From the Bookshelf of Beyond Reality…

The City & the City

China Miéville

Start date: February 1, 2018

Finish date: February 28, 2018

Discussion: Previous BotM--DISCUSSIONS

Why we're reading this: The group previously read this book in Sept. 2009.
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Previous BotM--DISCUSSIONS

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What Members Thought

May 09, 2013 carol. rated it liked it

Shelves: my-library, hugo, my-library-hardcover, urban-fantasy, awards-of-all-sorts, mystery, sci-fi

Can a city have a personality? I think so. Certainly the feel of Los Angeles is entirely different from NYC, and different again from Chicago, right? But what are the components to a city's character? Despite being the centerpiece of the novel, The City and the City never came alive for me. Half the time I felt as if I was reading a dusty encyclopedia description of a city and half the time an oddly paced but elaborate mystery.

The story begins typical for the detective-mystery genre: we follow I Can a city have a personality? I think so. Certainly the feel of Los Angeles is entirely different from NYC, and different again from Chicago, right? But what are the components to a city's character? Despite being the centerpiece of the novel, The City and the City never came alive for me. Half the time I felt as if I was reading a dusty encyclopedia description of a city and half the time an oddly paced but elaborate mystery.

The story begins typical for the detective-mystery genre: we follow Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad to the scene of a murdered and nude woman. It is a seedy, run-down area full of addicts, and at first it appears as if she's another lost soul from the streets. Tyador commanders an eager young subordinate, Corwi, for her street contacts and legwork. Before long, an anonymous tip points them in the direction of Il Qoma, the city that lives within/alongside/interstices with their own city of Beszel. The citizens of both places are monitored by Breach, a mysterious authority who will spirit away those who mistakenly acknowledge the partner city without following proper channels.

"'Why were you there?'
'... It was a conference. 'Policing Split Cities.' They had sessions on Budapest and Jerusalem and Berline, and Beszel and Ul Quoma.'
'Fuck!'
'I know, I know. That's what we said at the time. Totally missing the point.'
'Split cities? I'm surprised the acad let you go.'"

The idea of two cities, co-existing in shared spaces but actually separate nations, is a brilliant idea. Unfortunately, Big Idea is all that holds this story together, which has little to humanize it amidst a slow and painful investigation. It occurred to me that this is the premise of so many other books, the unseen co-existing with the seen, but I felt it was hard to get a grip on the intricacies of the schism.

Bezel and Il Quoma never truly differentiated for me. I think part of the reason is that Mieille relies on two main modes of describing his cities: the architecture and the political history. I felt very much like I was being given a lesson on Yugoslavia, or walled-Berlin, or one of the split cities so overtly mentioned. An example from page 43:

"In typical political cliche, unificationists were split on many axes. Some groups were illegal, sister-organisations in both Beszel and Ul Qoma. The banned had at varioius points in their history advocated the use of violence to bring the cities to their God-, destiny-, history-, or people-intended unity. Some had, mostly cack-handedly, targeted nationalist intellectuals--bricks through windows and shit through doors. They had been accused of furtively propagandising among refugees and new immigrants with limited expertise at seeing and unseeing, at being in one particular city. The activists wanted to weaponise such urban uncertainty."

I can appreciate such description, but does it resonate? Evoke emotion? I think of Kate Griffin's Matthew Swift series, how London comes alive with the lyrical descriptions, and wonder at the difference. Perhaps people would have helped, or further character-building of the ones we had. Histories of the characters could have been used to gain more insight into the schism between the two, but only Tyador's youth is shared in any detail. About the only person that stood out for me was the detective's superior, who humorously managed to undercut Borlu's complaints with every line of dialogue.

"'This is bullshit. We've been screwed.'
'It is bullshit, he tells me,' Gadlem said to the world. 'He tells me we've been screwed.'
'We've been screwed, sir. We need Breach. How the hell are we supposed to do this? Someone somewhere is trying to freeze this where it stands.'
'We've been screwed, he tells me, and I note he tells me so as if I am disagreeing with him. Which when last I looked I was not doing.'"

I enjoyed China's word-play, particularly 'grosstopically,' reference to things that are near in physical space but from different nations But the word-smithing didn't feel as sophisticated as Embassytown or as fun as Kraken, which is interesting, as they were published in a three-year span. Most of the vocabulary was created around the idea of 'unseeing' the neighbor city and it's occupants. Overall, the language felt stilted and excessively formal for genre fiction, further distancing me from the story.

It's not that I don't understand the exploration of the dissonant, conjoined cities. We take the noir detective format, incorporate a nice play on the idea of two cities, merged but unseen, occupying almost the same space with each other. It's actually a relatively common exercise in the spec-fic/sci-fi world, giving an author (and reader) familiar concepts to latch onto while the author forays into stranger places. There are times the Big Idea works well and can carry a novel on its own, but for me, this wasn't it. I'd suggest Only Forward if you want to play with the idea of city and identity. ...more

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May 26, 2011 Ric rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I found it hard to get started with this book. Part of it was my incredulity with the premise(view spoiler). After reading other GR reviews, it turns out that this is a common aspect of Mieville novels. The other part was that I was a Mieville virgin, in the sense that this was the first book of his I had ever read.

But it grew on me, this book. Noir and police detectives, quite a throwback, but effective. Once I was past t

...more

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Mar 17, 2014 Tomislav rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, mystery, 5-stars, read-3-times, fiction, sff-2018-read-all-the-books

third read - 14 February 2018 - ***** I read a trade paperback edition of China Miéville’s 2009 The City & The City. I had previously read it in 2010 and in 2015. In spite of generally preferring science fiction over fantasy, I have also read and enjoyed a number of Miéville’s other novels.

