The City & The City

The City & The City by China Miéville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Tyador Borlu of Beszel's Extreme Crime Squad is assigned to the murder case of an unknown woman. To find her killer, Borlu must go to the neighboring city of Ul Qoma and team with Qussim Dhatt of the Murder Squad. Can the two detectives from different cultures figure out who the victim is and why she was killed?



Wow. The core premise of The City & The City requires some explaining but I think I'm up to the task. Remember those perceptual illusions you were so enamored with when you were a kid? Like the old woman/young girl:





Okay. Instead of images of an old woman and a young girl, picture instead two cities that overlap. People from one city are trained from birth to unsee/unsense people and buildings in the other city. Still with me? Now picture a murder mystery set in one of the intersections between the two cities. Yeah, it was one mindbender of a read.



While The City & The City is firmly in the new weird genre, it's also a gritty crime story, which makes it substantially more accessible than many of Mieville's works. Tyador Borlu and Qussim Dhatt are the bickering cops that secretly grow to respect one another as they unravel a mystery than snakes back and forth between the two neighboring cities. Kind of like Jim Belushi and Arnold in Red Heat, except good.



The thing that makes The City & The City work is that the cities are quite different from one another. While Ul Qoma and Beszel aren't as detailed as New Crobuzon, they are both distinct entities. While the idea of being in one city or the other is really odd, Mieville does a good job of explaining it and making it seem plausible. How often do you actually remember what homeless people look like, for example.



The concept of the Breach is also part of the glue that holds the story together. Part police force, part bogey man, the Breach enforce the unseeing/unsensing of the other city, keeping people from going back and forth between cities with impunity.



There's not a lot else I can say without ruining key plot points. If they were to make a movie of one of China Mieville's books, this would be the one. I kept seeing Ewan MacGregor and Jason Statham as the cops. It reminds me of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles at times, Neverwhere at others, and Jeff Vandermeer's Finch at still other times. I didn't like it quite as much as Finch but it was still spectacular. For fans of both detective fiction and the new weird, it's definitely a must-read. 4.5 out of 5.



View all my reviews

Kraken

Kraken by China Miéville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A preserved giant squid is stolen from London's Natural History museum and curator Billy Harrow is at the top of everyone's list for answers. But who stole the Kraken and why? Was it the Londonmancers? Or minions of the Tattoo? Or the Church of the God Kraken? Or someone else all together? That's what Billy Harrow and Dane Parnell, a renegade from the Church, aim to find out. But can they recover the Kraken before it's used to trigger Armageddon?



China Mieville appears to have the Midas touch at times. In Kraken, he takes the conspiracy thriller and infuses it with so much new weirdness that green goo is oozing from between the pages. Where do I start? Do I talk about the Londonmancers, shamanic magicians who dwell in and shape London's streets? Or Wati, the sentient statue-thing that's unionizing London's familiars? Or the gunfarmers? Or the chaos nazis? Mieville throws so much at you in this one that it's hard to pick out one outlandish concept as the favorite.



I see people comparing this to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere or American Gods, the works of Tim Powers, or even Mieville's own Un Lun Dun, but the book that it reminds me the most of is The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes. There are conspiracies galore, gods created by belief, and the psychotic duo of Goss and Subby, who remind me both of Croupe and Vandemaar of Neverwhere fame and of The Domino Men.



The characters are an interesting bunch. Billy Harrow's in the Arthur Dent mode of protagonists. Parnell drives the story forward, as do the impressive array of interesting Londoners. In fact, Billy's probably the least interesting character within the book. But really, when one of the characters is a talking tattoo, he's got competition.



Easter eggs about within Kraken's piscine pages. There are multiple Star Trek references, including a magic-powered phaser and a Tribble, a Lolcats reference, Dr. Who, Michael Moorcock, the list goes on and on. And Mieville both mentions the criminally unknown Hugh Cook (of the delightful The Walrus and the Warwolf) in the forward and includes one of his poems, The Kraken Wakes, within the pages.



Any complaints? Only that there was a little too much going on at times. Kraken was a good read but it was never a "drop everything and neglect your personal hygene" kind of gripping. I found myself procrastinating a few times rather than go back to it. Once the story passes the 33% mark, it really takes off.



If squid based conspiracies are your bag, this book is for you. Otherwise, this book should appeal to Mieville fans, conspiracy fans, and fans of Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Barnes. Now get reading before I send the gunfarmers after you!



View all my reviews

Finch

Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Detective John Finch gets assigned to an impossible murder case, one of the victims being a man thought dead for a hundred years. Finch's case takes him all over Ambergris and up against a crime lord, his Gray Cap superiors, The Partials, and makes him question everything he believes. Can Finch solve the case before he becomes another victim?



After City of Saints and Madmen, I was leaning toward passing on the rest of VanderMeer's work and dismissing him as a pretentious bastard. Shriek, the second book, changed my mind and brought me around. This one, damn! is about all I can say.



Finch is a new weird detective story set in Ambergris, VanderMeer's city of choice. After the events of Shriek, the fungal alien Gray Caps have risen up and taken over the city. Partials, humans entered into unholy pacts with the Gray Caps, serve as a spy ring, keeping the populace under control. Finch is a cop working under the Gray Caps. Paranoia and distrust permeates every page. Finch reminds me a lot of Dekkard from Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, cynical, bitter, and just doing his job.



While Finch is a good character, I think it's the supporting characters that carry the story. Wyte, Finch's fungus-infected partner, The Partial that keeps messing with him, Heretic, Finch's Gray Cap boss, Sintra, Rathven, the list just keeps going.



I'm trying not to give too much away but it's hard. There are so many things I want to mention, like the living fungal guns and the memory bulbs, mushrooms that grow on corpses that give the person who eats them a glimpse at the memories of the person they grow on. Finch's case is bizarre and manages to answer many of the questions posed by the previous two volumes. The paranoid feel reminds me of Blade Runner at times and the plot-oriented episodes of the X-Files in others. VanderMeer uses a noir style reminding me of Richard Stark at some points and James Ellroy in others. It's one hell of a ride.



VanderMeer hit the ball out of the park with this one. All of the plot threads and hints about the Gray Caps in the first two Ambergris books come to a head in this one, the best Ambergris book yet. If I read a better book than this one in 2010, I'll be surprised.



View all my reviews