Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay

Mockingjay completes Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy and it is a spectacular ending indeed. I really enjoyed this series. It’s got everything that I love in stories: great, believable characters; terrific plot and pacing; ethical conflict; harrowing action sequences; examinations of human nature.

In Mockingjay, Katniss finds herself free of the Capital–but not free of government control. Most of her world believed that District 13 was destroyed some 75 years previously. But they just went underground, literally. The inhabitants rescued her at the explosive end of the last book, hoping to use her as a symbol for the rest of the rebels to rally around. At first, Katniss resists, not wanting to be the cause of more deaths. She manages to cut a deal with the rebel government to save the lives of other victors of the Hunger Games, including that of her erstwhile boyfriend, Peeta. In exchange for their lives, Katniss becomes the Mockingjay. She reluctantly agrees to be filmed to make propaganda. In the background, a real war is being fought. There is a strange disconnect between Katniss’s sort of dangerous war and that real war.

Descriptions of life in District 13 add to the feelings of menace this book evokes. Life under President Coin is highly regimented–to the extent that everyone receives a daily schedule they must follow. Food is rationed, providing just enough calories to keep people going. Jobs are assigned. Everyone is micromanaged. Katniss is the only person, outside of the president, who gets some freedom. I wondered–as I expect Collins wanted to me to–that life wouldn’t be much better under this regime than the last. If the rebels won and put Coin in control, it’s clear that the roles of the Capital and the Districts would be reversed and they’d all be fighting it out in another 75 years or so. The anger that some of the rebels express and their willingness to be as cruel as their enemies call to mind the aftermath of the French and Russian revolutions. I theorize that those reigns of terror were a very bloody kind of catharsis for years of abuse.

The war gets real for Katniss by the end. She gets to rise above her role as a figurehead. She is also witness to some heartbreaking acts of war that make it clear that, unless someone changes the path the country is on, the killing will not stop. The ending is amazing. I think my jaw dropped as I read it. I loved the epilogue that followed. I can’t say why for fear of ruining the entire trilogy, so I think I will stop summarizing here.

I think what I love most about these books is that Collins does not pull her punches. She makes these books very violent and dangerous, and you get a strong sense of the stakes people are playing for here. And being the cynic that I am (especially after I read the news), I can believe that governments can be this cruel and that revenge has a very, very long half-life.

Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

Catching Fire

It took me a long time to get around to reading Suzanne Collins’s Catching Fire, but I am really glad that I picked up the last book in the Hunger Games trilogy at the same time. I spent most of my weekend with Katniss Everdeen and the revolution that she accidentally started.

When we pick up the story again a few months after Katniss won the Hunger Games. Like a twisted version of Miss America, she and her co-winner have to make a publicity tour six months before the next Hunger Games. Though mentally scarred by the experience and sickened by the warped pleasure that Capital citizens take in the Hunger Games, Katniss is looking forward to being out of the spotlight. However, the President visits and makes it clear that she has to keep playing along with their games to keep her family and friends safe. At the same time, we get hints that unrest is spreading throughout the Districts. The lengths that the Capital will go to to keep order are horrifyingly cruel. And yet, I have no trouble believing that people would go so far. I watch the news and I know my history.

It becomes clear that Katniss’s attempts to make her small act of rebellion during the Hunger Games was really just an act of love are not fooling anyone that matters. The President arranges things so that Katniss has to compete in yet one more Hunger Games, one that promises to be even deadlier than the last one. By the end of the book, a full scale revolution has broken out. On the one hand, this is a great middle book. It has it’s own plot, with great pacing. But on the other, it’s a clear set up for the last book.

I love how tough and commonsense Katniss is. She’s far from perfect, but she is struggling to save lives and to do the right thing. These books got a lot of press and a lot of readers, but I wish that they got as much attention as the Twilight series. They deserve a wide audience. I’m really looking forward to what Collins comes up with next.

