The City & The City

China Mieville feels like an author whose time has kind of passed. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way; the man’s still putting out books. It’s just that after helping to start the whole “New Weird” thing during the early 2000s with the Bas-Lag trilogy, he’s moved on to less fantastical genres and non-fiction, neither of which have gotten quite the same amount of attention as his earlier work.

My first exposure to Mieville was Perdido Street Station, partially because the first edition had a sick-ass cover and partially because I was still young enough that the idea of reading really long novels still felt mature and intellectual (these same factors led me to reading The War Of The Flowers by Tad Williams several years earlier, a mistake I have still not entirely recovered from). Like a lot of people who read Perdido Street Station, I never finished it.

As a fantasy author, Mieville is seemingly more interested in settings than stories, and long-time readers of This Blog will know how I feel about fantasy world-building. With a Mieville book you’re at least getting really strange, original world building, but at the end of the day that’s still not enough to carry a fantasy brick on its own.

Several years later I read The City & The City and also didn’t finish it, for basically the same reasons plus a few news ones, but I recently discovered that there was a BBC adaptation and it piqued my interest enough to go back and give it another shot. Can I turn a Book I Didn’t Finish into a Book I Did Finish?

The City & The City is about the rival independent city-states of Besel and Ul Qoma, apparently located somewhere vaguely Balkan-adjacent. Throughout their history the two cities have been political and economic rivals, and have twice even gone to war; as the book opens political relations have warmed somewhat into a Cold War-esque chilliness where the cities aren’t actively at each other’s throats, but you get the feeling it wouldn’t take much to push them back in that direction.

That push comes in the form of a murdered woman. When our protagonist detective Borlu starts investigating, the case quickly leads into the thorny territory of political extremism, illegal border crossings, the machinations of the two cities’ somewhat authoritarian leadership, and the shadowy forces that operate in service of keeping Besel and Ul Qoma separated.

So it’s a Cold War-style political mystery set in fictional locations? Well, here’s the twist I didn’t mention earlier: Besel and Ul Qoma aren’t separated by a wall, or distance, or anything at all. They occupy the same space, interwoven with each other so tightly that many areas belong to both simultaneously. Despite this, the political separation between the two cities is as absolute as if they were located on opposite sides of a continent, maintained by an ingrained reflex among their populaces to automatically “unsee” elements of the opposite city, even when those elements are literally right in front of their face.

And when someone does punch through the divide in a way that’s too egregious to be ignored, that’s when Breach steps in. A mysterious and seemingly supernatural force, Breach watches over the two cities at all times, responding to those who threaten the separation of Besel and Ul Qoma by snatching them away, never to be seen again. It’s this alien power that Borlu finds himself coming dangerously close to tangling with as he follows the dead woman’s trail.

So right off the bat, this is an arrestingly novel idea. That old adage about how there are no new ideas is one of those things that’s kind of true and not true at the same time, but every once in a while a writer still comes along with an idea that makes you say “Gee whiz, never seen a book about that before.” 

Mieville clearly had a lot of fun thinking through the strange implications of the concept, which leads to neat ideas like quiet, almost-abandoned areas of Besel sharing physical space with bustling Ul Qoman shopping streets, or Borlu finding out that the Ul Qoman house next to his is on fire on the news because he didn’t (or won’t) notice the smoke billowing outside his window. When the main characters inevitably go to Ul Qoma they do so by going through a border checkpoint, even though they’ve been physically in Ul Qoma for half the novel up until that point, passing through “crosshatched” areas and simply unseeing the Ul Qoman people and buildings around them.

But these explorations, as fun as they are, also lead us to one of the novel’s biggest flaws. I probably don’t need to tell you that the central premise is clearly intended to be metaphorical rather than something you’re meant to take completely literally; the parallels between real-world cultural, ethnic and political divides couldn’t be more obvious, inviting the reader to ask Deep Questions about what even is a border, really, when you think about it? And the thing about a metaphor is that it doesn’t need to make sense.

