the situation gets deeper as the novel progresses, and even though it is completely absurd, I found myself easily suspending my disbelief and becoming totally absorbed in the story. This impossible setting is PERFECTLY executed so as to seem plausible. Beszel and Ul Qoma deserve to be included in the Atlas of Fictional Places, they are so well constructed. Even the languages (as reflected in names of people and places and a few idiomatic sayings) consistently support the mood and "flavor" of the two cities.
The two cities may be a clever metaphor for the Situation of Man, but the book's highbrow literary qualities will not get in the way of its pure entertainment value. The best fiction I have read so far this year.
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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A change of pace, but still peculiar, May 29, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Much ado has been made of the change in tone and character in this most recent book, and it's true that the language is a dramatic departure from his typical baroque style, but it still bears something in common with pretty much everything Mieville writes: it requires quite a lot from the reader.
There are books that you can read at a surface level, just taking in the words one at a time as they lay out character, setting and plot much like a computer loading an image. Mieville's books - and to a lesser extent his stories - tend to be more like jigsaw puzzles without the box. In his more fantastic work, it's less jarring than here because even at his most outre, he tends to tread familiar paths as far as story and plot, so you can keep up.
This, on the other hand, is a bit of noir fiction/magical realism, and it's a bit jarring to read about a hundred pages of the book before you're really given a handle as to exactly what's going on.
That aside, the overall plot of the book - not to mention the characters and, of course, the cities themselves - makes for a good read, but be prepared to devote a considerable amount of your brain's memory cache to this book until you're finished.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful vision, lacked execution, July 9, 2009
It pains me to have to give any book by Mieville only three stars, however The City and the City is not what I would have expected from him. The underlying idea-- of two inter-spliced cities coexisting in unacknowledged proximity, continually seeing and yet obliged to unsee each other daily on pain of invoking that most shadowy and intimidating of punitive powers, Breach-- is undeniably fascinating, as is the murder investigation that is conducted against this setting. The circumstances surrounding the discovery of Fulana Detail's (the generic name given to unidentified murder victims) dumped body lead to what quickly becomes a highly atypical investigation that spans both cities and leads to the uncovering of one conspiracy theory after another. Mieville's vision is, as always, extraordinary in both breadth and detail. His prose is quick to show that every aspect of the setting-- the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, the entire invented world that exists not just physically, but in complex laws and cultural nuances-- has been painstakingly thought out by the writer. The city is, as always, Mieville's strength.
That said, the plot is good; typically labyrinthine. The characters, passable. The dialogue perhaps a tad ambitious, not to mention peppered with extraneous profanity. His preponderance for sentence fragments was wearing at times. The execution was, in short, lacking. The vision was there, and as far as the novel was a police procedural, it succeeded, which I do believe was Mieville's goal. The obfuscation of certain logical steps was done to effect a certain exciting confusion in the reader. That aspect was beautifully and subtly done. But other aspects that would have contributed to better readability were lacking, and for that reason I am forced to give this latest of Mieville's books only 3 stars.
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