China Miéville, The City & The City

[mmcirvin]

This is the most brilliant Miéville book I've read thus far, and it's in a very different vein from his huge baroque political fantasy novels set in the world of Bas-Lag. It's a nearly mundane police procedural with a wild scene-setting twist that he comes remarkably close to making believable. I'd actually describe The City & The City as, not fantasy, but classic one-free-assumption SF, the science in question being political geography. Fans of the Strange Maps blog must read this.

It's impossible to describe it much further without being more spoilery than many readers would like, so here's a spoiler cut. I'm not going to say anything about the solution to the actual mystery plot, but many may like to discover the details of the premise on their own.


The world of The City & The City is an alternate history, but only so alternate as any world with a fictional country in it (Ruritania, Grand Fenwick, Latveria, etc.) In this case, it's the oddly paired city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma, in a vaguely specified coastal region that seems to be somewhere in the southeastern corner of Europe, not that far from Istanbul. Besźel and Ul Qoma are sprinked around the same piece of land in a complex patchwork of tendrils and enclaves, somewhat like the real-world Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau in Belgium/the Netherlands, or Cooch Behar in India/Bangladesh.

It's even more intimate than that, though, since many public streets and other areas are "crosshatched" common territory of both states, with different place names in the two cities. And unlike those real places (though metaphorically like a lot of things we do every day), the people of Besźel and Ul Qoma (and even visitors) are all required to "unsee" the people and things in the city they are not officially in, a practice that they teach themselves by lifelong training and maintain under threat of disappearance by a frightening shared secret police force called Breach.

Against that setting, a Besźel cop investigating the discovery of a murdered Jane Doe ends up having to travel to Ul Qoma, which requires him to unsee the buildings and people he was seeing before, and vice versa, while walking around the same neighborhood he normally lives in. And it gets weirder than that.

The thing I love about this novel is that it would be so easy for Miéville to make it just a reductive allegory for the kinds of social unseeing everyone does, or just a thuddingly simple dystopian narrative about a totalitarian state, and he resists these temptations at every turn just by giving these places the flavor of real cities and states. Both polities have illiberal aspects even apart from Breach, but Ul Qoma is having an economic boom and enjoys a fair bit of prosperity, and Besźel, while depressed and crumbling at the moment, is at least nominally democratic.

The cities aren't really mortal enemies, or mutual un-cities whose residents are required to deny the other even exists. They have to cooperate to make this arrangement function at all. They have chilly but strangely normalized relations, and they even have a tiny official border that you can cross in one specific spot, provided you've gotten the visa and undergone the necessary training course to prepare you to unsee the stuff in the city you just left.

Both states are convinced that their existence depends on the weird unseeing rules, and Breach's authority is carefully constrained to existential breaching violations; they can't take over your murder case if the killers smuggled the body across the border at the one spot where it officially exists. There are unificationists who advocate for the dissolution of the system while trying harder than anyone not to commit breach, and right-wing nationalists who hate the fact that the Breach force exists even while relying on it to maintain the very distinctions they cherish. The United States has economic sanctions against Ul Qoma, for reasons that remain obscure, but is on good terms with Besźel. My favorite detail is that Besźel has an Ul Qomatown, where expats from Ul Qoma can hang out in quasi-Ul Qoman style and have Ul Qoman food while unseeing the actual pieces of their hometown that are right next to them.

In spots, Miéville's New Weird impulses threaten to break through, but he keeps them in check except for teasing hints. The origin of the double nature of Ul Qoma and Besźel is shrouded in mystery, millennia in the past, and archeological digs have uncovered Antikythera-like pre-Cleavage artifacts that are hinted to have mysterious physical powers, though this may just be crackpottery. Breach agents are initially described in terms that make them sound almost supernatural (and some reviewers even seem to have taken them as such), but this gets deflated later on.

Could this arrangement work in the real world? I doubt it, but stranger things have happened. Evelyn Leeper's review of the Strange Maps book noted that there was a murder investigation in Baarle that really did have to deal with a lot of jurisdictional snarls like some of the ones Inspector Borlu runs into. For me, Miéville's command of detail made it easy to suspend disbelief.


People keep comparing this novel to the work of Dick and Kafka, but it reminded me more of Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Borges--even though I'd be prepared to argue that it is science fiction.

Comments

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

I listened to this on tape on the plane to Bulgaria this summer, and then I couldn't help but see Sofia as the cities, mostly in the architecture.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the US embargo against Ul Qoma had to do with that siding (somewhat nominally) with the USSR. It was Ul Qoma that had the cyrillic alphabet, to Beszel's romantic alphabet?

