The City & The City by China Miéville
(Originally written for Craccum, Auckland University's shitty student magazine with beautiful covers and amusingly large delusions of grandeur.)
The City & The City is a hard novel to classify. Although it won the author, China Miéville, yet another Arthur C. Clark award, many readers subsequently questioned if this book could be considered science-fiction at all. Either way, it is a spectacular piece of work: a curious mixture of crime and speculative fiction centred upon an unsolved murder and a pair of cities unlike any other.
The premise is (almost) simple. In the city of Beszel, a murdered woman is found in a run-down estate, and Inspector Borlú gets assigned to the case. But as he investigates, the case becomes unsurprisingly convoluted…
The story is made exceptional by the setting: the bizarrely conjoined city-states of Beszel and Ul Qoma. These two cities occupy only one geographical location (a vaguely defined locale somewhere in Eastern Europe) but are definitely separate entities, each with their own language, politics, fashions and food. This leads to a complicated existence, where the only things keeping the two cities apart are centuries of tradition - and Breach, an Orwellian law enforcement body with seemingly boundless powers to enforce the surreal borders of these overlapping worlds. Here, citizens learn to ‘unsee’ whatever doesn’t belong in their reality, be it people, buildings, or foreign traffic.
Formal relationships between the two cities exist, of course. There is only one legal border, through Copula Hall, a large government building in the centre of the city. Children from both Beszel and Ul Qoma learn the language of the other. And houses located ‘grosstopically’ on the same street can call each other using international dialling codes. The fact that the two cities are also situated on Earth, rather some fantastic otherworld, only adds to the oddness; mundane talk of Amnesty International, Google and German cars definitely feel out of place next to the unremarked upon existence of crosshatched roads, where a gentrified area of one city could overlay dangerous, graffitied streets of the other, with no acknowledgement from local citizens.
Miéville doesn’t dwell on the strange logistics of these fictional cities (although his meticulous and fascinating worldbuilding is frequently much more absorbing than the actual plot). Instead he spins a reasonably convincing crime story that leads Inspector Borlú from Beszel to Ul Qoma and back again, tracking leads - including one about a third, mythical metropolis - across both cities in an increasing complicated quest to discover the killer of a woman who turns out to be an American student of archaeology. However the cities themselves feel like much stronger characters than most of the humans, who seem loosely drawn and, with the exception of Borlú and two of his colleagues, play only minor roles in the overall narrative. But these small flaws do not detract much: The City & The City is an excellent novel, and highly recommended.
A surreal and thought-provoking thriller. 4.5 out of 5 stars.
The City & The City is a hard novel to classify. Although it won the author, China Miéville, yet another Arthur C. Clark award, many readers subsequently questioned if this book could be considered science-fiction at all. Either way, it is a spectacular piece of work: a curious mixture of crime and speculative fiction centred upon an unsolved murder and a pair of cities unlike any other.
The premise is (almost) simple. In the city of Beszel, a murdered woman is found in a run-down estate, and Inspector Borlú gets assigned to the case. But as he investigates, the case becomes unsurprisingly convoluted…
The story is made exceptional by the setting: the bizarrely conjoined city-states of Beszel and Ul Qoma. These two cities occupy only one geographical location (a vaguely defined locale somewhere in Eastern Europe) but are definitely separate entities, each with their own language, politics, fashions and food. This leads to a complicated existence, where the only things keeping the two cities apart are centuries of tradition - and Breach, an Orwellian law enforcement body with seemingly boundless powers to enforce the surreal borders of these overlapping worlds. Here, citizens learn to ‘unsee’ whatever doesn’t belong in their reality, be it people, buildings, or foreign traffic.
Formal relationships between the two cities exist, of course. There is only one legal border, through Copula Hall, a large government building in the centre of the city. Children from both Beszel and Ul Qoma learn the language of the other. And houses located ‘grosstopically’ on the same street can call each other using international dialling codes. The fact that the two cities are also situated on Earth, rather some fantastic otherworld, only adds to the oddness; mundane talk of Amnesty International, Google and German cars definitely feel out of place next to the unremarked upon existence of crosshatched roads, where a gentrified area of one city could overlay dangerous, graffitied streets of the other, with no acknowledgement from local citizens.
Miéville doesn’t dwell on the strange logistics of these fictional cities (although his meticulous and fascinating worldbuilding is frequently much more absorbing than the actual plot). Instead he spins a reasonably convincing crime story that leads Inspector Borlú from Beszel to Ul Qoma and back again, tracking leads - including one about a third, mythical metropolis - across both cities in an increasing complicated quest to discover the killer of a woman who turns out to be an American student of archaeology. However the cities themselves feel like much stronger characters than most of the humans, who seem loosely drawn and, with the exception of Borlú and two of his colleagues, play only minor roles in the overall narrative. But these small flaws do not detract much: The City & The City is an excellent novel, and highly recommended.
A surreal and thought-provoking thriller. 4.5 out of 5 stars.