The tightrope trick of maintaining this central conceit is handled remarkably skilfully by Miéville; though the publisher predictably invokes comparisons with Kafka, there is nothing especially outré about the story, once the premise is accepted. Borlú uses fax machines, cell phones, grapples with paperwork, physical clues, unreliable witnesses, the sheer cussedness of events; the murder investigation plays fair and is realistic. Or realistic, at least, in the conventions of the detective novel, which is, like all fiction, a sort of fantasy.
In that sense, the hallucinatory aspects of the book owe more to Borges, or perhaps Les Gommes, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s subversion of the policier. Most impressively, Miéville’s underlying point, that all city- dwellers collude in ignoring real aspects of the cities in which they live — the homeless, political structures, the commercial world or the stuff that’s ‘for the tourists’ — is never laboured.
This is Miéville’s most accomplished novel since Perdido Street Station. It deserves an audience among those who would run a mile from his other books: it is fantastic in the careless, colloquial sense, too.
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