The City & The City
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Author: China Mieville
- Publisher: Del Rey
- Release Date: May 2009
- ISBN-10: 0345497511
- ISBN-13: 9780345497512
- List Price: $26.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryAmazon |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Noir Thriller With Fantasy Twist
Rating:
China Mieville is a master of urban fantasy. Each of his books features an intricately designed setting and well-plotted story. The City & The City continues this trend. Without giving too much away, the novels is about a murder investigation in the city of Beszel, a fictional city in modern day Europe. The story is told through the viewpoint of Inspector Borlu who is the lead detective of the investigation. Through him we see the city of Beszel and its interactions with its more modern neighbor, Ul Quoma.
The City & The City will keep you enthralled with its setting and plot. One could argue that the cities of Beszel and Ul Quoma are the main characters of the story. The plot is also interesting and moves along at a brisk pace. It is clear Mieville was inspired to write a noir thriller in homage to the classics in the genre and he has succeeded in doing so. The only negative was that I found the character to be somewhat flat and uninteresting, but the setting and plot more than made up for that.
Fans of fantasy, crime thrillers, mysteries, and noir should all find this book a great read. it is truly a cross-genre effort.
Gateway Drug for Mieville Readers
Rating:
After reading _Perdido Street Station_ and _The Scar_, I have found _The City and the City_ to be much more accessible. That is not a criticism, however. Mieville has created a fantastic world that exists within our regular world of cellphones, Windows PCs, and pop culture. The seeing and unseeing that the residents of both cities must do should keep grad students in literature busy for years to come. Again, that is not a criticism. The images and ideas of the novel linger in your mind even when the book is put away. If you like the novels set in Bas-Lag, you will also like this book. If you have not read Mieville before, this is a great starting point.
Not your statdard Detective novel... but fun
Rating:
Mieville is a very creative individual and his stories, although entertaining are always a little "out there". This is a great murder / conspiracy story with an interesting and believable main character. It has elements of a good Raymond Chandler novel where the reader has to follow the relationships of each character to the plot while at the same time requiring a suspension of reality in order to understand the relationship between the two cities the novel is named after. I dislike reviews that spoil the plot so I will end by saying that The City and the City isn't quite as wild as Perdido Street Station but it sure was a fun read.
it all depends on what you're looking for
Rating:
I think your response to this book will depend on what you expect. I'd never read Mieville before and I'm not a science fiction/fantasy reader; I heard about this on NPR, as part of a review of unusual and good detective novels. I'm a big mystery reader and picked it up, and I found it really haunting and a lovely take on the detective genre. Unlike some reviewers, I didn't find the ending unsatisfactory; Mieville was, I thought, true to his setting and characters.
China Mieville in an homage to Philip K. Dick
Rating:
The premise of The City & The City is one Philip K. Dick would have been proud to conceive. The idea that two cities can occupy the same physical space while maintaining a nearly absolute separateness caused by a politically mandated state-of-mind is worthy of the great science fiction master. Most of Dick's finest fiction featured an examination of the nature of reality by highlighting the perceptions of a disordered mind. Like a medical pathologist studying unhealthy tissue in order to determine the entire body's condition, Dick was able to abstract the universal from a single dysfunctional character: as in his 1966 novelette We Can Remember It for You wholesale, the basis for the film Total Recall. Aldous Huxley in his book The Doors of Perception undoubtedly provided the germs for ideas that Dick used extensively to such great effect.
After reading his delightful young adult novel Un Lun Dun I approached this book with anticipation. Not having read his earlier, more Baroque fiction I found it easy to adapt to this more focused work. Mieville develops his conceit with great skill. The major character Inspector Tyador Borlu is given a fully developed inner life that enables the reader to put flesh on the two cities as we view them through his eyes. The breadth of Borlu's interior emotional life enables Mieville to breathe life into both city's inhabitants, which is crucial because the author is less successful in presenting the other characters as three-dimensional beings. We see everything through Borlu's eyes and this novel lives or dies over whether Borlu is interesting enough and perceptive enough to make the reader care about what is occuring around him. I think that Mieville manages to do this with some skill but you may be disappointed in the two-dimensional nature of many characters. They often appear to be nothing more than foils for Borlu and the plot's progression.
The novel comes to a jarring and abrupt end that has annoyed some readers. I think the ending is ambiguous and certainly open to interpretation. Has everything been the delusions of a single disordered mind? The interaction of several character's minds? Or has the reader imposed his/her own expectations and illusions onto the novel? The ending's truncated nature certainly facilitates those questions. This is just one of many interesting aspects of a skillfully drawn disordered universe: one in which Philip K. Dick might have felt at home.
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