Flashback, by Dan Simmons

Flashback

Dan Simmons’ Flashback is a very angry book. I’m hard pressed to say whether it’s Simmons letting his anger at current events flood his book or if Simmons was experimenting. It was very hard not to try and psychoanalyze the writer as I read this book. Like China Miéville’s books, Flashback is packed with ideas. But unlike Miéille, it has a sympathetic and human character to anchor the chaos.

Nick Bottom is an unlike hero in a future America that, in my more pessimistic moods, seems all too likely to happen. The economy has collapsed and most people live hand to mouth in former malls and housing projects or are fighting for territory. Many people are hooked on flashback, a drug that lets them relive moments from their memory. Nick used to be a cop until his wife died and his drug abuse got out of control. We meet him several years after that, trying to convince a Japanese advisor to let him investigate the murder of the advisor’s son. Nick even tries to portray his addiction as an asset, since he can remember the case files while he’s under the influence. Simmons lets us sink into Nick’s world, picking up details about our possible future history while slowly building up the mystery plot.

There are two secondary plot threads that help us see just how dangerous the future America has become. In one of them, we meet Nick’s father-in-law, an aging academic who would like to write a Tolstoy-level epic about this new American society. Until the plot really gets moving, however, Leonard mostly seems bewildered. The other plot thread is narrated by Nick’s son, Val, a punk who is angry at the world but is reluctant to lash out against it.

Before long, it becomes clear to Nick that there is more going on to the mystery than he thought. To the reader, it becomes clear that the murder is not the center of this book. This is not a mystery; it’s a conspiracy. Nick travels back and forth from Denver to Boulder to Sante Fe (no longer a part of the United States) to Los Angeles and back. Leonard and Val flee Los Angeles as a war breaks out behind them. The pieces of the puzzle come together in the end, into an unexpected picture. Everything clicks into place in a deliciously satisfying way, in spite of the possibly ambiguous ending. Flashback has an ending that could be read as optimistic or pessimistic, depending on your mood when you read it. This is a tremendous book, and I’m still turning over it’s ideas almost a week after I finished it. This is one of the best dystopias I’ve read in a long time.

So why do I call this an angry book? Because it was all too easy for me to imagine a writer reading or watching the news and getting so angry at politicians and the media and terrorists and society that it had to come out somehow. The America that Simmons presents could not exist without our current society and government making some key mistakes. First, America is so broke that it hires out its army to fight for Japan in China. Second, September 11 is now celebrated as a holiday, rather than a day of mourning. Third, America has ceded its place as a world power and its population seems to have lost any will to regain that place. After all that, it’s easy to picture Simmons as an anti-Islamic conservative or libertarian.

And yet, this book has too much subtlety to dismiss it like that. This book is crammed with ideas, just waiting to spark discussion not only about its literary merits but also about the way our society might be headed. I finished this book right before the debt ceiling talks produced a plan, so it was very easy to think that Simmons’ predicted future was well on its way. This book is terrifying for that very reason.

This book deserves to be read widely, for its plot, its character, and especially for its ideas. I hope it wins a ton of awards so that more people will read it.

The Unincorporated Man, by Dani and Eytan Kollin

The Unincorporated Man

One of the things I love about science fiction is that the writers can take small things about our society, extrapolate from them, and come up with fantastically frightening stories. In Dani and Eytan Kollin’s The Unincorporated Man the idea of owning stock is transformed into a weird blend of capitalism, social welfare, and slavery.

A few chapters, hinting at how much time has passed and how much the world has changed, set the scene. The main action starts when a suspension sarcophagus is found and the man inside revived. For a while, Justin, the protagonist, is like a time traveler and has the new world explained to him. For the most part, he can swing with the nanotechnology, near instantaneous travel, and colonies on just about every planet in the solar system. But what Justin can’t accept is the new economy. Rather than owning stock in companies, people own stock in each other. Part of a person’s earnings go to the government and the other people who own stock in them. Throughout the book, Justin refuses to incorporate–in spite of the very interesting arguments to incorporate himself.

