![]() ![]() ![]() China Miéville, the only three-time winner of the Arthur C. Suffice to say that I urge you to read The City & The City, even if (maybe especially if) you have not been able to take to Miéville’s work before despite the prodding by friends or literary critics. At the same time it’s a police procedural, a hard-boiled thriller and a fantasy novel, with links and allusions to science fiction (without every really becoming a SF novel), and it uses the advantages of each of these elements to their fullest, to create an insightful work of art that is too complicated, ultimately, to be reducible to a message or a simple resolution the latter being its main flaw, by the way, but we’ll return to this. Like much of Miéville’s work, it displays a firm commitment to genre, but it’s hazy about the kind of genre that is foregrounded here. We all know Jarrell’s adage that a novel “is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it” true to form, there are problems with Miéville’s book, as well, but the overwhelming success of the books as whole, the staggering originality of its ideas and the success in pulling the whole thing off, this lifts the novel far beyond many of its contemporaries. The City & The City, China Miéville’s seventh novel, is a well-nigh perfect work of literature. ![]() ![]() Miéville, China (2009), The City & The City, Macmillan ![]()
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