The City & The City [Paperback]

The City & The City is the latest by an author who has garnered quite a reputation these past years for being original, insightful and basically pretty damn good. The City & The City comes loaded with plaudits, A Nebula Award nomination, and enough cover quotes to ensure even the most insecure author feels the love. Miéville is even compared to George Orwell and Franz Kafka...

Now here's a thing, with all this adulation from the critics you might think I'd be extremely keen to read this book, right? Well the truth is I've wanted to read something of China's work for a while, but I was by no means certain I'd like it. I couldn't help but wonder if it might all be drearily pretentious. You know the kind of book? Difficult to read, self-indulgent drivel, that our cultural tastemakers often effuse over. The ones that leave us mere mortals - who're only looking for a good read - feeling inadequate on account of our inability to invoke the same level of excitement for them. The quote from Socialist Review on the cover also made me groan a bit. Knowing China's politics - was this going to be a disguised party manifesto?

So a little apprehensive and ready to stand against the wave of support for this book if need be, I plunged in, and bugger me - It IS really good! My initial reservations turned out to be completely unfounded. I didn't even mind that it's told in the first person, which as a point of preference is not by favourite narrative perspective.

Inspector Tyador Borlú is the person telling this tale, an investigator in a specialist division of the Bes'el 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 Bes'el. 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.

Bes'el 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 Bes'el, into Ul-Qoma and beyond, not just physically but mentally as well.

This is a book about perception and about identity, about cultural indoctrination, and the nurturing of exclusivity and otherness for larger social and economic ends. It's also a tale of misinformation and conspiracy. At times I was reminded of Balkan identities, the Palestine/Israel situation, and Turkish politics with its national obsession for the Deep State. Yes it's political, but not I think in any narrow ideological sense. It can take a little while to become familiar with the dreamlike landscape of Miéville's setting, and to appreciate the fullness of the idea he's constructed. Once realised it's difficult not to be awed by his inventiveness, and marvel at its execution.

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. Bravo Mr Miéville! I for one am now converted, you fully deserve your plaudits.

Neither pure science fiction nor entirely naturalistic, China Miéville's The City and The City functions in a strange hinterland between genre spaces. Significantly influenced by hardboiled noir detective fiction (notably Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy) and taking cues from Kafka, the novel is strikingly difficult to pin-down; and although many reviewers have tried resorting to long compound chains of genre labels (`post-modern-sci-fi-detective-noir' etc.), this is probably more confusing than helpful. So I think it's best if we stick with Miéville's own self-disclosed moniker `Weird Fiction' [his capitals], which though concise and a tad self-satisfied, is nonetheless a pleasingly eloquent descriptive of what is a damn unusual book.

As the name suggests, The City and The City is a novel rampant with doubling: it's set in two fictional cities in Eastern Europe: Bes'el and Ul Qoma, which although being different administrative, legal and cultural entities, nonetheless share the same physical space, topographically speaking; so one street may be in Bes'el, whereas the street immediately adjacent might belong to Ul Qoma. The citizens of each city must ignore the existence of the other entirely (`unsee' it - strikingly Orwellian neologism?); if they don't, then they are said to have committed a crime called `Breach', and weird things happen to them. Principally the novel concerns a by-the-numbers `extreme crime' detective called Borlú, who's tasked with investigating the murder of a Bes'el woman by a citizen from Ul Qoma; all the while Borlú becomes more and more obsessed with pseudo-academic theories that a third city called `Orciny' exists - functioning entirely unseen between the other two.

Borlú narrates in the first-person past tense, and in essence he acts as the mouth-piece of the reader by expressing confusion at the book's bizarre goings-on on the reader's behalf. Large chunks of the narrative can be baffling, and the book only really comes-together at its shocking dénouement. Compounding this tonal confusion is China Miéville's very slow reveal of made up, idiosyncratic terminology, which has to be gradually decoded by the reader as no gloss or moments of explication are provided - but rather than being frustrating, this refusal to elucidate contributes to a sense of immersion and authenticity that's so often lacking in other, less delicate sci-fi where heavy-handed exposition is problematic.

The cast is drawn competently, though occasionally it does veer into clichés of genre-type (feisty side-kick, cantankerous police chief, unidentified telephone informant etc.) and this is a shallowness of character that can't always be hidden by complex plotting and non-stop action, but I'm willing to let this pass because the real shining stars of the novel (the most developed `protagonists', if you want to be poncy about it) are the cityscapes of Bes'el and Ul Qoma. Miéville takes his (admittedly brilliant) idea of the inter-meshed cities and really runs with it, augmenting the characteristic cityphilia that he's shown in earlier novels with a fetishistic attention to the physical description of skylines, road layouts, architecture and city administration. Not only does this contribute to a unique and highly original sense of place, but also instils an unnerving feeling of the uncanny, as the cities in The City and The City function more like characters than mere settings. As Borlú moves between the two cities, the very nature of the streets, like arteries of the cities, pulses, flows and shifts - the streets tell lies and trick reader and narrator alike. Simultaneously belonging to two very different cities, the streets are alarmingly schizophrenic and threatening: they display a shifty inconsistency that creates an unsettling cognitive dissonance, an effect created by Miéville's unashamedly intricate, complicated prose. The permanent danger is that Borlú will slip-up and commit Breach, and I was torn between simultaneously wanting to see this happen, while also wanting the best for our narrator (who, remember, really functions as the mouth and eyes of the reader - a point of view character in this strange but familiar (hence ` uncanny') world).

So, The City and The City is a dark, violent and complicated hybrid of genre types that functions as a celebration of the idea of `city' rather than of the detective as moral paradigm or of the crime as grotesque indulgence (a trap so many hardboiled novels fall into). It's grounded by a rigorous attention to police procedure and a penchant for unexpectedly naturalistic dialogue (you'll read lots of `ums' and repetitions of colloquialisms/idioms: `you know' etc.) that weights the novel into a quasi real-world context when it could so easily have floated into the realms of the purely fantastical. This teasing of the fantastic can, however, be a source of frustration. The more outré, sci-fi aspects are dangled like the proverbial carrot in front of both reader and protagonist alike: the hidden `third city', the possibility of advanced technology, the strange crime that is `Breach' - these are all narrative threads that are im-rather than ex-plicit, and it's demonstrable of Miéville's skill that, even when he's writing minor fantasy, he can suggest the most head-spinning weirdnesses. But readers looking for the out-and-out bizarro creations of his earlier novels might find The City and The City lacking.

Some reviews have portrayed this as a murder mystery set against the backdrop of two very unusually interlaced cities. I'd turn this around and say it's a mystery about the nature of the cities, set against the backdrop of a murder investigation.

I was initially frustrated that I couldn't quite grasp what was going on with the cities, then after a while I thought I understood, and then later came to have that understanding subverted. In the end I was just gobsmacked by the audacity of the whole thing. This reminded me a little of The Bridge by Iain Banks, in terms of there being a mystery in the book which is not explicitly pointed out.

This is a very good book, I really enjoyed it.