Aside from Justin’s anti-incorporation stance, there isn’t a major plot arc. Instead, the book reads as a series of episodes. There are trials, assassination attempts, wild Mardi Gras parties, and nanobot attacks. But just when you think that this is going to be the big show down, the Kollins wrap things up within a chapter or two. And then the last chapters are a clear set up for the next book in the series. If I had to chart it out, the plot of this book would look like an active heart monitor. After a while, I had to adjust and stop reading it like a 400+ page story and read like like a long series of connected episodes. It’s a minor adjustment, but it let me enjoy the book a lot more.

Whenever I get to talking about communism with people–which happens more than you might think–we always come back to the conclusion that communism failed because it never took human nature into account. Sure, people can be wonderful to each other, but we can also be utter bastards. Capitalism functions better, but there are still parts of society that suffer for various reasons. In the world of The Unincorporated Man, the worlds run on a modified form of capitalism where people own stock in each other. Curiously, it plays on the self-interestedness of people. In order to get profit from the people you own stock in, you’re more concerned with making sure they get enough to eat, medical care, education, and a good job. People are motivated to work by the hope that someday that can own a majority of their own shares. I can see how it would work, given my cynical view of people in general. But it’s a depressing concept to contemplate. Brilliant idea, but very depressing.

For the most part, I think, the Kollins live up to the originality and possibilities of their premise. Where they falter is in their pacing and characterization. The characters are hard to get to know. Once you get past the initial set up, the characters don’t change and we never really get past their surface motivations. For example, why is Hektor so hell-bent on getting Justin to incorporate? Why is Neela so willing to throw off her social conditioning and start a relationship with a resurrectee? The pacing is strange. It’s episodic. Parts are rushed, with tons exposition and information dumps about things that I would have preferred to see play out.

There is a sequel, The Unincorporated War. I wonder if the Kollins have improved their writing. The Unincorporated Man isn’t a bad book. It’s a very interesting read. It just has some hiccups in the writing style.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

I had no idea that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was such compulsive reading. I picked it up this morning and could hardly put it down. Every page is packed with things to think about. On the one hand, I wanted to race through the book to see what would happen next. And on the other hand, I wanted to slow down and really think about this new world that Huxley created. Near the end of the book, a character compares their society to an iceberg–most of it is below the waterline. This book is like that, too. There’s so much that has to be going on, but the plot skims along on the surface, tempting you to dig for the subtext. There are so many things to talk about, that I made a list of the most important ones before I started to write this, just to make sure that I didn’t leave anything out.

The book begins in a decanting and conditioning–for lack of a better word–factory. Huxley sticks you deep into the horrors right off the bat. At first, things don’t see all that horrible. But for me, well meaning science is one of the scariest things out there. In this world, the whole process of reproduction has been replaced. (The characters would say improved.) Children aren’t so much born anymore as hatched. As they gestate, chemicals and vaccines are introduced at certain points to stunk or foster growth, to inoculate, to develop tolerances to heat or toxins. The stunted kids are destined to do the dirty work as adults. A chosen few become leaders and thinkers. After they “born,” the children are whisked off to some truly terrifying, Skinneresque conditioning.

A long passage describes the conditioning process. As I read it, I though about how awful it would be to never have a genuine, original thought. In their sleep, recordings play. Voices spouts platitudes and catchy rhymes shape how the children think about their place in society, how to be consumers, how to fear solitude. In times of stress, these little homilies come back. One could argue that we are conditioned ourselves, by our parents and our childhood experiences. But we can change our perspectives and habits, with enough effort. Most of the characters in this book can’t do this. The only ones who can are either more intelligent than they were supposed to be, or they were never conditioned in the first place.

Returning to the iceberg metaphor for a moment, another thing that made a deep impression on me was that the experimentation that must have gone on to achieve all this was barely hinted at. But they never talk about the genetic experiments that must have happened. All through the book, the “civilized” characters are so damned proud of their science. Everything is orderly, sterile, with minimal waste. But I have to wonder how many embryos and children were sacrificed along the way to get a system that, for lack of a better word again, works. It’s a very disturbing thought, and it never occurs to any of the characters to think it. And how many people were driven insane, addicted, or were killed during the soma experiments? In order to perfect a drug that is not addictive, is euphoric, and has predictable behavior, how many human guinea pigs did they have to go through?