I found this to be completely mind-bending, and as I wanted to wander off into considering the allegory of our own social un-seeing, I felt the fictional setting more interesting, and questions I had were eventually, in most cases, answered by the book as the plot proceeded. He did it so well that I felt the climactic "escape attempt" by a wanted character was weirdly believable.

And I thought the menace of the Breach agency was also suitable communicated. I agree that this has Calvino and Eco written all over it; Dick would involve convenient aliens, and I'm not sufficiently familiar with Kafka, except to note that what's usually compared to Kafka is bureaucracy taken to nightmarish extreme. I found no such thing in the Cities, imagining that, as it is permitted, visitors who pass the required test can essentially fake the activity of the Beszelians or Ul Qomans, and the worst risk is deportation by breech, in essense, for failing to do it.

One question remains-- Borlu legally entering Ul Qoma sees some Ul Qoman cathedral (or something like that) which he has been unseeing for years, and nearly says that he's always wanted to see it. When you snap a picture of Ul Qoma with your cellphone and then print it up, what did you take a picture of? Do people's poster-prints have black silhouettes where the other country enters the frame? Does Google Earth let you drop markers where there are points of interest in crosshatched areas? I recall the Ul Qomans had a considerable Chinese Firewall (evidently run by Breach).

Anyway, I read the unabridged audio version, and found myself parked in the car when I could be inside, listening to the book play in the car's CD deck. Wonderful read, and so good after my recent read of "Perdido Station."

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Actually, I got the vague impression that Ul Qoma had followed a sort of Titoist neutral strategy during the Cold War, whereas Beszel might have actually been a Soviet client.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's not clear. It's implied that Ul Qoma sided with the Nazis in World War II. It's Ul Qoma that uses the Roman alphabet, after an Ataturk-like reform in the early 20th century; Beszel has the alphabet that resembles but is not exactly like Cyrillic.

(I read one review that said that Ul Qoma's boom was happening because they were the ones that could trade with the US. It's actually plot-significant that it's the other way around. The reviewer had probably unconsciously flipped the situation actually described in the book to make it easier to explain from an American perspective.)

I got the impression that you could perfectly legitimately Google up pictures of stuff in Ul Qoma and look at them in Beszel. You just couldn't look at the places in person without making the official transition from one city to the other. But the question of alterity in the frame of an outdoor photograph is a good one. Maybe Breach is picky about outdoor photography in general.

That's one thing I forgot to mention, that the cities are explicitly hooked into a functioning modern Internet and there are cell phones, etc. (though calls between Beszel and Ul Qoma numbers are treated as international calls and go through a crappy, laggy link).

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I recall specifically thinking that Mieville was never handing the reader a neat and comfortable way of distinguishing either city based on its alphabet, its role in history, or its US relations, to fit either side, for example, of the Iron Curtain, or to fit any other major division that divides Europe. The only thing they have in common is that they're excluded from the Euro.

That the two cities exist is proof that they weren't behind the Iron Curtain, given that the Soviets wouldn't put up with that sort of thing, you can't un-see a tank, and the Soviets left a deep and lasting impression on everything they touched.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

If they weren't, that further raises the question of where exactly they are. I was thinking on the Aegean or Black Seas; dialogue implies that Bulgaria and Romania are nearby; but the existence of a seaborne refugee problem implies that it's more likely the Adriatic, maybe between Montenegro and Albania.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, while Ul Qoma has what reads to us as a vaguely Muslim-world flavor, its predominant religion seems to be a completely fictional one. It has some strange architecture too (helical towers, what seem to be inflatable structures with exoskeletal frames).

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I did notice that and think "Minarets, but not." I pictured the Cities north of where you put them, but still somehow in the channel that runs from Asia to Europe below the black sea. I missed the seaborne refugee issue.

I read a lot of Alan Furst, a living writer who writes very unusual spy novels of the WWII era in loose series of books called "Night Soldiers." With the exception of the first book, whose protagonist is recruited into the NKVD in the late 20s, his stories are about the exotic lives of people who lived through the war, but because of people they met, or were connected to by blood, or the access their jobs gave them, found themselves in the resistance, or in an intelligence network that might be connected back to England, or Poland or heaven knows where. The climactic events of The City & The City, combined with the close knowledge of events held by the uncommonly-informed characters reminded me greatly of Furst's books.

Furst doesn't set up any supermen who win the war singlehanded, either by intelligence coup or by action, but each makes a contribution, and also bears witness to the buildup and the war. Borlu was such a good witness to both the cities, and ultimately, to the threat that caused that big action at the end. It was way more satisfying than the analogous (as I see it) outcome of "The Yiddish Policeman's Union."