I like China Mieville's work a lot, not least because he operates in the fantasy genre, without writing about elves and unicorns.  YOU know what I mean.  Fantasy has the potential to be so much more, and Mieville takes it there.

Mieville has announced that he wants to write one novel for each kind of genre, and this is his take on the mystery genre.  And it is, as you might expect from a China Mieville novel, mind-bendingly bizarre. 

All without (for the most part) leaving the reality that we live in here on Earth in the every day life, with the Googles and the cell phones and the murder mysteries.

Yes, The City and the City manages to be preposterously bizarre without once resorting to strange creatures, sea monsters, walking cactus people, nightmares that spread like a communicable disease, or disfiguring surgical procedures.

This is the tale of one city which is divided in half, like East and West Germany.  Except that there is no wall.  In fact, the line between the two cities gerrymanders around to a surprising extent.  There are many areas (called "crosshatched") where the two cities overlap.  But heaven help you if you notice the other city; this is called Breach, and there's an entire shadowy governmental agency dedicated to spotting and enforcing it.  Many victims/perpetrators of Breach are never seen again.

This dreamlike theme, of seeing without seeing, is the book's only real fantasy element.  (Aside from a collection of devices which are little more than props, and appear only briefly towards the end of the book.)  But it's a real doozy.  There is literally no other book like it, and it's well worth reading if only for that reason.

I regret to inform you that the book opens with the discovery of a naked dead lady.  It is sadly true that in this day and age, fiction runs on the backs of naked dead ladies.  I wanted to hope that by hinging his novel on a naked dead lady, Mieville was planning to make a grand dramatic point about this misogyny in Western fiction.  But no; it's just another naked dead lady, like all the millions of fictional naked dead ladies that have gone before her.  I had thought better of Mieville, honestly, and I'm sure he didn't do it on purpose or anything.  But still.

In addition to being about Yet Another Naked Dead Lady, I'm pretty sure The City and the City fails the Bechdel test.  In fact there are very few female characters; in defiance with actual statistics, only about 10% of the people in the book are female. It's a sausage fest in there, is what I'm saying, and I often found myself missing Inspector Borlu's female partner after he leaves Beszel.

A note on the audiobook version: the reader has a wonderful trick with accents, and pronounces all of Mieville's wacky proper nouns with a zest I could never hope to imitate.  Clocking in at just over eight hours, this was a really great listen.