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htanh

Where I got the book: my local library. 50 pages into this book, I would have given it five stars. The concept's wonderful: two cities occupying the same space and time, their citizens trained from childhood to simply unsee the other city. What a great metaphor for our own cities where we walk with mental blinkers on so that we don't see the homeless or the people of that other ethnic group. One of the biggest problems for the physically or developmentally disabled in our world of equality is that people ignore them, talking to their "normal" companions as if they're not capable of giving an answer. Miéville's seen this, being the socially concerned writer that he evidently is, and does a good job of hitting us in the face with the message. So much for the concept. The writing's clear and sharp, and carries Miéville's ideas very well. All good. But by the end of the novel, the shininess had simply rubbed off for me. For one thing, the story is at heart a basic suspense/thriller with murders, cops and bad guys with guns OR ARE THEY THE BAD GUYS? It builds to a climax that really never takes off for me, possibly because the main character is experiencing it secondhand. As a story, it doesn't soar. And the characters are little more than cardboard cutouts. Even the main character, Tyador Borlú, is so shadowy as to practically disappear into the background; at what for me was the worst part of the novel where it should have been the best--the aforementioned climax--he actually does disappear and a sort of omniscient narrator voice seems to take him over. I struggled to connect with a single one of the characters and came up with nothing. What I'm seeing here is a whole lot of cleverness, and I'm a fan of the cleverness but 'tis no story, English. This novel bears a closer resemblance to a morality tale where each character represents a facet of the point the author's trying to get across rather than a living, breathing human with a heart and soul. So four points for the cleverness and the good writing, but it'll take more than this to win me over. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed.

2023-03-05 17:45