China Mieville - The City & The City

Mieville has always had a thing for patchwork cities. I first encountered the author years ago with the strange and wonderful Perdido Street Station, which I highly recommend. That novel was a masterpiece of imagination, set in a politically fractured steampunk metropolis. Its two sequels were entertaining but lackluster, and Mievelle fell off of my radar.

The City & The City, which shared the 2010 Hugo with Bacigalupi's vastly inferior The Windup Girl, is a detective novel set in the absurd divided city of Beszel and Ul Qoma, located somewhere in a post-Soviet Eastern Europe. I don't want to say too much about the nature of the relationship between the two cities, as the gradual unfolding of this relationship in the early part of the novel produces a somewhat maddening sense of disorientation that I found to be fairly masterful on the part of Mieville. For this same reason, I would recommend that one avoid reading too much about the book before diving into it.

The setting itself is something of a literary-theoretical thought experiment taken to an absurd extreme; this is self-conscious, as Foucault and Baudrillard are referenced by a character in the text (although I think the conceit is more due to Deleuze). Which is to say: this book is ambitious, in a way that (especially with the noir trappings) reminds me of nothing more than Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, to which this book is clearly indebted. And Mieville, somehow, pulls it off, producing a novel that's both a technical masterpiece and lot of fun.

edit: As a sidenote, you can understand the thematic structure of this novel in terms of Greimas' semiotic square, which is a bit like a two-dimensional dialectic and a really powerful analytic tool in general.