The book follows the story of Unute, an immortal man who has lived for tens of thousands of years. The plot follows the "present", where Unute is working with a secret US military unit, and shows glimpses of his past and people who he encountered on this journey. It's hard to succinctly describe what the story is about, other than the psychology of being immortal, and the effect it has on people who know of it. While there is a lot of action (a la Keanu), there is a lot of philosophy, self reflection, and social criticism (a la Mieville).

I really liked reading it, and the story overall. While being an interesting mashup of Keanu's Graphic novels and Mieville's dominant style, the book also had, at least for me, strong echoes of Neil Gaiman's atmospheric books. The atmosphere and the disquiet it elicits was, from my perspective, the main attraction in the book. I also found the exploration of the myth of Unute and its reverbrations across generations and societies and interesting thought experiment, challenging and inverting the concept of God-ness.

The only thing I struggled with is the character development, which was a bit lacking, especially in contrast to other works by Mieville. While Unute was well explored, the other protagonists were more superficially depicted, without really thinking through or understanding their motivations, which I would have loved to learn more about.

I'm also of two minds about the pacing of the book. On the one hand, being plunged neck deep into the story from page 1, without any pre-amble, is confusing and irritating. It takes a long time to understand what really is going on - who's who, and the why of it all. On the other hand, there is an echo in it of Unute's own experience - this disorientation is telling and exemplifies what it must feel like at times for him. On balance, I liked it, but did find it tough.

Bottom line is that while it's not as good as Bas-Lag or King Rat, it's a great book by Mieville, and I highly recommend it to fans of the author, or the New Weird and Urban Fantasy genres more broadly.

My thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.