My big problem with the book was that the voice, plot, and characters didn’t fit the absurdist/surrealist/satirical premise, which was like something out of Jorge Luis Borges or Thomas Pynchon, and begged for a similarly lush or gonzo style—the exact style, in fact, that Mieville is really good at. Instead, it’s deliberately flat and underplayed. The cop has few traits. Most of the characters have few traits. The two cities themselves are not very vivid or detailed compared to what I’ve seen Mieville do in other books. The conclusion is deliberately anticlimactic.

I just finished TC & TC today. I agree that it felt quite thin by the end -- and "more style" would have been one way to deal with this, but I actually would have preferred him to go with "more heart". I kept wishing that em_h had written the book instead, that the characters were more fully human and the true costs of unseeing more deeply explored. (I thought it was quite striking, actually, how many elements from her three novels appeared in this one, and that's why I kept expecting things to follow the directions that she would take, and they hardly ever did. Unsurprisingly.)

Like the first unificationist they talk to -- he says that he more than anyone needs to take care not breach, because he's always watched, and there's potentially a whole very moving life story there: he longs to see the other city so much that he's willing to endanger himself, make a fool of himself, and yet because of that he won't allow himself any of the tiny cheats that ordinary citizens take all the time. I wanted to sink into moments like that and really inhabit them, and come away feeling like I had gained some perspective on something, and the story just didn't do that.