The City and the City book discussion. [Thpoilerths]

Ghostwolf67

Well-Known Member
Felt like talking about the book before my long term memory discards all the relevant information about it. Has a habit of doing that.

First thing that comes to mind for me was the real need for perseverance with this book. To push past the (almost cliche) crime scene intro and the dropped hints about how the city works without clear explaination took me a lot of head scratching. It makes perfect sense later on reflection but going in blind I have to say I was confused on more than one occassion.

Once the meat of how the cities work materialised I found myself pretty captivated. Suffice to say the setting was the high point of the book for me. It conjured images of if the Gaza strip was spliced with Israel, or Irish Republic spliced with Northern. Both sides having friction, different cultures and customs, passport bans etc. It really made the book sing.

It makes me wonder if 'unseeing' was almost Mievilles sly comment on the mid east crisis, eg just ignore each other; pretend they arent there but thats just my opinion.

I did feel the need for more explaination of Breach or the cities inner working (or how the hell this happened in the first place). Mieville went with showing us breach which was fine by me but all he really did was show us behind the stage curtain, we didnt get the full tour.

Plot wise it seemed like your bog standard MM. We were led to believe for a long time that more was going on concerning conspiracy theories and then at the end abruptly convinced otherwise. That I did like from a standpoint of the plot. A sort of anti-twist.

Any one elses thoughts?
 
Finally have some time and managed to dig up this post, so here goes in spoiler tags of course

I agree with most things said by Ghostwolf, I kinda liked the open-ended lack of description of the middle city though as it's an interesting point for debate. Opinion here though makes me think that it's not so much a comparison of a real world situation (although a lot of them probably influenced the book), I got a hint of Mieville warning of the dangers of systematically ignoring something as it can lead to the "middle city" becoming altogether too strong, although the lack of a detailed explanation of the origins of the middle city or the split and so on means that my point of view on that lacks any backing ;)
 
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