The City and the City - China Mieville

An impossible setting, convincingly explored

By one of those odd coincidences, I came to "The City and the City" halfway through reading a much older series of books with a curious parallel - the Len Deighton "Game Set and Match" trilogy. Deighton's setting is the late Cold War setting of spies in early-Eighties Berlin, East and West, a time of betrayals, shifting loyalties, double- and triple agents - where every conversation was a careful diplomatic maze to be threaded at your peril, where if a man left a family behind the Wall he could expect never to see them again - a world that twenty years after the fall of communism now seems increasingly alien, even irrelevant.

So. The basic concept, and as usual it's an utterly original one, is this. In "The City and the City" the diplomatic maze is still there; but Mieville has taken it out of the internal world of verbal evasions, elusions, justifications, and mapped it outward - something like a reciprocal lattice - on to the streets of an actual city - or rather two intricately interleaved cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, each with its own completely distinctive character, language, cuisine, architecture, economy, etc - trodden, sometimes side by side, by two sets of citizens who are forbidden to interact, or even notice one another, under pain of attracting the notice of a terrifying faceless authority called the "Breach." In a reversal of Berlin (denied by the narrator, in what I take to be a bit of misdirection) the geographical Wall has changed places with convention; in this world, it's inside your head.

Set against this backdrop, we find Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crimes Squad called in to investigate a dead body which has come to light on a low rent Besz housing project. But it quickly transpires that this is an international crime, and there are clues that can only be followed up in Ul Qoma. By this means, Mieville can introduce us gradually to the protocol of the cities, and the day-to-day enforcement of their strange duality, as we see Borlu go about his investigations within the constrained topologies firstly of Beszel, and then of Ul Qoma. Is that duality relevant to the crime? I'll leave you to find out.

Let's face it, it's a mind expanding concept. Normally I would probably have given this book five stars, straight off, by comparison with other fantasy novels, no problem. The trouble is that reading Deighton reminds you of just how very high the bar has already been set for other genres with which this novel also intersects. More than once, I caught myself mentally superposing Deighton's Bernard Samson on to the rather colourless but ostensibly thin, non-smoking Inspector Borlu, and what's more, Mieville's novel didn't suffer for it. Or take Borlu's two casual background girlfriends who don't know about one another but wouldn't mind if they did. Like we do, hey, girls? Yes, yes, I know it's Metonymy, or whatever, but how much more human, how very much more rewarding for the reader is Samson's cracking office romance with Gloria/Zsuzsa. Not to give away the ending, but can I add that Deighton can also do "bleak but satisfying" better than I found the denouement of this book?

So really, this is a four-and a half star review. In fact if I had just read it after most normal fantasy fare I wouldn't have hesitated in giving it five stars. I admit freely that I could never have thought of this story myself. But there are novels in other genres I couldn't have thought of either; and since this is a novel about transgression, it would be doing it less than justice not to compare it with work in other genres which share, if not that theme as presented here, then a straightforward transformation of it.

Ingenious tale of two cities

Mieville takes a simple detective story, and turns it into some kind of metaphysics, sustaining an intricately complex story of two cities.

Touching on a wide range of possibilities, perhaps this is an echo of the sadness of the two Irelands - split by their religions, or of Israel hemmed in by its enemies, or Cold War Berlin, its inhabitants seared through by their Wall.

The author embeds his audacious concept in a murder story, creating a believable mythology, that although strange has its own consistent [il]logic.

Very different to his earlier novels, this shows a master novellist in control of his prose, inventing a new world, and exploring it with ingenuity and daring.

Dystopian Police Procedural

Inspector Tyador Borlú is the person telling this tale, an investigator in a specialist division of the Besel City Police. Borlú is assigned to investigate the murder of a foreign woman, whose body is discovered abandoned by his officers. From the outset there are unaswered questions regarding the identity of the woman, and her activities in Besel. As the investigation unfolds, it becomes apparent that Borlú is being drawn into a mysterious series of events; the investigation of which both threatens his life, and his understanding of his country.

Besel City is an invented City-State, located it would seem somewhere in Eastern Europe. It exists in exactly the same physical space as another city, Ul-Qoma. The streets, the buildings; all the features of the two cities would appear part of the one city to an outsider, although they are internationally different political entities. To their respective inhabitants they're entirely different worlds. They have different customs, taboos, dress, levels of affluence, language inflections etc and what's more they have developed a culture of not seeing the other - literally. They actively seek to avoid noticing their neighbours from the other city, even if they're standing in the same street, they're in another country. To fail to acknowledge the strict protocols associated with these customs is Breach, and summons a third and mysterious entity by that name to dispense justice.

The story follows Borlu's investigations in a noirish manner, and this novel has many of the essential characteristics of that sub-genre. It is a kind of dystopian police procedural. The reader is a witness to Borlu's investigation in a manner which slowly reveals the nature of his reality, and the challenges to that reality as fresh details of the case emerge and the plot develops. The murder trail leads Borlú out of the confines of Besel, into Ul-Qoma and beyond, not just physically but mentally as well.

This novel has a head full of ideas, but in its heart beats a classic detective story. Crucially, it never forgets to be entertaining. There may not be as much Sci-Fi/Fantasy as some might hope, but there's plenty of vision. An excellent and original read.

Unrewarding read

Interesting idea, well constructed, but curiously unengaging. This looked a good proposition, as I enjoyed Perdido Street Station. However, time really dragged reading this. The big questions: did I care about the victim? did I care what happened to the protagonist? No, and no.

An Absorbing Fantasy about Social Blinders

". . . [M]any prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it." -- Matthew 13:17

The City & The City is ostensibly a first person detective novel about trying to solve a murder that occurred in two cities that co-exist in the same space . . . but which social convention requires be treated as though they are quite far apart. The mystery is there to help you accept the fantasy of two cities deliberately ignoring one another while being perfectly aware of each others' existence. To me, this wasn't as much a fantasy as a commentary on the trend toward isolation in modern urban and suburban living. You might be surrounded by people, but you will do your best to act as though they are not there.

From that perspective, the book is a terrific exploration of how deliberate choices to limit our knowledge causes us miss out on the potential of what's in front of our noses and all around us. I would have graded it higher, but I found that Mr. Mieville's treatment of the central theme was much too drawn out to be fully rewarding. It felt a little to me like the times when someone has told me a joke for which the punch line was obvious, but who insisted on telling me the punch line again and again . . . hoping I would laugh aloud on one of the tries.

The detective story is more interesting and amusing near the beginning than near the end, the opposite of most good police procedurals. I did enjoy Mr. Mieville's taking his story seriously enough to develop the detailed complications that he fantasy world must contain.

I don't normally read much fantasy, but here I thought that the fantasy served its purpose better than traditional contemporary fiction writing would have.

Nice!