The big issue of this book, as I see it, is the nature of happiness. What makes people happy? What can make the largest number of people for the longest amount of time? In Brave New World, apparently its all a matter of changing the human. It’s clear that you can’t change the world. So they condition the lower castes (the ones who were poisoned as embryos) to be stupid, to fear learning and beauty, and to never want more than their next dose of soma. The people who struggle the hardest to stay happy are the ones who are granted their full intelligence. In a sense, this book clearly demonstrates that ignorance is bliss after all. But it makes me wonder what it really means to be happy. Does it mean being satisfied with what you have? Does it mean getting what you want? Is it, as Viktor Frankl supposes, different for everyone? I tend to agree with that idea. I think there are as many different ways to be happy as their are people.

Which is probably why we fight so much. We all want different things. Characters in Brave New World refer to devastating wars in the past and governments that collapsed. So to avoid the merest hint of society instability, they changed how people think and feel about happiness. Instead of seeking their own happiness, they settle for their lot in life. It’s a terribly depressing thought.

After the factory and some character introductions, two of the main characters, Bernard and Lenina, take a trip to a reservation in New Mexico. For no adequately explained reason, the world government left certain areas of the world alone. The people who live there are left to their own devices, to live and reproduce and worship as they will. On a more prosaic note, these “savages” provide a point of reference for the reader because they think more like we do. In a Dickens-level coincidence, one of these savages turns out to be the children of “civilized” people. Bernard and Lenina talk John back to England with him, in a repeat of Smith and Rolfe taking Pocahontas back to show off to important people back home. John, who partially learned to read from Shakespeare, provides a strong contrast to civilization.

At the end of the book, John has a long, losing argument with the controller for Western Europe about happiness. John feels so strongly about concepts like freedom and honor and romance that he is utterly incapable arguing their merits when it comes down to it. The controller is able to shut him down at every turn. But then, if you were called on to argue about why people should be allowed to love beauty for its own sake or to be allowed to be noble, would you be able to be coherent about it? Poor John. I agree with him, and I wish he could have made a better showing. Another way of looking at this is that human happiness is an insoluble problem. We can argue about it forever without changing anyone’s mind.

One last note before I wrap up. The civilized characters use the name Ford instead of God. I’m pretty sure they’re calling on Henry Ford, given the assembly lines and mass consumption. They never say for sure, but it’s an odd rock to build a civilization on. I wonder how much Huxley knew about the historical Ford’s ideology, specifically the antisemitism.

I’m really glad I read this book. I know that I’m going to have to read it again (probably more than once) to get everything out of this story. It’s disturbing and profound. I wished that it had gone on longer than it did, so that I could learn more about this deliciously weird world.

World Made by Hand, by James Howard Kunstler

World Made by Hand

One of the great things about fiction is that an author can explore how our future might turn out in a meaningful way. Putting well-realized characters into a possible future is will have more impact than speculative nonfiction. Readers can’t help but identify with the characters on the page (unless the character in question is Holden Caulfield). I know that I can’t help but wonder what I would do if I were in the same situation.

James Howard Kunstler, previous author of nonfiction about a post-scarcity world, tries his hand at fiction with World Made by Hand. We meet our protagonist, a former software company marketing executive turned carpenter, several years after the collapse of the world economy. Unlike other novels about post-scarcity I’ve read, Kunstler lets a good amount of time elapse between a shortage of oil and a full scale collapse. There’s an old saying the civilization is just a couple of good meals away from anarchy. I’ve always wondered how true that is. I supposed I have more faith in Americans than most readers are. In spite of everything, Americans can band together in large emergencies. We’ve done it before. Of course, my level of faith in Americans is inversely proportional to amount of reality television and pop culture I’ve been exposed to.

