The City & the City, by China Mieville
I am in transports of happiness over this book, and have been telling everyone to read it.
The City & the City is a detective novel that takes place in two cities occupying the same space, separated only by social custom and rigorous individual policing of perception. Beszel, the home of the detective Tyador Borlu, is a slightly run-down Eastern European city - think, Prague in 1981 - while Ul Qoma is more like Lausanne, prosperous and modern. Relations between them are prickly. But here is the thing; although there are all-Beszel and all-Ul-Quoma areas, "totalities," much of the cities overlap, so that a single street may contain houses or even apartments in Beszel, while the remaining ones are in Ul Qoma. A local park, which has a different name in each city, contains trees which are "crosshatched," some part of the tree in Beszel and another in Ul Qoma, with anxious parents standing nearby coaching their children not to see the children of the other city climbing next to them. Citizens of each city-state are rigorously trained from childhood to unsee whatever is in the other locale, and failure to do so is punished severely and immediately by Breach, a shadowy body capable of disappearing offenders.
In the center of the cities is a large diplomatic building, "Copula Hall" in both languages, that is neither crosshatched nor a mix of static totalities, but a both-and-none arrangement. The gate underneath Copula Hall is the checkpoint through which one may pass, with the proper documentation, from one city to the other. When Borlu leaves Beszel and enters Ul Qoma, he must struggle for a moment when he passes his own house - but cannot see it, because it is in Beszel.
I don't want to tell you the story of the book, but the story in any case is not the main driver; it is the amazing world building, and what the lives of the people of Beszel and Ul Qoma suggest about our own rigorous social constructions, such as race and gender.
The City & the City is a detective novel that takes place in two cities occupying the same space, separated only by social custom and rigorous individual policing of perception. Beszel, the home of the detective Tyador Borlu, is a slightly run-down Eastern European city - think, Prague in 1981 - while Ul Qoma is more like Lausanne, prosperous and modern. Relations between them are prickly. But here is the thing; although there are all-Beszel and all-Ul-Quoma areas, "totalities," much of the cities overlap, so that a single street may contain houses or even apartments in Beszel, while the remaining ones are in Ul Qoma. A local park, which has a different name in each city, contains trees which are "crosshatched," some part of the tree in Beszel and another in Ul Qoma, with anxious parents standing nearby coaching their children not to see the children of the other city climbing next to them. Citizens of each city-state are rigorously trained from childhood to unsee whatever is in the other locale, and failure to do so is punished severely and immediately by Breach, a shadowy body capable of disappearing offenders.
In the center of the cities is a large diplomatic building, "Copula Hall" in both languages, that is neither crosshatched nor a mix of static totalities, but a both-and-none arrangement. The gate underneath Copula Hall is the checkpoint through which one may pass, with the proper documentation, from one city to the other. When Borlu leaves Beszel and enters Ul Qoma, he must struggle for a moment when he passes his own house - but cannot see it, because it is in Beszel.
I don't want to tell you the story of the book, but the story in any case is not the main driver; it is the amazing world building, and what the lives of the people of Beszel and Ul Qoma suggest about our own rigorous social constructions, such as race and gender.