I've bought some China Mieville for my partner before, after developing a taste for his essays, but didn't consider reading his fiction myself due to a strong antipathy for horror, and a generally "meh" attitude towards sf. Partner's reaction to Embassytown was so-so, which didn't incline me either. I picked up the City and the City after reading yet another interview of Mieville's which I loved. Figuring the crime elements might win me over.

So I wasn't expecting this to be one of those five-star, take your breath away, punch the air when you finish for the sheer pleasure of the experience, books. But it was. Mieville combines a smart intellectualism that unabashedly rewards thoughtful reader-engagement, with a perfectly plotted and paced crime noir novel that can just be read on it's own terms.

It possibly helps that you can read the City and the City without allowing for mystical, alien or supernatural elements. Which I must confess, I did. And as a meditation on the power of the collectively-agreed-and-understood - the way in which we aggressively see the world in the way our society agrees that we do, even as we distort our own individual perceptions - it was simply magnificent. As a more immediate commentary, on the construction of people as "other" based on ideas about race, ethnicity and culture, it was equally powerful.

None of that would have made it a joy to read, without the clear characterisation and taut plotting with an eye to suspense. If I thought some of that faded a bit at the end, well, I seem to usually find endings disappointing.

The best thing I can get from a book generally is thought provoking. And I much prefer the provocation to come through the ambiguity, what is suggested and contradicted, than through stridency. In a sense, I'm much less interested in trying to predict what an author thought, than in what the author made me think. I can't wait to read another book that gives me so much to chew on. My real fear now is that nothing else of Mieville's will live up to it.