A China Miéville top 10

To mark the BBC adaptation Miéville’s The City & the City, here’s a quick run-down of his oeuvre so far. All opinions my own.

1. The City & The City. If one definition of great art is that it changes the way you view the world, then this is great art. Inspector Tyador Borlú investigates a murder in Besźel and Ul Qoma, cities which share the same space but where to acknowledge the other’s existence is a crime. Along with Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, this is my favourite work of 21st-century fiction.
2. The Last Days of New Paris. Maybe not to everyone’s taste, this tale of resistance and survival in the days following a Surrealist apocalypse is a source of constant wonders. Artworks come to a weird kind of life – with all which that entails – and move with what Miéville beautifully describes as “dreamlike specificity”.
3. Kraken. One of our cephalopods is missing. Octopi London. When a giant squid is kidnapped from the Natural History Museum, inter-cult capers ensue. His funniest book, and perfectly fits that (admittedly rare) “needing to read something light but which still melts your brain” mood. The wonderfully foul-mouthed PC Kath Collingswood is Miéville’s best supporting character.
4. Railsea. Miéville’s second work aimed at Young Adults, this riff on Moby Dick is good fun. A great white mole is hunted in a world where stepping off a railway line means certain death.
5. Looking for Jake. A short story collection, and patchy in places, but it contains enough gems to qualify: the modern-day Lovecraftian “Details”; “The Ball Room”, certain to put parents off taking their kids to soft-play for life; and “Reports of Certain Events in London” which I have to confess was the inspiration for one of my own stories.
6. Three Moments of an Explosion. More short stories: more of them, and better. “Covehithe” (semi-sentient oilrigs; a comment on our oil dependency), the inverted landscapes of “Polynia” and “The Dowager of Bees” – there are certain cards you never want dealt – are among the highlights.
7. Perdido Street Station. You were beginning to wonder, weren’t you? Epic urban fantasy, endlessly inventive, and the book that made his name. The first of his Bas-Lag trilogy but not, for me, the best of them. That would be…
8. The Scar. The heroine of this nautical adventure, Bellis Coldwine, is arguably Miéville’s least-sympathetic protagonist, and that’s what I like about it. It takes guts for a writer to know readers are going to whine “I didn’t like the main character” and to not give a shit. The sudden appearance of the native females on the island of the Anophelii is one of the scariest things I’ve read in years.
9. Un Lun Dun. More fun for Young Adults. With illustrations by the author, any book which features fighting trashcans – Binjas – has lots going for it. Also contains Extreme Librarians, which is always a good thing.
10. Embassytown. This is the point at which a top ten seems a bit of a stretch. This space opera is (alongside This Census Taker, below) the only Miéville I’ve never felt tempted to re-read. Stunningly inventive linguistically, for me it all falls apart towards a rather uninspired final act.

At time of writing Miéville has published thirteen full-length books, so the above list is pretty inclusive. What did I leave out, and why?

1. Iron Council. The final (so far) of his Bas-Lag novels. I’m not a Western fan, but that isn’t the reason it doesn’t make the cut. There are some great set-pieces, and astute political commentary, but it’s the flattest-feeling (and the longest-feeling) of the trilogy.
2. King Rat. This almost made the list at the expense of either Looking for Jake or Embassytown, and on another day it might have made it. Miéville’s debut, the drum & bass motif is perhaps dated, the plotting (by his standards) conventional, but if I’d written a book this good when I was 24 (and the book I wrote when I was 24 was not good) I’d be pretty happy.
3. This Census Taker. Or, the exact point at which an author leaves too much to the reader’s imagination. And with the “averaging gun”, it’s where Miéville lapses into self-parody. Happily this drop in form was just a blip because his follow-up was, to bring us right up to date, The Last Days of New Paris.

Other China Miéville on Into the Gyre:

• China Mieville’s “UnLunDun”: dismantling the cliché of Prophecy

photo credit: Geraint Lewis/Writer Pictures