Breach

My review of The City & The City by China Mieville is up now at SF Site:

This is simply Miéville’s finest work to date. Never before has he demonstrated such sustained control over both message and medium. It is also — and, given the venue this review appears in, I feel this needs stating — his least fantastic. You could read The City & The City as being entirely mimetic, excepting the Ruritanian presence of the cities themselves. Yet at the same time it presents a world which is odder, more unsettling than all the splendid monsters of Bas-Lag. While telling a noir story, he has stripped away the pulp elements that were joyously present but also de-stabilising in his earlier work and replaced them with a deeper strangeness.

I strongly recommend this two part discussion of the novel between Niall Harrison and Dan Hartland (and others in the comments, most notably Adam Roberts).