angie04210bd60

Not my favorite Miéville by any means. It's a murder mystery and a detective story set in a distinctly odd set of places. The story and the primary character are engaging enough, but I was hoping for more weirdness to bubble up throughout. Instead the reader is immersed in the nuts and bolts of how one uses "unseeing" to navigate through Besźel or Ul Quoma, two very different cities that share the same space. Perhaps it's my age showing, but I imagine these two cities as a topological transformation of East and West Berlin before the Wall went down. Instead of two areas separated by a wall, the two are physically merged and psychically (not in a paranormal or supernatural sense) separate. Usually Miéville sprinkles his books liberally with fascinating concepts, often tossed off with short mentions or brief descriptions, that let us glimpse a world much stranger than our own. In this book, the strangeness that I look for is fixed tightly to the one conceit.

2022-11-14 18:06