The City & the City

Is it a fantasy novel, a science fiction novel, or a crime novel? Sure. Why not?

It's nigh impossible to discuss this modern classic in any detail without spoiling some vital piece of the narrative. The premise is simple to explain, although fairly difficult to imagine: what if two cities, for reasons lost to history, both reside in the same geographic area, sharing some streets and even some parks and buildings, but being legally and technically different countries? And, what if they had taken that to the extreme of making it illegal to even recognize the buildings, people, and infrastructure, the sounds and even the smells, of the "foreign" city? People may live physically next door to each other, yet for cultural reasons be forced to "unsee" each other as they pass in the street.

And then someone gets murdered, and it's unclear who has jurisdiction, or if anyone does.

Yeah, it's trippy as all get out, but worth the mental energy.

This book was nothing like I was expecting, as a winner of an Arthur C. Clarke Award I was expecting a cracking good Sci-Fi story, I was really disappointed. The Sci-Fi aspect is dull and repetitive, how many times can you mention that somebody has to unsee something that exists in another city? Plenty loads according to this book.

The last line of the blurb mentions Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler and that is spot on. There is the futuristic feeling from Dick, the poor, the punks, sinister policing and the rich controlling everything. Heavy influences from Chandler are there too in the fantastic detectives Tyador Borlú and Qussim Dhatt, some real gritty guys. You witness them slowly unravel a very complex case, up against tough odds. Just to prove how good a detective story this is, Borlú's boss kept shouting at him to get the job done in try Dirty Harry tradition.

Once I got past my "Sci-Fi" issues I thoroughly enjoyed this, a complex murder mystery that kept me guessing.

Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2019/10/07/the-city-the-city-by-china-mieville/

The City and the City is a fantastic thought experiment. The world building is exquisite. Unfortunately, the characters feel underdeveloped. This book takes its queues from hard-boiled detective fiction so for most of the book, I was willing to give this a pass and focus on the extraordinary idea of two overlapping cities and the spaces between them.

However, one crucial turn of events depended on a character’s motivations. Because the character was little more than a plot device, I found these motivations unconvincing. This, in turn, made for an unfulfilling narrative.

Nevertheless, I would recommend this book. It has a lot to say about borders, language and identity, and it raises fascinating questions about how these affect the way we perceive the world.

I will be thinking about the questions raised by The City and the City for a long time, but the characters are unlikely to stay with me.

Wow, this book was utterly original, I can't imagine how the author even came up with the idea for his setting. It appears to be set in modern day earth, or perhaps slightly in the future - Coca Cola and Tom Hanks movies are mentioned - but in an alternate version in which the neighboring countries (city-states?) of Beszel and Ul Qoma exist. I didn't catch whether it's ever specifically stated where in the world these exist, but the names sound somewhat slavic to my completely ignorant ear so if I had to guess I'd guess eastern Europe/former USSR state type area. Anyway, these two countries both claim the same area of land ... and rather than fight over it or divide it in half, they BOTH live there. Yes, both countries physically occupy the exact same space.

When I initially read the book blurb I had somehow got the impression that one city was in the "real world" and the other was in some kind of mystical parallel dimension that it was occasionally possible to cross into. But nope, both cities, in two different countries, share the same streets, borders, even parks and structures. The author is taking the human tendency to ignore what we don't want to see to a ridiculous extreme. The land in the dual city where the story takes place is designated as belonging to Beszel, to Ul Qoma, or "cross-hatch". In cross-hatch areas, citizens and traffic of both countries can travel, but have to "un-see" each other. They have adopted traditions of dress, habits of movement, even expression, so that citizens of either find it easy to immediately tell who "belongs" and who is in the other city and is therefore not actually there, and must be ignored. Beszel citizens can only enter Beszel or crosshatch streets, parks, shops, and so on. Ul Qoma citizens likewise. If you live in Beszel, to visit someone in Ul Qoma who may literally live physically next door to you, you would have to go to the official border between the two, pass through customs, and then walk back to the physical location you started in, but you'd now be in a different city (and now could not enter your own house without re-crossing the border).

