Having read China Miéville's genre-bending sophomore effort,
Perdido Street Station, and his possibly even more engaging follow-up,
The Scar, I was excited to see a new novel out from him.
Miéville departs from his established style in
The City and The City to try his hand at creating a murder mystery set in an existentially imagined land--and the setting here is truly the burnished star of this tale.
Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad is tasked to find the murderer of a young woman whose body is discovered in a park. As the plot unfolds we begin to understand that Borlu's homeland, Beszel, is half of an unnatural duality of cities. Both Beszel and its sister city Ul Qoma share the same physicality--they overlap one another--and by mutual agreement their citizens "unsee" each other and the other city itself. Each city has its own flavor and, relying on one of his strengths, Miéville does a wonderful job of world building here.
Without getting into more plot detail, suffice it to say that the nebulous Breach entity is the wild card in the tale and one that keeps the reader guessing throughout.
On a deeper level the novel explores social mores and even hints at the increasing self-absorption and personal isolation of the modern world.
Miéville largely succeeds in amalgamating various speculative fiction elements here and paying homage to writers like Chandler, Kafka and P.K. Dick (as he notes). The plot moves steadily, if a bit ploddingly at times, toward a climactic resolution. Although the characters are simply drawn and Miéville's choice to use as a first person narrator the wooden Inspector Borlu is uninspired, it does feel consistent with the type of story he is modeling. My one nit with the dialogue concerns the frequent truncation of lines where the reader is forced to guess the end of the sentence.
As with any novel, the ending is the most critical (and difficult) and left me with a sense of closure to the main thrust of the story and yet also a sense of unease that there were too many critical elements, particularly regarding Breach, that weren't satisfactorily explained. It left me a bit frustrated, but ultimately just made me keep thinking about the novel after I had finished it.
Although I didn't enjoy this as well as the other two novels I've read by Miéville, it was still an interesting and well executed story. Again, the well conceived setting is at the focus and I wouldn't be surprised to see him return to it in the future.
