The City & the City
Two cities occupy the same physical space. Citizens must "unsee" the other city or face punishment by Breach. Mieville's 2009 novel bends genre boundaries: part detective fiction, part Kafka, part political allegory about the borders people enforce through willful ignorance.
Characterisation is thin, the detective and supporting cast reading as ciphers, and one blogger states flatly there is no character development to speak of. The dialogue omits information readers need, forcing rereads to follow who knows what; one abandoned it a third of the way in. Another files the whole as “half dusty encyclopedia description, half oddly paced mystery.” The mystery underneath is conventional, “stumbling along a single, mainly procedural line,” with the conceit doing more work than the investigation. Readers describe “admiring the mechanism more than enjoying the ride.” And some find “too many plotholes to suspend disbelief” in the seeing rule itself.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
