I've had mixed experiences with China Miéville. I read Perdido Street Station shortly after it came out ('before he was famous', to employ a tired supposed-Hipster cliché) and enjoyed it immensely up until its famously unsatisfying conclusion. I enjoyed The Scar a lot less, probably because I read it straight after Perdido Street Station and was feeling slightly burnt out on encountering a dozen outlandishly fascinating concepts every chapter. Un Lun Dun, on the other hand, read so much like an adult author talking down to a young audience that I dropped it after thirty pages.

So you can imagine why I was a bit nervous going in to The City & The City. I had decided that this was my final chance to 'get' Miéville, a last-ditch effort at trying to see what everybody else apparently sees in him. I'm happy to report that it was a resounding success.

The City & The City is as finely-honed and meticulous in its worldbuilding as something like Perdido Street Station is vast and sprawling. It takes a handful of utterly brilliant concepts, themes and insights about urban life and proceeds to turn them into a genuinely unique work of literature. What Miéville does here is audacious, but he manages to pull it off so well that you'll likely never question its plausibility. (Nor should you, since doing so would be missing the point.)

I don't want to go into too much detail about the premise, because you really should experience it for yourself. In brief, The City & The City is (unsurprisingly) about two cities - Besźel, where main character and narrator Tyador Borlú works as a detective for the Extreme Crime Squad, and Ul Qoma, its uneasy neighbor and more prosperous rival. Both cities occupy the same physical location - more or less. The boundary between them is sometimes physical (in that there are streets which are entirely Besź or entirely Ul Qoman) but more often mental, with citizens of both countries rigorously trained to 'unsee' anything which is not in the same city as themselves.

If that sounds confusing...well, it is, which is why you should really just go and read the novel if you're curious. Miéville takes enormous care to make the worldbuilding here work, an impressive feat in itself, and within fifty pages or so you'll find yourself completely at ease with the invented lingo of the dual city.

The plot kicks off with an old-fashioned murder mystery, after a woman's body is found dumped in Besźel despite the fact that she lived in Ul Qoma. It maintains suitable tension throughout, aided by a respectable number of twists and complications, but the real point is to further explore the concept of the divided cities. Characterization takes a complete back seat here (Borlú isn't quite as much of a cipher as many of the side characters, which is about all I can tell you regarding him), but this is one case where you're not likely to care. The city (cities?) is/are the real main character, to employ another cliché.

If you're sick of predictable speculative fiction, you really owe it to yourself to check this out. It's definitely the best of Miéville's work that I've tried, along with being the best book I've read full-stop all year.