At any rate, Kunstler’s reimagined and fragmented America would take time to achieve. The economy collapsed without oil, and then the government (except for a rumored president in Minnesota) followed after major acts of terrorism. America reverts to small farming communities and banditry. It’s always interesting to me that in these situations, people seem to revert to the Middle Ages. Some lucky communities have steam power, but that’s about it. In World Made by Hand, one farming community goes so far as to reinstitute feudalism. This regression fascinates me, because it illustrates how far we’ve come with technology and how much we have to relearn in order to survive without it. As I read books like this, I start to think about what I might do, how I might grow my own food, how I might defend myself without society’s protection, how I might cope with the loss of the technology that props up how I live.

World Made by Hand meanders through several months in Robert’s life. He, and a few dozen other survivors, have set up shop in rural New York, well away from the turmoil of the cities. After a strongly religious group arrives and starts to settles, Robert finds that what he thought was the status quo was really just stagnation. A murder by a bunch of local rowdies ultimately leads to Robert taking over as mayor and forcing the rest of Union Grove to do more than just subsistence farming. They do so well that I worried for their safety, considering how violent their neighbors can be. I found it strange that Robert and his people seem to take no steps to create a militia, or any other steps to defend themselves. It was a curious gap in the logic of the book. If things are as bad as Kunstler would have us believe, Union Grove should have been terrified of the outside world.

In one of the more interesting episodes, Robert leads (accompanies might be more accurate) a group of the religious types to Albany on a rescue mission. We rapidly learn that few people have been as fortunate as the Union Grove community. Most of the people they encounter are starving, or close to it. And when they get to Albany, they find a nearly lawless town reminiscent of the Wild West. Extorting food and money from travelers keeps them afloat. Again, this made me curious about how Union Grove has managed to maintain a Mayberry-level of safety all these years.

World Made by Hand is an idea book. Its purpose is to make its readers think about what might happen when the oil runs out. But I appreciated its attempts at subtlety. Kunstler doesn’t hit his audience over the head with morals and warnings. He lets the story unfold without scolding about consumerism and anti-environmentalism. There are a few characters who are obviously meant to serve as lessons rather than just be characters, but even these are believable. As I read, I enjoyed the book more and more. Now that I’m done, I want to get my hands on the sequel.

Devil’s Alphabet, by Daryl Gregory

 

Devil's Alphabet

The Devil’s Alphabet, by Daryl Gregory, centers on the aftermath of a strange epidemic in a small Appalachian town. Ten years before the events of the book, a disease ripped through the town of Switchcreek. Those that survived had their DNA altered to the point where the scientists don’t even think they’re human anymore. Apart from some seriously bizarre explanation of where the disease came from (that, frankly, even I don’t give credence, too), there isn’t much talk in this book of the disease. Instead, this book is more about how the survivors have learned to live with their new bodies and how the world is still learning that lesson.

Ten years after the epidemic, Pax–a skip who wasn’t touched by the disease–returns home for the funeral of one of his childhood friends. Once he arrives back in Switchcreek, he gets tangled up in the local politics. It was hard to pick up on an overarching plot. I got the sense of Pax getting caught up in other people’s schemes; he reacted for just about the entire length of the book. He is a strangely passive protagonist. I was much more interested in the other characters: the corrupt but hospitable mayor, the gigantic and honest unofficial “chief,” Paxton’s loopy ex-preacher of a father. If Gregory had chosen one of them to be the main character, this book would have been a lot more interesting.

I read Gregory’s previous book, Pandemonium, and while this book shares the same originality, it doesn’t have the same kind of intensity. I kept waiting for this book to pick up, to get to the point, but it never got there.

Far North, by Marcel Theroux

Far North

I didn’t expect to enjoy Marcel Theroux’s Far North as much as I did. I ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting last night, finishing up a little after midnight. For an end of the world novel with little or no dialog, it was surprisingly engrossing. While the novel has some unmistakable similarities to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this book has something that McCarthy’s book was missing: hope. And that makes all the difference.

Also, characters with actual names helped.

