'The City & The City' by China Miéville
BOOK REVIEW
Call it a love letter to the diversity, polyglot sprawl, complexities, contradictions, pitfalls, humanity and streetlife of the metropolis.
If Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler's love child were raised by Franz Kafka, the writing that emerged might resemble China Miéville's new novel, "The City & the City."
Miéville is one of our most talented fabulists, and his work roams boldly across genre, encompassing dark fantasy, science fiction, pulp, horror, Steampunk, Slipstream, Orwellian dystopia and Dickensian social commentary. But Miéville's astonishingly imagined worlds are uniquely his own, and his ability to create intricate, compelling fiction on a grand scale has drawn raves and awards.
Miéville's 2007 foray into young adult fantasy, "Un Lun Dun," was a New York Times bestseller. But he remains best known for a baroque, dense and lyrical trilogy -- "Perdido Street Station," "The Scar" and "Iron Council" -- set in the world of Bas-Lag and New Crobuzon (a sort of alternate London).
In many ways, "The City & the City" is a stark departure.
Where earlier books were drunk on language, detail, color and character, this novel is gray, chilly and stripped down. Where past books topped 600 pages but left readers hungry for more, this one's barely 300 and seems about right. And where earlier worlds teemed with khepri, garuda, haemophages, vodyanoi, anophelii, slake-moths and cactacae as well as humans, "The City" seems only a cat's whisker away from our own.
Readers who fall in love with a fictional world often want the author to keep writing the same book -- with slightly new plots and characters. Publishers may push for that too because there's a built-in market.
In "The City," Miéville has done something bolder and braver.
He's written a detective novel.
You might wonder what new twist Miéville could possibly bring to a genre that already has hundreds of variations, from Agatha Christie "cozies" to James M. Cain's noir. Sleuths solving mysteries today include vampires, dogs, dinosaurs, ghosts, ancient Romans, medieval knights, middle-aged Botswanan women and septuagenarian Laotian coroners, in addition to the usual suspects.
A fresh spin
But Miéville has found untrammeled turf.
He's done so not by reimagining the classic detective character but by creating a surreal environment in which his sleuth must operate to solve the murder of a young woman who is found dumped near a bleak housing project on the first page.