The existence of these two entirely separate cities is a shared group construct that citizens of both maintain. However, a secretive force known as Breach is responsible for maintaining that citizen, and if anybody does try to break that convention, Breach will immediately step in and vanish them away to be dealt with. This could be as innocent as even looking too long at someone from the other city, let alone speaking to or touching them.

The novel opens with Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad in Beszel. As he investigates the murder of a young woman found in Beszel but who appears to have been murdered in Ul Qoma, he initially assumes it is a matter for Breach to deal with and refers the case to them. However, when it turns out that the murder has in fact been very carefully planned to avoid invoking Breach, the case ends up in the hands of himself and detective Qussim Dhatt of Ul Qoma. As they try to figure out who would kill this woman and why, not to mention how, they uncover bigger questions about what else may be hiding between the two cities, unseen by either as both sets of citizens un-see people and actions they assume are "other".

It took me a little while to wrap my head around the whole concept enough to get into the story, but once I did it was really interesting and such an incredibly unique setting as well. If you like your brain to get a little exercise imagining completely foreign concepts, you should definitely pick up this book! It's also a pretty good detective story also.

Set in Eastern Europe, circa 2009, in the fictional twin city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma, a young woman's body is discovered in a park. What starts as a routine murder investigation soon takes on larger ramifications which threaten the history, political system, and even the unique border separating these two estranged cities.

Having read and had mixed feelings about Miéville's Bas-Lag trilogy, I was curious to try something else by him that may showcase the depth and skill of his writing. I chose this one because it was his most-awarded novel, having won the holy trinity of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, World Fantasy Award, and the Hugo Award. The surprising thing for me was the lack of hardcore Science-Fiction or Fantasy elements. While the Bas-Lag novels were loaded with all manner of weirdness, this one is firmly grounded in our real world, with our technology. In fact, the only speculative element in this novel is the unique nature of the border between these two cities and the societies this border has given rise to.

The characters are basically just caricatures of what is needed in a mystery novel. There is very little depth to them, and they exist solely to tell the story. In this regard, the Bas-Lag novels were much, much better. The plot works for the most part. When the murder investigation gets a little mundane, there is the discovery (for the reader) of what this unique border is and how it affects the lives of people who live there. This is handled well, for it truly is a gradual discovery on our part because the narrator has lived there all his life and just immerses us in his world.

If I were to pick on a few things--in addition to the characters--one would be the sometimes overtly obvious dialog. While the narrative doesn't get heavy-handed, there seems to be a bit of winking to the reader in the conversations the characters have with one another. Probably the most offensive is the lengthy summary conversation at the end that fills in all the information that wasn't worked into the novel elsewhere or readily apparent from the events as they transpired. And, finally, there is Miéville's narrative style. While technically correct with an impressive vocabulary, there is just no beauty in his writing. I enjoy reading his essays for the way he communicates his ideas, but there is little craft here. It's more like science and less like art.

There is, however, a slight redemption to this novel. I believe, though I'm not 100% certain, that the border and the societies it creates is an allegory for the class and racial divisions that exist within our own societies. We go our entire lives noticing and ignoring things around us because that's just the way it's always been. To an outsider, it seems ridiculous, but to someone raised within such a society, it seems perfectly normal--even the correct way. It's a good discussion on looking at one's own society and examining it from the basics on up.

This was a bit of a fish-or-cut-bait kind of novel for me, but I'm still not sure what to do. Somewhere inside Miéville, there is a great novel waiting to be written. I've seen hints of it in Perdido Street Station and this one, but he's still not there yet. I think I'll take a break from him for now, but I'll keep reading the reviews of his new novels. At some point, he needs to take a rest and evaluate his work. When he brings up the quality of his narrative, and combines that with focused characters, plot, themes and imagination all in one novel, he will have a winner.

1) "'Is the mattress being tested for trace?'
'Should be, sir.'
'Check. If the techs are on it we're fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.'"

2) "It was, not surprisingly that day perhaps, hard to observe borders, to see and unsee only what I should, on my way home. I was hemmed in by people not in my city, walking slowly through areas crowded but not crowded in Besźel. I focused on the stones really around me---cathedrals, bars, the brick flourishes of what had been a school---that I had grown up with. I ignored the rest or tried."

