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mburnamfink 's review for:
The City & the City
by China Miéville
The City and the City is a great page-turning mystery, but ultimately lacking.
Mieville's greatest talent, aside from his monstrous imagination, is his impeccable understanding of motive, of "why". The world of Bas Lag is so shocking, not because of how unusual it is, but because in the midst of magic and splendors and hideous beasts, characters still grapple with mundane concerns like wealth and power and class and knowledge and love.
The mystery at the heart of The City and the City, the nature of the breach between Besźel and Ul Qoma, is not satisfactorily explained or resolved. As an allegory on divided cities in our world, or the way that we do not see the poor and powerless, it is surprisingly subtle and effective. As the central driver of a murder mystery, it comes up short.
--Nov 26, 2016
****
China Miéville made his name on weird fantasy with a communist and anarchist bent. His world of Bas Lag is full of wonderful and terrible monsters, with humans+capitalism as the king predator of them all, even more so than insane gods, mind-eating months, and trans-dimensions leviathans. The City and The City takes us from Bas Lag to our world, and the twinned and divided cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, located somewhere Eastern Europe. Inspector Borlu, Extreme Crime Squad, is investigating a murdered girl. This should be an open and shut case of a murdered prostitute, another grimy little tragedy of the night, but the details don't make sense. The victim is an American archaeologist, working on a dig in Ul Qoma, and full of heretical theories about the history of the two cities.
As Borlu investigates, it becomes apparent that the real mystery is the nature of the barrier between Besźel and Ul Qoma, and the force of Breach that maintains it. This isn't Berlin or Jerusalem, cities divided by walls and borders. Both cities exist on top of each other, grosstopologically speaking, and the inhabitants careful learn to un-see and un-hear their neighbors. Miéville teases at the idea that Breach has arcane powers, access to ancient technology, is identical to or is at war with a secret third city, Orciny.
He teases at these things, but when Borlu shoots a suspect across the border and is taken by Breach, the actuality of the world fails to meet expectations. Breach are just men and women, a social convention of sudden violence and intimidation used to enforce a unique set of laws. The case that got the suspect killed is a tangle of corporate espionage and political corruption, not something particularly supernatural.
Miéville obviously has great talents as a writer, and in this case he puts them entirely behind a political position: that we are all complicit in unseeing certain aspects of our own cities: the homeless, the poor, refugees; while being carefully attentive of the fictions of geopolitics and business. He has a keen eye for coolness of liminal spaces and temporary autonomous zones, and the interlinkages of ideology, pragmatic politics, and academic theory. The thing is, I'm fairly sure this isn't a science fiction novel, or even a speculative novel of any stripe (aside from the fictionalized but carefully realized setting). Parts of me likes this better than the alternative. It'd be a disappointment if Breach really was Alien Space Bats, or something similarly sensible. But part of me also wants a novel that engages with the Weird, that grips and sticks, and that doesn't slide so neatly into the gap between cities.
Mieville's greatest talent, aside from his monstrous imagination, is his impeccable understanding of motive, of "why". The world of Bas Lag is so shocking, not because of how unusual it is, but because in the midst of magic and splendors and hideous beasts, characters still grapple with mundane concerns like wealth and power and class and knowledge and love.
The mystery at the heart of The City and the City, the nature of the breach between Besźel and Ul Qoma, is not satisfactorily explained or resolved. As an allegory on divided cities in our world, or the way that we do not see the poor and powerless, it is surprisingly subtle and effective. As the central driver of a murder mystery, it comes up short.
--Nov 26, 2016
****
China Miéville made his name on weird fantasy with a communist and anarchist bent. His world of Bas Lag is full of wonderful and terrible monsters, with humans+capitalism as the king predator of them all, even more so than insane gods, mind-eating months, and trans-dimensions leviathans. The City and The City takes us from Bas Lag to our world, and the twinned and divided cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, located somewhere Eastern Europe. Inspector Borlu, Extreme Crime Squad, is investigating a murdered girl. This should be an open and shut case of a murdered prostitute, another grimy little tragedy of the night, but the details don't make sense. The victim is an American archaeologist, working on a dig in Ul Qoma, and full of heretical theories about the history of the two cities.
As Borlu investigates, it becomes apparent that the real mystery is the nature of the barrier between Besźel and Ul Qoma, and the force of Breach that maintains it. This isn't Berlin or Jerusalem, cities divided by walls and borders. Both cities exist on top of each other, grosstopologically speaking, and the inhabitants careful learn to un-see and un-hear their neighbors. Miéville teases at the idea that Breach has arcane powers, access to ancient technology, is identical to or is at war with a secret third city, Orciny.
He teases at these things, but when Borlu shoots a suspect across the border and is taken by Breach, the actuality of the world fails to meet expectations. Breach are just men and women, a social convention of sudden violence and intimidation used to enforce a unique set of laws. The case that got the suspect killed is a tangle of corporate espionage and political corruption, not something particularly supernatural.
Miéville obviously has great talents as a writer, and in this case he puts them entirely behind a political position: that we are all complicit in unseeing certain aspects of our own cities: the homeless, the poor, refugees; while being carefully attentive of the fictions of geopolitics and business. He has a keen eye for coolness of liminal spaces and temporary autonomous zones, and the interlinkages of ideology, pragmatic politics, and academic theory. The thing is, I'm fairly sure this isn't a science fiction novel, or even a speculative novel of any stripe (aside from the fictionalized but carefully realized setting). Parts of me likes this better than the alternative. It'd be a disappointment if Breach really was Alien Space Bats, or something similarly sensible. But part of me also wants a novel that engages with the Weird, that grips and sticks, and that doesn't slide so neatly into the gap between cities.