Certain writers absolutely defy categorisation and China Miéville is most definitely of that rarefied company. His prose is exhilarating, poetic, coruscating...... more
Certain writers absolutely defy categorisation and China Miéville is most definitely of that rarefied company. His prose is exhilarating, poetic, coruscating with ideas and atmosphere and it has enhanced a body of work that has almost no parallels in modern writing. Heretofore, if Miéville has brushed shoulders with any identifiable genres, they are those of fantasy and science fiction which makes his remarkable new book, The
City and The City, such a surprise. The authors publishers compare this novel to Philip K Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984 which at least gives a series of corollaries for this book, however tentative. There are elements here of the crime thriller, but very much refracted through Miévilles highly individual imagination.
The body of a murdered woman is discovered in the remarkable, crumbling European
city of Besel. Such a crime is par for the course for Inspector Tyador Borlú, who is the premier talent of the Extreme Crime Squad until his investigations uncover evidence that bizarre and terrifying forces are at work and soon both he and those around him will be in considerable peril. He must undertake an odyssey, a journey across borders both physical and psychical, to the
city which is both a complement and rival to his own, that of Ul Qoma.Like all of China Miévilles work, The
City and The City will not be to everyones taste the very individuality of the prose and
the surrealistic inventiveness will not attract those preferring more prosaic fare. But for readers who hanker after untrammelled imagination and look for literary fare unlike anything they have read before (even, it has to be said, by Miéville himself), then this is a journey to be undertaken. But with caution, perhaps --Barry Forshaw
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