Finally, a new Miéville book! I didn’t end up reading the graphic novels it is based on beforehand, even though I wanted to, because that’s just not my genre, no matter how hard I try. Oh well.
I had a lot of fun reading this book once I got past the beginning, which felt stuttering and stilted – not sure if I just needed to get into the book or if the beginning is genuinely choppy – at book club, I wasn’t the only one taking a while to warm up to it. Speaking of book club: we also had a lot of fun taking shots at the worse version of the cover, and in particular, the amazing author:title ratio.
Plot-wise, I just had fun, and felt like the author was having fun, too, which is relaxing. It’s not Perdido Street Station, sure, but it’s entertaining and thoughtful and has a finale that could’ve been written by Diane Duane. Plus, it gave me some cool new symbolism to play around with, and was just … engaging and fun, while also portraying a mind that is both very human and very removed from many human experiences – how do you even deal with being alive for 80k years? (Take it one millennium at a time …)
Oh, and bonus points for the casual queerness throughout. That was nice.
Plot summary
Beware: full spoilers! Also probably incomplete and possibly incomprehensible.
Unute cannot die and hangs out with people across 80k years. His violent rages keep him apart, as does his age. There is one other immortal: the deer pig, and there used to be one other person like him in the past, only his powers are about violence and death, and hers about life. Her children walk the earth yet.
In the present day, he works with US soldiers, which is all kinds of tricky. Weird shit starts happening, apart from the deer pig tracking him down again, and there’s a big showdown with one of the children of life vs Unute, until they realise that they are on the same side: Entropy, and against their common enemy, stillness/death.