But by spending so much time on world-building and the practical considerations of how the setting works, the book all but demands the reader engage with it literally, and once you do that you start realizing that the premise couldn’t possibly work the way it’s described. Various hand-wavy solutions are given to the most obvious holes (What about foreign visitors? What about children who haven’t learned to unsee? What if a car belonging to one city runs over someone from the other city?), and then you’ve got Breach as a sort of tacit acknowledgement that no, a place like this couldn’t actually exist in the real world. 

There’s a reason Ursula Le Guin wrote The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas as a short story instead of a full-length novel delving into the culture of Omelas and the precise mechanics of exactly how the imprisoned child ensures the city’s happiness and prosperity. The story--as much as it even has a story--was subordinate to the metaphor, whereas in The City And The City it’s the other way around.

The presence of Breach also highlights the uneasy place the book occupies in terms of genre. Setting it in a version of the real world instead of another fantasy location undoubtedly adds to the excitement of the premise, and for a lot of its pagecount the book is very much trying to operate as a sobre, realistic detective yarn/political thriller despite the strangeness of the setting. But then you’ve got plot elements like Breach or a secret third city that feel very much like fantasy tropes injected into a hardboiled noir story.

And here’s the thing: this sounds like criticism, and it sort of is, but at the same time the things that trip me up about The City & The City are also the only reasons I like it. Putting such an emphasis on world-building and setting causes the metaphor to break down, but without those explorations the actual plot would be kind of a snooze-fest: Borlu, despite being a detective, spends a lot of the book not actually doing a lot of detectiving; instead, clues and plot points are mostly just given to him by other people, at least for the first half of the story, which makes it less a detective novel and more of a guy-answering-the-phone novel.

Having the book take place in the real world feels messy, but it also makes the premise way more interesting than it might otherwise have been. Fantastical elements like Breach feel like a clumsy bandaid intended to keep the whole thing from falling apart, but they’re also fun additions to the story that kept me reading even when the murder mystery wasn’t grabbing me.

On the topic of world building, I have to commend Mieville here for pulling off something quite difficult. In the fantasy genre, completely invented secondary worlds are far more common than fictional locations that are meant to be set in our actual reality, and it’s not hard to see why: you can get away with making a fantasy world--even a fantasy world based heavily on real history--lack verisimilitude, since the reader doesn’t have anything to compare it to, but set your story in the real world and they’ll expect at least the level of detail and plausibility provided by a reasonably observant travel writer. When you consider that authors routinely fail to meet this standard even when writing about locations they actually live in, this is kind of a high bar to clear.

And maybe this is simply due to my ignorance of the region of the world the story is set in, but Besel and Ul Qoma have a palpable sense of verisimilitude to them. The book sprinkles in just enough odd little fantasy details--there’s a large population of feral wolves, the archaeological dig that much of the story centers on is turning up very otherworldly artifacts--that it feels like the book is having some fun with the possibilities of invented contemporary settings, without going so far in that direction that the cities start to feel too detached from reality.

I’ve been really split on the book’s plot (much like an ancient city-state divided by mysterious forces, one could say), but I’m a lot less equivocal about the book’s writing, which is to say that it’s bad and I don’t like it.

The narration is presented in a clipped, terse style full of short sentence fragments that I think is meant to be aping detective noir, but which mostly only succeeds in aping badly-written novels. I don’t remember any of Mieville’s other books having this issue, so I think it was an experiment for this one in particular. If so, it failed. 

Similarly, the dialogue was clearly intended to be highly naturalistic, with characters repeating themselves and tripping over their words. All this does is call attention to why most writers don’t try to make their dialogue mimic actual spoken speech. It’s a massive pain to read, at times getting so illucid that it can be hard to parse the dialogue, and for the most part it captures the rhythms of actual speech far less effectively than more “artificial” dialogue does (again, see “why most writers don’t do it this way”).

So that’s The City and The City. A land of contrasts between one culture and another, between a fascinating fantasy concept and a kind of dull, rote murder mystery. To be honest, I’m guilty of committing the book blogger version of breach by not really knowing whether to recommend this or not. If the prose was better I’d say go for it despite the flaws, but as it is reading The City & The City is a bit like visiting a fascinating foreign location with a tour guide who only wants to show you the dingy McDonalds and that one subway tunnel that’s always covered in vomit. You might be better off just staying home.