The City & the City by China MiévilleMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
The City in the City is a hard-boiled murder mystery hung on a speculative scaffolding. Beszel and Ul Qoma are two separate Eastern European cities sharing the same physical space. Being in one means "unseeing" the other and "breaching" from one into the other is unthinkable. What starts with a body in Beszel pointing to crimes in Ul Qoma quickly spins into a web of murder, academics, nationalism and Post-Soviet politics, all electrified by Miéville's allegorical current of two cities, two cultures, sharing one space. Those expecting flights into the speculative and metaphysical or concrete descriptions of Miéville's allegory may be turned off by what is essentially a by-the-numbers police procedural, but The City and the City is both a superb work of weird fiction and a fast-paced detective novel.
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