The City & the City

An unusual, provocative, and fascinating novel. Mieville's basic premise---two cities, and its inhabitants, who pretend as if the other doesn't exist---is one of the most creative books that I have read in some time. If you would like a good read, but aren't satisfied with the normal dribble, this is the perfect book for you. The ideas in this novel will stay with you long after you are finished. Bravo Mieville!

Mieville attracted me because of his cultural pedigree and the good critical views he attracted. Favourable cross-genre reviews are hard to snare. The reader is rewarded with an exotic yet conceivable plot which is set against a startling but not unfamiliar landscape. The fifth star is a rare pat on the back for Mieville's true characters and avoidance of plot slip-ups. Comparisons to literary greats are fair and offer a promise of work to come.

China Mieville is one of the more clever writers in any genre. In The City and the City he as written a murder mystery, but one in a place like no other. The cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma reside in the same temporal space connected by crosshatches. And in-between is a shadowy nowhere, the Breach. The boundaries of the two cities are strictly enforced, mostly, so the citizens of each city have learned to "unsee" the other city to avoid entering the wrong temporal space that would put them in Breach. Being in Breach is a bad thing. It can make you disappear. Sound confusing? That's okay. You'll get used to it once you've inhabited the cities for a time. Within these cities, well, Beszel is where it starts, a horrific murder of a young woman takes place and we are introduced to our interlocutor, detective Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. Borlu's search for the mysterious killer takes us across the cities, across unseen boundaries, in what is in the end, a rather intricate but not atypical murder mystery. As it turns out, the murder takes place in Ul Qoma but the body winds up in a desolate area of Beszel. This makes the murder even more mysterious as it's not easy to pass through the cities without breaching. Borlu's investigation becomes a political hot potato and takes him to the shadowy underworlds of fringe political groups like the "unifs" who want to unify the two cities, to the True Citizens, who are ultra-nationalists wanting power for their particular city. It also takes him to Ul Qoma where the murdered young lady last resided, working on a doctorate at an archeological dig that predates the splitting of the cities. It turns out she was into some rather strange beliefs herself, one of which was there is yet a third and all powerful city, Orciny, occupying this same temporal zone. That put her in hot water with a lot of fringe political groups so she had plenty of enemies and the suspects abound. And it introduces us to a mystery within a mystery. Does Orciny really exist, or is it just an urban legend? And what might the murdered young lady's search for Orciny have to do with her violent demise? I guess we'll have to find that out too. Borlu is a dedicated detective and wants justice for the murdered young woman so he works tirelessly to that end doing what most detectives do - poking his nose all over the place until some type of pattern or answers emerge. And slowly they do emerge and they get very weird indeed. As simply a very good mystery story, this novel works extremely well. Its setting and complexity make it superb.

I have awarded five stars to lesser books in the past, but now the bar has been raised; I know what a five-star novel is really like after reading _The City & The City_. It's a detective novel written in the first-person; the narrator is Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. The writing style is relatively spare, reminescent of Dashiell Hammett. The narrator constrains himself strictly to observable phenomena and tells us nothing of characters' inner thoughts or emotional states, which makes the action seem very immediate and the narration very stark. Police procedures are presented believably but without too much detail. The case itself is not terribly elaborate. It starts with a murder, but about two-thirds of the way through I felt that the murder was no longer the focus. Inspector Borlu's investigation leads to fringe political groups, an archaeological site, a foreign country, and to somewhere else entirely. The setting of the novel is what makes the story work. There wouldn't be a story if it wasn't set in Beszel and Ul Qoma. It's a totally original concept, like nothing I have ever read before. Beszel is a gloomy, decaying city which seems to be located somewhere in Eastern Europe. Ul Qoma is a bright, bustling city that seems either Arabic or Turkish. The relationship between the two cities is the central theme of the book. I can't tell you much about it without spoiling the beautiful unfolding of the novel. Of course Inspector Borlu takes everything for granted because he lives there; it's all familiar to him .. so instead of explaining things as one would to a foreign visitor, he lets details emerge through descriptions of sights and events, and the reader slowly pieces together details of the setting. One's understanding of the situation gets deeper as the novel progresses, and even though it is completely absurd, I found myself easily suspending my disbelief and becoming totally absorbed in the story. This impossible setting is PERFECTLY executed so as to seem plausible. Beszel and Ul Qoma deserve to be included in the Atlas of Fictional Places, they are so well constructed. Even the languages (as reflected in names of people and places and a few idiomatic sayings) consistently support the mood and "flavor" of the two cities. The two cities may be a clever metaphor for the Situation of Man, but the book's highbrow literary qualities will not get in the way of its pure entertainment value. The best fiction I have read so far this year.

China Mieville is best known for two things: his urban writing exploring the twists of cities partially real (Un Lun Dun and underground London in King Rat) to over-the-top alien (New Crobuzon and the Armada in Perdido Street Station and Scar respectively) and for his baroque writing which I would liken to a swordmaster showing off to a drunken crowd. With the title, we know that the urbanphile will be present, but it's rather a surprise that the flowery language I associate with Mieville is nowhere to be found. This is a detective novel(TM) and the cynical, cold language of that style flows effortlessly from China's pen. (Okay, word processor, so who's being flowery now?) This is a tale of two cities vaguely positioned in the outskirts of Eastern Europe, Beszel and Ul-Qoma. The boundary between the cities is fluid, mysterious thing, certainly not a physical journey. And a murder involves both co-located cities, the city and the city of the title. More would be revealing too much, Mieville is famously anti-spoiler. This is not as much of a work of fantasy as China Mieville's earlier works, but it's unlikely that his fans will be much disappointed. This story is so exquisitely told, full of unexpected details and diversions as the focus spreads from a crime story to an exploration of meanings. Regardless of genre identifications (and you do see the steampunk and new weird and dark fantasy labels hooked onto this book already) this is a great book, and I hope its literary significance will not be too hidden by the tags. This is science fiction much as Burroughs, Pynchon, Nabokov, and Ballard wrote science fiction.