Far North is the story of a more than probable future for our world. As global warming takes over in the south, places in northern Canada and Siberia become attractive places to settle for folks with a desire to reconnect with the land. Makepeace, our heroine, is the daughter of Quaker settlers who create the town of Evangeline somewhere in Siberia on the Arctic Circle. When we meet her, she is the only one left alive after hordes of starving people from the South overrun their town. Makepeace was a constable in those last days, and now she spend her time patrolling her town and staying alive.

After meeting a Chinese refugee and seeing a plane, Makepeace decides to make contact with the wider world. Theroux downplays the epic journey she takes by describing it in simple (but not Hemingway-simple) language, with sparse dialog. We get to tag along as she travels through the remains of her parents’ generation’s experiment in Siberia. We never quite get to see what happened to the rest of the world. Makepeace remarked at one point that there were as many answers to that question as there were people you cared to ask. The most likely one is that the earth just couldn’t support the population anymore after the climate changing effects of global warming. One character posits that the world is experiencing an extinction event.

This novel could have been as utterly depressing as The Road except for the presence of hope. In The Road, the world is clearly dying. There’s no safe place to live. There’s nothing to eat (unless you resort to cannibalism) and nothing will grow. In Far North, people can live if they can find the right place and learn how to fend for themselves. Sure, there are slavers and radiation blighted Zones and deadly Russian winters, but people like Makepeace can still survive and live.

The other thing that made this book work for me was Makepeace herself. She’s gritty, determined, sort of like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, but with two X chromosomes and a stronger sense of justice. She’s the toughest woman I’ve seen in fiction lately and, as you read, you can’t help but admire her strength. She may not say much, but you get her internal dialog all the through the book. Theroux has a light touch with the flashbacks and the historical information dumps; you mostly get this information through Makepeace’s musing. While he leaves you wanting more, Theroux doesn’t overload the book.

This book had everything I like: action, suspense, peril, believable villains, and a kickass hero. It was fantastically written with every word that needed to be there and nothing else. Excellent book.

Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron, by Jasper Fforde

Shades of Grey

The first book in the planned Shades of Grey trilogy, The Road to High Saffron, reveals that Jasper Fforde is capable of more profound writing than I previously thought. I’ve read almost every other book Fforde has written, mostly comical books in which the characters waltz in and out of other books. The Thursday Next series is one of my favorite series written in recent years. It’s funny and intelligent, but it’s not what I would call deep. Shades of Grey shares some of the same zaniness and wit, but the ending is one of the most moving things I’ve read recently.

The Shades of Grey series takes place in what Fforde described as a time long enough after an apocalyptic event that people don’t really know what happened, but it’s talked about. Consequently, the event is only ever referred to as Something that Happened. It’s up to the reader to try and piece together what happened. In the world the STH created, people can only see certain colors. As I read, I tried to imagine what it would be like to see only shades of red or blue or yellow and failed. The characters in this book can only see certain colors and what they can see determines their jobs and their place in society. The people at the bottom of the totem pole are Greys, who don’t see color at all. On top of all this, the society is ruled by a Byzantine collection of rules, purported to be the rules created by the original founder, that lock everyone into a rigidly polite Collective. Those who disobey or question or even try to innovate, are punished. This world is not as grim as the last few sentences might make it sound. This dystopic science fiction, but there’s enough humor and absurdity to leaven it.

The book is narrated by Eddie Russett, a young man who is on the cusp of joining the adult world. Once he takes his color test, which determines how much color he can see, he’ll take his place in society. His life takes a detour when the prefect, like a mayor and sheriff combined, sends him to the edges of the Collective’s world to learn humility by conducting a chair census. Once he arrives in East Carmine, Eddie tries to fit in, but things start to go bad for him once he stumbles on to a mystery. First, he encounters a dead man with a false identity, then a conspiracy involving stolen medicine, and then Eddie starts to question why things are the way they are. A series of oddities and a string of bad luck leads Eddie to volunteer to go into the wilds of High Saffron where the last pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

The first two thirds of the book are interesting, but most of this part is full of explanations of the color code and the rules and incidents that illustrate how different this world is from ours. It’s very interesting, and I was hooked, but the best part of this book is the ending, when everything comes to a head. I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that there really is a vast conspiracy. The heartbreaking part comes when Eddie takes his test and realizes that he’s not allowed to marry the girl he loves. I realized it at the same time Eddie did, and I felt terrible for him. It’s a testament to Fforde’s ability as a writer that I felt such a connection to his goofy but honorable narrator.