3) "That beginning was a shadow in history, an unknown---records effaced and vanished for a century either side. Anything could have happened. From that historically brief quite opaque moment came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. All we know is nomads on the steppes, then those black-box centuries of urban instigation---certain events, and there have been films and stories and games based on speculation (all making the censor at least a little twitchy) about that dual birth---then history comes back and there are Besźel and Ul Qoma. Was it schism or conjoining?
As if that were not mystery enough and as if two crosshatched countries were insufficient, bards invented that third, the pretend-existing Orciny. On top floors, in ignorable Roman-style town-houses, in the first wattle-and-daub dwellings, taking up the intricately conjoined and disjointed spaces allotted it in the split or coagulation of the tribes, the tiny third city Orciny ensconced, secreted between the two brasher city-states. A community of imaginary overlords, exiles perhaps, in most stories machinating and making things so, ruling with a subtle and absolute grip. Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing."

4) "I pressed the buttons on the built-in VCR, hurtling the van backwards into my line of sight, then bringing it a few metres forward, pausing it. It was no DVD, this, the paused image was a fug of ghost lines and crackles, the stuttering van not really still but trembling like some troubled electron between two locations. I could not read the number plate clearly, but in most of its places what I saw seemed to be one of a couple of possibilities."

5) "'It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time...you can't come back from that.'"

China Mieville is the author when it comes to cities. I've found some of his other works tedious going because he puts so much love and adoration into his settings that he can't help but nudge the plot out of the way to show you his cool setting. Luckily, when it comes to The City & The City, Mieville had a brilliant idea: the detective novel provides a perfect frame for him to show off his city without it fighting for attention with his plot. Because there's a mystery to investigate, the details of the setting become critical to the plot, and can be properly showcased. Inspector Borlu is perfect for the job of tour guide -- the archetypal detective, he neither truly inhabits his life, but clinically examines his surroundings, and his arms-length remove from the city sets up the theme nicely.

Of course, where The City & The City shines is in the titular cities and there are (at least) three: Beszel: a prototypical Eastern European Olde Country; Ul Qoma: nouveau riche and glitzy; the combined physical reality that contains both, transposed on top of each other, not to mention Orciny -- the mythical third city that lies in the interstitial space. The idea is just so cool. And then the more I thought about it, the more I reflect on life, and that, my friends, is what makes a good book into a great book.

The central conceit is this: Ul Qoma and Beszel occupy the same space. I at first thought that this requires science fiction or fantasy, but Mieville employs neither here. Instead, he simply invents a political system where Ul Qoma and Beszel refuse to notice each other, even when physically located in the same place. They speak different languages, follow different rules and have different cultures. This was a stretch for me at first -- more of a stretch than imagining a magical system, to be honest. But then I started thinking of real-life split cities, like Jerusalem, where adjoining spaces belong to different governing bodies, speak different languages and in general refuse to acknowledge each other (even though in the book this exact example is brought up and belittled). And then I started thinking more generally and more close to home: I live in a neighborhood that walks the fine line between diversity and gentrification. Could it not be said that there are the neighbors, whether I know them or not, that I acknowledge more -- that, because I see similarity in the way they dress, talk and hold themselves, I am more likely to make small talk? When I talk about buying a house, there are blocks -- right next to highly desirable blocks -- where I would never live, because of the style of the houses and the presumed personalities of the neighbors (and the imaginary line dividing real people from the loathed undergrads.) And then I reflect on the recent political events and it's hard to argue that the same laws apply to everyone in the city, even in one physical location. So I spent a lot of time thinking about what these imaginary-but-real divisions in my life are, and what to do about them, since there is no all-powerful Breach in real life.

This ability to write a book that is intriguing prima facie, but that has used speculative fiction to explore deeper truths about real life is the exact reason that I read speculative fiction. The back of my copy of the City and The City compares it to Orwell and Kafka, but honestly, I think it transcends that and can only be compared to the true master: [a:Ursula K. Le Guin|874602|Ursula K. Le Guin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1244291425p2/874602.jpg]. And to say it holds up well in the comparison is a compliment of the highest order.