Community Reviews
One of the biggest wastes of a premise. It has a really interesting idea at its core - a literalization of the East West split a la Berlin in the Cold War. It has a great set up to its mystery and gestures towards Kafka in the unaccountable nature of its apparent villains, but the pay off is just mundane and frankly dumb.
More importantly, the reading experience was severely mangled by the combination of an affected Chandler/noir detective speak with bespoke lore terminology from the world of the book. This results in lots of confused grammar - sentence fragments, missing verbs, missing subjects, etc, that would normally be fine except that your ability to easily scan the sentence is hindered by references to the obscure terminology, invented slang, and in world native knowledge that is nonetheless foreign to the reader. I get the impression that the editor gave far too much deference to Mieville and not enough consideration to the reader. By the end, I was writing margin comments about grammar and confusing or awkward syntax rather than deep connections or themes (due just as much to the fact that there were no deep connections or themes). I am guessing that Mieville is too enamored by the idea of being weird and stylish and liked his premise and his genre imitation ideas too much and just slapped on a simplistic genre ending. It made for a very big let down, made worse by the frustration of having to re-scan sentences for basic clarity.
More importantly, the reading experience was severely mangled by the combination of an affected Chandler/noir detective speak with bespoke lore terminology from the world of the book. This results in lots of confused grammar - sentence fragments, missing verbs, missing subjects, etc, that would normally be fine except that your ability to easily scan the sentence is hindered by references to the obscure terminology, invented slang, and in world native knowledge that is nonetheless foreign to the reader. I get the impression that the editor gave far too much deference to Mieville and not enough consideration to the reader. By the end, I was writing margin comments about grammar and confusing or awkward syntax rather than deep connections or themes (due just as much to the fact that there were no deep connections or themes). I am guessing that Mieville is too enamored by the idea of being weird and stylish and liked his premise and his genre imitation ideas too much and just slapped on a simplistic genre ending. It made for a very big let down, made worse by the frustration of having to re-scan sentences for basic clarity.
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