I am really looking forward to the next books in this series. I’m so glad that Fforde is being published. There are only a handful of writers that I’ve encountered that have such a wildly creative streak. I am often astounded at what Fforde comes up with, as well as delighted.

The City & the City, by China Mieville

The City & the City

China Mieville’s The City & the City is a wonderful blend of two genres: fantasy and mystery. The mystery is in the plot. The fantasy is in the setting. Though, with Mieville, the fantasy is of a particularly weird variety. This novel takes place in two cities that overlap each other, Beszel and Ul Qoma. When I first read about this book, I wasn’t sure how the two cities were put together. But it sounded so original that I wanted to read the novel to see how it worked.

Turns out that the cities are intermingled with each other. The citizens of one city just “unsee” the residents and the buildings of the other, and vice versa. Children and foreigners have to be taught what to ignore and what to pay attention to. It’s a very odd premise, and without Mieville’s care and details, it sounds a little stupid, like two people refusing to speak to each other and ignoring each other as hard as they can. The further you get into the book, the more absurd it seems. For example, the cities can blend together on the same street (which has two names depending on who you ask) and in one building, some rooms will be in one city and their neighbord in another. If you’re wondering why the residents don’t give up and merge the cities, it’s because of an organization called Breach. If a citizen breaks the boundaries–by talking to some one in the other city or crashing their car into something in the other city–Breach takes them away and they are never heard of again. The fear of Breach keeps people in line.

The mystery starts out like any other, but it gets progressively weirder and more complicated as the novel goes on. Tyador Borlu, a Beszel detective, is called into a crime scene. A young, unknown woman has been found dead. As he and his team investigate, they find out that the girl was from the other city, Ul Qoma, and that she was into conspiracy theories. Like I said, the mystery gets more complicated as you go on. I don’t think I can do it justice, since Mieville does a fantastic job of laying out the clues so that the plots becomes more clear and the setting becomes more rich.

When you think about it, there’s really two mysteries for the reader. There’s the ostensible plot of the book. And then there’s the mystery of why the cities split in the first place. The academics who’re working on an archaeological dig in Ul Qoma theorize that the cities either split or merged some time in the distant past. The reason is unknown. Personally, I think they split, because something about the way that the citizens ignore each other speaks of anger to me. It must have been something awful for them to still not being on speaking terms after an unknown number of centuries. That little puzzle is almost more compelling than the actual mystery. It makes me hope the Mieville writes another book about the cities so that I can figure out what the hell is going on. The ending in particular makes me wish I knew the origins of the cities and Breach.

SPOILERS AHEAD

You’ve been warned.

One of the things that I really liked about the book was its ending. When Borlu finally catches up with the guys who done it, a breach-riot breaks out. Unificationists in both cities start to acknowledge each other. Breach–which turns out to be smaller and less evil and bureaucratic than you’d think–has its hands full trying to restore order. For a few pages, I thought the cities were going to merge. But then Borlu joins up with them and helps separate the cities again. By the end of the book, he becomes a member of Breach.

I said before that the premise, until you warm up to it, sounds kind of stupid. It’s so much work to keep the cities separate, with little to gain, that you have to wonder why people keep it up. I was happy when I saw that the cities might merge. Then I might get answers about what happened to split the cities. On the other hand, I’ve been along for the ride with Borlu and wanted to see him succeed, too. A very odd experience, rooting for two opposite things to happen.

‘Course, I would have been disappointed if this book had had a conventional ending, and I would have thought that Mieville was losing his touch.

SPOILERS END

I seriously hope there’s a sequel to this.