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The City & The City by China Miéville

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
What a beautiful book! Shame it has no soul.

Half fantasy, half detective. This is a book about two cities that exist in the same place, and not in some half-assed multi-dimensional way. These are two cities, two cultures, two languages, two histories, two architectures and popular trends and traffic laws smooshed together in one piece of land. If you live in one city, you must “unsee” the other, even as you step over its blown garbage. And if you don’t, well then, Breach will come for you and you will disappear.

The whole thing is brilliant. The details about how tourism works, about getting from one city to another, the vocabulary (unvisible, grosstopic), the mass psychology of it. There was something so granular and textured – so real, is the word I’m pussy-footing around. And one of the most successful things about it is how the predicate of the two cities metaphor never really solidifies; it is the pedestrian and the fantastic, the true and the false, the modern and the archaic, but none of these things with any insistence, because that’s not the point.

It’s just a shame that such a wonderful mechanism has nothing to operate on. Really, this book is all world building. There’s a murder mystery, sure, whatever, but it’s completely beside the point. It took me 80% of this book to consistently remember our narrator’s name, one of those

But man. You do not see world building like that every day.

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