The initial setup in China Miéville's The City and The City is classic crime novel. A woman's body is discovered dumped amid the trash, practically naked and with no identification, in the dilapidated city of Beszel located somewhere in Eastern Europe. Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad is called upon to investigate the murder.
Neologisms offer the first hints of strangeness, that things aren't as straightforward as it would seem. The kids who find the body, for example, are called “chewers” of “feld”, whose ingredients include “fibreglass threads…to abrade the gums and get it into the blood”. Then Borlú “sees” a woman whom he says he should not have seen – yet it's not the paranormal world of spectres or spirits being invoked here.
Slowly we get it: the – invented – city of Beszel exists in the same space as the city of Ul Qoma. Citizens of each city are trained to “unsee” and “unnotice” each other. The boundaries between the two cities are absolute; to step without permission from one into the other is a terrible crime, punished instantly by a shadowy, scary organisation called the Breach, whose powers far exceed that of either city's government.
Uncovered
The corpse turns out be an American post-graduate student who was working at an archaeological site, where mysterious objects from the cities' past are dug up. She was also known to make enemies, by asking uncomfortable questions about a fabled third city. And, though the body was found in Beszel, she lived in Ul Qoma - which is where the lines of investigative jurisdiction, power and control start getting very complicated. While the ominous Breach don't care about “normal” forms of crime such as murder, they do care, very much, if the boundaries between the cities have been violated.
The inventiveness of the novel has got a lot of attention; it has been short-listed for many awards and recently won the British Science Fiction Association's award for best novel, as well as the UK's most prestigious science fiction prize, the Arthur C.Clarke award, making Miéville a record three-time winner.
The well-deserved awards, interestingly enough, are for a book that's a departure from the kind of fiction Miéville is best known for: i.e. “weird fiction”, a genre that mixes science fiction, science, fantasy and uninhibited inventiveness to create such works as Perdido Street Station. Regular Miéville fans could well be startled by how faithful The City is to the police procedural crime novel; regular fans of crime fiction will be surprised by the strangeness that leaches into The City .
At one level, The City is a curiously haunting evocation of life in the urban sprawl: the atmosphere of the decaying city, the concrete tenements and rattling tramcars, and the smell of unease. It also evokes the contemporary urban zeitgeist : divided cities such as Jerusalem, for instance; or a polyglot capital such as London that effectively functions as multiple cities within a city; or the levels of surveillance in a repressive regime.
Crime first
But first and foremost, The City's intent is to be crime novel, if an unusual one. If a writer has written enough – as Miéville has – then the book's narrative should stand on its own – as The City's does – rather than as a convoluted metaphor for something else. The allusions and metaphors we read into it come afterwards.
If the idea of the city is central to many of Miéville's works, the unusual achievement of The City is how he returns to it in both fantastical and familiar ways. For Miéville sets his invented cities within the world we know – Beszel/Ul Qoma exist alongside London and Bucharest, for instance, and there's even a sly reference to the Terminator movie. Then he subverts the familiar logic of contemporary urban life, and the divisions between his cities are seen to be extreme cases, one, of the arbitrary borders that separate nations; and two, of our experiences of limiting what we choose to see and whom we interact with, within the busy urban lives we lead.
It is a complex idea to sustain over the course of an entire novel: overlapping cities that intersect intimately, but are quite separate. Miéville pulls off the feat, thanks to some scrupulously precise yet highly evocative writing. He allows the reader – like a character in the book – to explore at many levels what it is, to “live in both the city and the city”.
The City And The City; China Miéville; Pan Books.