This is a book that deserves re-reading. On the first read, it takes quite a while to really understand how the citizens of Besźel, Ul Qoma, Breach, and the possibility of Orciny all coexist in one physical ci third read - 14 February 2018 - ***** I read a trade paperback edition of China Miéville’s 2009 The City & The City. I had previously read it in 2010 and in 2015. In spite of generally preferring science fiction over fantasy, I have also read and enjoyed a number of Miéville’s other novels.

This is a book that deserves re-reading. On the first read, it takes quite a while to really understand how the citizens of Besźel, Ul Qoma, Breach, and the possibility of Orciny all coexist in one physical city – and that is a lot of fun. On the re-read, I found there were items even in the very first chapter that I failed to notice or misunderstood. And on the re-reads, I could focus back onto the murder mystery and the thriller that is set in that city. I still basically stand by the opinions I made after my first two reads (below), but with a few additional observations. At this point, I am moving deeply into spoilers, so am blocking out the rest of my third review.
(view spoiler)

Second read - 31 August 2015 - ***** This book is easily worth a second reading. I looked back over my comments from 2010 below, and see that most of them are based on my reactions to the first part of the book. On this read, I already understood unseeing was purely a social construct, and paid attention to the characters' own awareness that they were deliberately not seeing, how it is necessary first to see in order to decide to unsee, and to the role of Breach. Breach certainly does not have the manpower or the territorial control to be an unwilling enforcer. "It's not just us keeping them apart. It's everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We're only the last ditch: it's everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don't blink. That's why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn't work. So if you don't admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it's not your fault, for more than the shortest time... you can't come back from that." So it is a statement of how all social codes work, and the role of enforcement. Highest recommendations, again.

first read – 28 February 2010 - ***** The setting of this book is a vague somewhere in South Central Europe. I'm Croatian-American, and have traveled some to areas from the Czech Republic to Bulgaria, and a lot of the countries between. I thought I had the setting narrowed down to the Dobrudja coastal area of Romania, but eventually the geographic and linguistic clues, taken together, exclude every real place. The place names and character names are not authentically in any specific language, occasionally betraying a sort of naive perspective of a writer from as far away as Great Britain. Maybe this is deliberate, but I doubt it. For example, in no language of the region, would "Tyador" be abbreviated as "Tye" - more likely the single-syllable "Tyad" or even "Dor". Probably this only matters to someone like me, but it was kind of fun trying to pin down the locale until that became impossible.

On the face of it, this is a murder mystery. The body of a murder victim is found near a public skate park in Besźel, and Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad is assigned to the case. As in good mysteries, the scope of the case grows more complicated and runs deeper that initially thought. However, Besźel is one of two cities in two different countries that exist on overlapping territory. I don't mean one on each side of the river, like my Grandfather's birthtown of Brod - but with detailed house-by-house zones that belong alternately to Besźel, or to Ul Qoma, or are in crosshatched areas that are in common. However, even within the crosshatched areas, a careful code of behavior allows citizens of one to unsee and unhear the citizens of the other with whom they may walk a sidewalk or drive a street. There is a mysterious enforcement known as Breach that all live in fear of. There is one location at city center where crossing may be made. It is possible for one to walk from one's house, go through customs, and return along the alternate version of the same streets - and because you would now be in the other country, speaking another language, and in a different frame of mind, you would not see your own house. In my understanding, there is nothing of parallel universes or that sort of thing involved here, although the reader is teased with the possibility during the first half of the book. No, people are raised to see and interact only with their own kind, to be unaware of the other - a situation that nearly in fact exists in some towns in that part of the world. Maybe in the UK and the US too?

I was unsure in which category of SF to count this. I'm tempted to say it's not speculative fiction at all, as it is not science fiction nor fantasy nor alternate history. The only speculative element is the extent to which the two cultures have ingrained in their citizens an inability to recognize the other, beyond what we practice in the real world, and the social institutions that support that world-view. It illuminates how social codes and laws are not matters strictly of enforcement, but of convention, expectation, and learned blindnesses. So I'm going to stretch things, and call it social sf. But I'm afraid the category pigeon-holes this book a lot more than it deserves. This should be treated as literary fiction, more akin with writers like Franz Kafka than to the SF genre. ...more

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Dec 04, 2010 Jeffrey Paris [was Infinite Tasks] rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is the book of China Mieville I have enjoyed most, to date. The creative tension brought about by the heavily metaphorical divide between the two cities (unseeing, unhearing, cross-hatching, breaching) is both thoughtful and mind-bending. Mieville carried off the ambiguity between a "real" and a "psycho-social" divide with panache, never failing to challenge the reader to observe these divides in our own urban spaces. But far from heavy-handed, the book is carried by a moderately plausible ...more

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Mar 20, 2011 Craig Brown rated it it was amazing

Truly fantastic book. It took me awhile to figure it out, the first 30 or so pages are VERY confusing, the reviews which explain the duality of the cities helped and as the book continues it starts to make sense, if it can make sense. Two cities, coexisting in the same space, yet now overlapping, but overlapping. You have to read the book to understand that sentence. I highly recommend this book. It is really a who done it that can only be written in this make believe alter reality world.

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Nov 23, 2010 Allan Fisher rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

SCORE 9+

All I can say is what a mind blowing idea...What an imagination...I loved the way the concept behind this book was explored and continually expanded upon...and when you factor in the fact that it is also a worthy detective story it is not hard to see why it won so many awards...Brilliant!!

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