Miéville constructs an absorbing alternate world, Bas-Lag, that lives and breathes in all its gritty, steampunk glory. This novel places Miéville among fiction's greatest world-builders, offering a wide-angle view of humanity that depicts our species not so much as a collection of individuals but as a collective organism, one element of larger ecosystem, the city-state. Miéville's panorama is not pretty: Collectively, we are a nasty, stinking, destructive beast, excreting our waste and pollutants into the arteries of an otherwise-beautiful planet.
For the world-building alone, this novel is worth reading -- and offers a welcome reprieve from conventional fantasy.
The novel, though, is much too long, as I was bored throughout much of the middle section. The plot simply doesn't support 700+ pages. In addition, I was unable to get into the characters, whom I found to be paper-thin.
The best paragraph (p. 307):
At first, I felt sick to be around them, all these men, their rushing, heavy, stinking breaths, their anxiety pouring through their skin like vinegar. I wanted the cold again, the darkness below the railways, where ruder forms of life struggle and fight and die and are eaten. There is a comfort in that brute simplicity.
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