association-list

It seems like I’ve read a couple of books between Lamen­ta­tion in late March and this one in late June, but I hon­estly couldn’t tell you what they are. I’ll update later out of order if I remember.

I don’t want to tell anyone not to read this book, because I think that it’s worthy, that it is a novel writ­ten with seri­ous intent by an able writer, that it tries to do some­thing that stretches both the genre and the skills of the author. Unfor­tu­nately I don’t think that it worked. It’s Miéville’s best-​​written book, but in a way that evens out the excesses of prior works. As such, you avoid the awk­ward­nesses of prior works, but also you lose out on the sheer impact of inven­tion and strange­ness that awk­ward­ness occa­sion­ally lent to his ear­lier works. The biggest prob­lem, I sup­pose, is that the cen­tral con­ceit ulti­mately falls down in the end. No reason is given and no mech­a­nism for the power of Breach is ever explained. While I am usu­ally all for this sort of thing and think that one of the main fail­ings of fan­tasy as a genre is that it over-​​explains and over-​​systematizes, we have a strange prob­lem here. Breach is too much shown to be real to be a metaphor for the mech­a­nisms of urban sep­a­ra­tion given shad­owy flesh, and too pow­er­ful to simply be taken at fan­tas­ti­cal face value. There are a few hints here and there that there is some­thing else going on there, but then almost end up look­ing like con­ti­nu­ity mis­takes, arti­facts of a draft where Breach was a fan­tas­ti­cal mech­a­nism acci­den­tally left in during the trans­for­ma­tion to a draft where Breach is a eidolon of sep­a­ra­tion. This ambi­gu­ity of strat­egy makes it feel like Breach, which ulti­mately is the spine of the sep­a­ra­tion of the City and the City, which is in turn the heart of the book, feel unfinished.

Again, I urge you to read it. It has many lovely moments and is a good, solid read. Even with the prob­lem­atic ending, it’s an attempt to stretch the genre fur­ther, and we should laud its ambi­tion rather than scorn its failures.