The City & The City: An Appreciation

I suppose this could be taken as a symptom of family dynamics—my family's dynamics. Midway through China Miéville's novel The City & The City I raved about this terrific book to my daughter. 

She told me she'd read it. She'd read it and loved it ten years ago when it first appeared. She'd read it, loved it, and clearly recalled recommending it to me ten years ago. 

I have no recollection of our conversation. I managed to be entirely oblivious to the book and the author, a well-known and prolific British fantasy (?), science fiction (?) writer, for ten years. Meanwhile. The Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, and Publishers Weekly named The City & The City a Best Novel of the Year. It won the World Fantasy Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Hugo Award for best novel.  

What took me so long to catch up? My only excuse is that the world is full of terrific books and you never know where or when you'll find one. And, again, this is one.

I came to The City & The City via a four-part BBC mini series of the same name. It's a police procedural in which a young woman's body is discovered dumped in a trash heap and Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad is on the case. But we're in Beszel, a city that looks like a decaying Eastern European city. We learn almost immediately the woman is American and was actually killed in Ul Qoma, another country. And now things become interesting.

Imagine a city like Berlin before the wall came down. East Berlin is poor, grubby, and decrepit—that's Beszel. West Berlin prosperous, thriving, all stainless steel and glass—that's Ul Qoma. Now imagine the residents speak two different languages (think Jerusalem), have entirely different histories, economies, customs, and do not like or trust the other. Finally, imagine the residents are taught from birth not to see the other country; the residents of Beszel literally cannot see the citizens or the buildings of Ul Qoma across the street.

The BBC The City & The City series is so well done and the setup so interesting, I bought a copy of the book. It's better. Had I read the book first, then seen the series, I'd have been disappointed by the changes the writers and producers had to make to convert the Beszel and Ul Qoma story into something that could be shown in four hours. The novel is richer, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying than the TV show.

It's more satisfying because Miéville is able to do things on the page that are difficult or impossible to do visually. Borlú is, in some ways, a stock police detective who has seen too much, is an honorable man in a corrupt world whether in Beszel or Ul Qoma (as a young officer he spent enough time in the country to have learned some of the language and the customs). He's dealing with (among others) nationalists who want to destroy the other city and unificationists who want to make the two cities one.

An important institution in the novel and the TV show is Breach, an all-seeing (think high-def video cameras with facial recognition software), all-powerful super secret police force that maintains the peaceful separation between the two cities. Violate Breach and you can disappear. Breach gives the story a dark and threatening ground because a citizen in either city can breach the separation between the two inadvertently.

So what starts as a relatively straightforward murder mystery opens up into a meditation on what we know, what we can know, how to pass from one reality to another, and how to make sense of it all. And with all this, Miéville never loses control of the language or the story. If you've managed to miss The City & The City for the last ten years, look up the BBC series, then read the book. Trust me—and my daughter—on this one.