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The City & the City
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Amazon Review
Certain writers absolutely defy categorisation – and China Miéville is most definitely of that rarefied company. His prose is exhilarating, poetic, coruscating with ideas and atmosphere – and it has enhanced a body of work that has almost no parallels in modern writing. Heretofore, if Miéville has brushed shoulders with any identifiable genres, they are those of fantasy and science fiction – which makes his remarkable new book, The City and The City, such a surprise. The author’s publishers compare this novel to Philip K Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984 – which at least gives a series of corollaries for this book, however tentative. There are elements here of the crime thriller, but very much refracted through Miéville’s highly individual imagination.
The body of a murdered woman is discovered in the remarkable, crumbling European city of Besźel. Such a crime is par for the course for Inspector Tyador Borlú, who is the premier talent of the Extreme Crime Squad – until his investigations uncover evidence that bizarre and terrifying forces are at work – and soon both he and those around him will be in considerable peril. He must undertake an odyssey, a journey across borders both physical and psychical, to the city which is both a complement and rival to his own, that of Ul Qoma.
Like all of China Miéville’s work, The City and The City will not be to everyone’s taste – the very individuality of the prose and the surrealistic inventiveness will not attract those preferring more prosaic fare. But for readers who hanker after untrammelled imagination – and look for literary fare unlike anything they have read before (even, it has to be said, by Miéville himself), then this is a journey to be undertaken. But with caution, perhaps… --Barry Forshaw --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'A murder mystery set in a surreal, Blade Runner-esque urban landscape.'
-- Shortlist
'An extremely ambitious work with a grand finale which won't disappoint fans of either genre.'
-- Timeout
'Beautifully, seamlessly, effortlessly created.'
-- American crime writer Laurie R King
'Miéville again proves himself as intelligent as he is original.'
-- Guardian
'The names of Kafka and Orwell tend to be invoked too easily for anything a bit out of the ordinary, but in this case they are worthy comparisons...a gripping and thought-provoking read.'
-- The Times
'This is Miéville's most accomplished novel since Perdido Street Station. It is fantastic in the careless, colloquial sense.' -- Spectator
'This is a fable, just like Clockwork Orange was a fable... The fable is just extraordinary and within this is a very good murder mystery.'
-- Front Row, BBC Radio 4
`Both utterly fascinating and his most brain-scrambling work yet.' -- SFX
`His most disciplined and sharply focused novel to date.' -- Locus
`It is simply unlike anything you...have read...The sheer scale of its ingenuity is just phenomenal.' -- The Truth About Books --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
-- Shortlist
'An extremely ambitious work with a grand finale which won't disappoint fans of either genre.'
-- Timeout
'Beautifully, seamlessly, effortlessly created.'
-- American crime writer Laurie R King
'Miéville again proves himself as intelligent as he is original.'
-- Guardian
'The names of Kafka and Orwell tend to be invoked too easily for anything a bit out of the ordinary, but in this case they are worthy comparisons...a gripping and thought-provoking read.'
-- The Times
'This is Miéville's most accomplished novel since Perdido Street Station. It is fantastic in the careless, colloquial sense.' -- Spectator
'This is a fable, just like Clockwork Orange was a fable... The fable is just extraordinary and within this is a very good murder mystery.'
-- Front Row, BBC Radio 4
`Both utterly fascinating and his most brain-scrambling work yet.' -- SFX
`His most disciplined and sharply focused novel to date.' -- Locus
`It is simply unlike anything you...have read...The sheer scale of its ingenuity is just phenomenal.' -- The Truth About Books --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
49 of 52 people found the following review helpful
By DC
Format: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.... Read more ›
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.... Read more ›
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By TomCat
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
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.... Read more ›
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.... Read more ›
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By John W
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Jo Bennie
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback
Two cities, Beszel, a decaying soviet style society and Ul Qoma, near Eastern in style. The body of a murdered young girl found in the vandalised playground of a sink estate by Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad [for some reason, annoyingly, Amazon doesn't seem to support accents, but there are acute accents over the first e in Mieville, the second in Beszel and the u in Borlu, which give an indication of the slavic slant of the language of the latter two]. But all is not as it seems, and Mieville's detective story is, Borlu says of his case on page 9, 'considerably more Byzantine than it had initially appeared'. I won't give anything away, but the reference to Byzantium, also known as Istanbul and Constantinople over its history, as well as the meaning of 'byzantine' itself give clues to just how much of a ride Mieville takes you on. Brilliantly conceived and written
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
I like a good...
book to shake up my expectations and this did. I doubt I'll be a fan but anyone who buys this book will enjoy the skill and depth he brings to the characters in playing out his... Read more
Published 24 days ago by John Guiller-McCallum
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't read any reviews, just read the book!
This is a great book, a really exciting read. You must read it, but do yourself a favour and don't read anything about the book before you read the book itself. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Stegasauro B
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strangely memorable
This book was a weird one for me. I read it around two years ago and I found it really difficult to get my head around the central premise of two cities living alongside each other... Read more
Published 5 months ago by T.Forsdyke
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great
Interesting novel, detective whodunit with a sci phi twist in a world that is so far removed but yet not very far away at all. Existential thriller.
Published 5 months ago by MR
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating conecpt
Loved the idea of the book and the notion that we are all unseeing but at times it was a tadge clunky.
Published 6 months ago by Mair
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bear with it - it opens up
This book was an enjoying read - it started slow at first but built up in good momentum to the end, with a pretty good ending I thought. Read more
Published 7 months ago by S. Cordes
5.0 out of 5 stars
The City and The City
This is a novel of which the point is stated in the title, the insersection of a city and another city, when a murder takes place in one. Read more
Published 7 months ago by infrequent
5.0 out of 5 stars
Parallel lives
The City and The City is a meaningful and important exploration of cultural and social difference and how we learn to exclude others. Read more
Published 7 months ago by fgunn
3.0 out of 5 stars
How many cities co-exist where you live?
This is the second novel by Mieville that I've read. I really enjoyed his sci-fi gothic style of Perdido Street Station and, given my usual taste in reading being `classics' and... Read more
Published 7 months ago by H. Tee
5.0 out of 5 stars
Challenging in the best possible way!
This is, quite categorically, the very best book I have read this year. I'm normally a quick reader, but this took me much longer than usual - not because it was boring, but... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Catherine Czerkawska
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