So I finished The City & The City today and while I liked it and while I liked it a lot and while I think I am comfortable saying it is one of the better books I've read so far this year I am also all sort of mixed-up about the whole thing, which is okay because honestly I think China Miéville himself was sort of mixed-up about the whole thing, himself, like he was never really certain what he was more interested in, the existential conceit or the really-to-my-mind-pretty-standard mystery novel or the act of integrating the two, the act of writing a mystery novel set inside an existential conceit, the act of pushing existential concerns through a mystery novel. The thing's got the same sort of pulled-punch feel that I'd felt he'd pulled at the end of Iron Council; like, not-going-there is the new going-there. Which I think wouldn't bother me much or really even concern me at all if I hadn't fallen in love with him via Perdido Street Station which was seven hundred straight pages of mutha-flippin' going there. Plus, you know, in comparison, this book, The City & The City, it reads pretty dry, but in a way that wants so bad to burst into wet. Moisture seeping through the cracks. It's tough for me to align it against his entire oeuvre, since I've only read the Bas Lag novels and now this one, but I can still sort of see a line leading up to this point, one of terseness coming to take the place of explosiveness. Which is fine but I do catch myself hoping he completely up and up bursts next time out. Like, the strain will be too much. Like, the strain must give way. Or maybe I just need to realize that while I love the guy's work on the whole and while I'll eventually read everything he's ever written it's really more likely that I need to get over everything else and just go re-read Perdido, because, yes, please. And anyway all concerns are pretty secondary to the fact that I really did enjoy the hell out of the damn thing, The City & The City, and that it's got a haunting closing paragraph, and it's been a while since I've felt a book haunt me like that, I think, so: win.