Books I've read lately: The City & the City by China Miéville

[sholio]

Anyone else read this?

The core idea in the novel is really one of the most fantastically original ideas in anything I've read lately. I don't want to say what it is, specifically, because the slow reveal is very well-done and gripping.

Too bad it started to lose me in the middle, then, with the complete lack of a main character!

Is it just me, or did the main character feel like a narrator-shaped hole in the canvas? To some extent there was a reason for that -- I could tell that Miéville was doing an intentional film-noir riff, a genre not really known for its deep and subtle characterization. And because of the way the book ended, Borlú had to be a guy who wasn't very tightly bound to anyone in his life; someone with close ties of friendship and family, someone who wasn't already drifting through life to some extent, would have had a much more difficult adjustment to life in Breach.

But I was still disappointed at the flatness of the narrator's characterization, especially compared to how rich and lush the world-building was, with a wonderful wealth of detail in the two overlapping cities and cultures. I was really fascinated with the first third or so of the book, and then degenerated into apathy in the middle because I just didn't care; I wanted to find out what was going on with Breach, but I couldn't really connect to any of the characters, with the possible exception of Corwi. Actually, from near the beginning until right up until the end I was halfway convinced that the author was planning to pull an unreliable-narrator twist, with Borlú being either the murderer or an agent of Orciny -- because we got so little of his opinions, feelings or details of his life. At the end, when it turned out that he was just what he appeared to be, I was disappointed, because he'd never really come alive as a person for me, and there wasn't even some kind of big reveal as a payoff for it.

I was also a bit frustrated by not finding out much more about the origins of the twinned cities than we knew at the beginning. I wouldn't have wanted the veil pulled all the way off, but their dual existence is so weird, and the steampunk archaeology is so impossible in terms of our real world's technological development -- I really wanted some sort of explanation. This was especially a problem for me because I didn't really buy Breach as a functional society, especially with normal human technology and nothing extra-special to enable (or force) them to do what they did and behave as they did. I could almost believe that something as bizarrely dysfunctional as the Beszel/Ul Qoma duality could exist on its own (reading the book while traveling was really making me notice how we consciously "fail to see" the strangers around us in airports or on street corners!) but Breach's queerly inhuman humans were just too much to swallow without some sort of metaphysical explanation.

It's a lovely book, but I'm not really sure it held together for me on either the plot or the characterization level.

I do recommend the book for its lush world-building, but sometimes felt like Miéville was more interested in showing the reader this gorgeous world he'd dreamed up than in letting the story unfold. I had similar problems with Un Lun Dun, the other of his books that I've read. Un Lun Dun, at least, shifted into high gear about halfway through, and gripped me to the end. The City & The City picks up again once the climax begins to unfold, but it never quite was able to follow through on the promise of the first 1/3 or so of the book.

Comments

[rheanna27.livejournal.com]

I read Perdido Street Station by Mieville and found it slightly unsatisying in a similar way: the setting -- the physical descriptions of the city -- dominated the narrative, and the plot and the characters struggled to make themselves heard over it. I remember being particularly irritated when one of the two main female characters got taken prisoner and simply disappeared about 2/3 of the way through -- I got the impression Mieville pushed her to one side because he couldn't think of anything for her to do. I find his writing a bit frustrating: the worldbuilding fascinates me, but a lot of the time he focuses on that at the expense of the rest of the story. That said, even with those flaws, his writing is still original and inventive enough to make me want to at least try out his other books. (Although I haven't yet.)

[sholio]

Yeah, right now I'm really torn on whether I want to read another of his books, especially hearing that about Perdido Street Station (which was the next one of his that I was thinking about reading). I really adore his world-building and his ear for language, but his lack of characterization really frustrates me and since I think the books I've read are among his latest, it looks like he's not getting better at it, either. City & the City was much the same way as what you describe, with potentially interesting characters wandering onto the page and then wandering off again with nothing to do.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

I tried reading his book The Scar, but was unable to get very far. The world building was awesome but sooooo much. I felt like it was burying the characters, that less time was being spent on them and more on creating the world for the reader. Although, for me, I was more concerned with the direction the story was going, and whether it would squick. So I slowed down, then had to return the book to the library before I could finish :P Needless to say, it didn't hold my interest.

[sholio]

Definitely starting to sound like it's a recurring issue with the author's style, not just something to do with the couple of his books that I've read. It's too bad, because he really does have beautiful, lush worldbuilding. But I want to read a story, not a travel guide to a fictional world!

[sheron]

>Too bad it started to lose me in the middle, then, with the complete lack of a main character!

You know that sort of thing tends to put me off in fic as well..sometimes it feels like the time-slices the characters get are so short and there are so many of them, I just dtop caring. In a fic I will usually still slog through it just ctrl+F-ing through to the characters I do care about. In a book, I'll give up.

[sholio]

Well, in this case, there *was* a single main character (the whole book was told in first person). It's just that we never learned anything about him -- who he was, what he thought about what was happening, his tastes and opinions and history and personal life. All he did was relate the events of the story. I never connected to him as an individual.

I've also had problems with books that had large casts and rapid shifts between them -- Terry Pratchett is actually the only author I can think of off the top of my head who does this well. But Mieville just doesn't really give you a character at all -- his protagonist was just a window onto his world.