China Mièville’s The City & the City is a wonderful blend of two genres: fantasy and mystery. The mystery is in the plot. The fantasy is in the setting. Though, with Mièville, the fantasy is of a particularly weird variety. This novel takes place in two cities that overlap each other, Beszel and Ul Qoma. When I first read about this book, I wasn’t sure how the two cities were put together. But it sounded so original that I wanted to read the novel to see how it worked.
Turns out that the cities are intermingled with each other. The citizens of one city just “unsee” the residents and the buildings of the other, and vice versa. Children and foreigners have to be taught what to ignore and what to pay attention to. It’s a very odd premise, and without Mieville’s care and details, it sounds a little stupid, like two people refusing to speak to each other and ignoring each other as hard as they can. The further you get into the book, the more absurd it seems. For example, the cities can blend together on the same street (which has two names depending on who you ask) and in one building, some rooms will be in one city and their neighbors in another. If you’re wondering why the residents don’t give up and merge the cities, it’s because of an organization called Breach. If a citizen breaks the boundaries–by talking to some one in the other city or crashing their car into something in the other city–Breach takes them away and they are never heard of again. The fear of Breach keeps people in line.
The mystery starts out like any other, but it gets progressively weirder and more complicated as the novel goes on. Tyador Borlu, a Beszel detective, is called into a crime scene. A young, unknown woman has been found dead. As he and his team investigate, they find out that the girl was from the other city, Ul Qoma, and that she was into conspiracy theories. Like I said, the mystery gets more complicated as you go on. I don’t think I can do it justice, since Mieville does a fantastic job of laying out the clues so that the plots becomes more clear and the setting becomes more rich.
When you think about it, there’s really two mysteries for the reader. There’s the ostensible plot of the book. And then there’s the mystery of why the cities split in the first place. The academics who’re working on an archaeological dig in Ul Qoma theorize that the cities either split or merged some time in the distant past. The reason is unknown. Personally, I think they split, because something about the way that the citizens ignore each other speaks of anger to me. It must have been something awful for them to still not being on speaking terms after an unknown number of centuries. That little puzzle is almost more compelling than the actual mystery. It makes me hope the Mieville writes another book about the cities so that I can figure out what the hell is going on. The ending in particular makes me wish I knew the origins of the cities and Breach.
SPOILERS AHEAD
You’ve been warned.
One of the things that I really liked about the book was its ending. When Borlu finally catches up with the guys who done it, a breach-riot breaks out. Unificationists in both cities start to acknowledge each other. Breach–which turns out to be smaller and less evil and bureaucratic than you’d think–has its hands full trying to restore order. For a few pages, I thought the cities were going to merge. But then Borlu joins up with them and helps separate the cities again. By the end of the book, he becomes a member of Breach.
I said before that the premise, until you warm up to it, sounds kind of stupid. It’s so much work to keep the cities separate, with little to gain, that you have to wonder why people keep it up. I was happy when I saw that the cities might merge. Then I might get answers about what happened to split the cities. On the other hand, I’ve been along for the ride with Borlu and wanted to see him succeed, too. A very odd experience, rooting for two opposite things to happen.
‘Course, I would have been disappointed if this book had had a conventional ending, and I would have thought that Mieville was losing his touch.
SPOILERS END
I seriously hope there’s a sequel to this.