It was slightly less “spin in a completely new direction at each turn” than Iron Council (which is my favourite Mieville) and not as much of a mindfuck as The City & The City (tied for favourite), but yes, great stuff.

If you like it, and play roleplaying games, check out Unknown Armies from Atlas Games. It’s a game that does a lot of similar things with a bit more structure to make it gamable.

I read the first two chapters of china mieville’s the city & the city yesterday. I found it pretty interesting, especially the setting. It appears to be either a balkan country or perhaps a former soviet republic. The ambiguity allows the reader to fill in some blanks. One thing I thought about, though, was the way it mentions of the back of the book that the setting as “at the edge of Europe,” which means partially European, but partially something else, and in this gap is where mieville’s two cities seem to be.

could this be what Beszel looks like?

I have not reached any discussion of Ul Qomo yet, but I am interested in hearing more about it. I like Mieville’s style of writing, and I think I am going to give The Scar another chance, since I have heard from my friends that The Scar is his best novel.

Anyways, I will write a blog post tomarrow sometime, so look out for that.

peace out

I was going through some back issues of Locus that were lying around my house and, on a whim, took a look through the 2009 in Review issue.  I was somewhat surprised when I saw so many people going on about The City & The City by China Miéville.  When I say surprised, I don’t mean to impugn the quality of the book; more like I was surprised that, for once, I hadn’t been late to the party.  I read The City & The City way back at the start of fall semester when it first came out based solely on the byline on the spine.  I’ve been a Miéville fan for a while, something my father knew, and was pleased when he brought me a copy of his latest book.

The book itself is a strange sort of duck, very unlike anything else you may have read from Miéville.  It’s one of the grandest and most ambitious urban fantasies I have read, but has no magic, no alien worlds, no elves.  What it does have are two cities occupying a space maybe the size of Jerusalem, separated by customs, dress, language, and politics.  The residents have been taught, from birth, to simply ignore the other city, though it may be as close as the house next door, for there is only one official border, and crossing anywhere else is a serious crime.

I would recommend The City & The City to anyone as an enthralling work.  I had a hard time putting it down at night, and a harder time not picking it up when I had homework to do.

–

Meanwhile, my work continues on a pair of urban phantasies set in my more serious Weird Philadelphia setting (home of Marshall Celan and Project Red).  Time, soon, will be the judge of one of the stories, a piece which is now in final revisions after sitting on the back burner for a year, while the other one is partway through being a first draft.

A brilliant idea dragged behind a donkey-cart of a plot.

Re-reading my review, I was struck by the similarities between Mieville’s book and the book I am currently reading : You Are Not A Gadget – A Manifesto (2010) by Jaron Lanier.  The opening chapter of Lanier’s book warns of the perils of what he calls ‘lock-in’, which is a kind of technological reification whereby arbitrary design choices made early on in the development of a technology then come to define that technology because by the time a better design comes along, it is impossible to re-engineer the entire conceptual architecture of the technology.

The example Lanier uses is MIDI – a technology that handles digital music from the viewpoint of a keyboard player.  To whit, notes are static entities and are related to each other by going one up a scale or one down a scale.  Unfortunately, not all musical instruments work in such obviously digital terms as pianos, for example violins and trombones (as well as the human voice) allow a smooth progression up and down the scale.  They are not naturally ‘stepped’. However, because MIDI is now locked-in to the way computers handle music, music software that does deal with non-stepped instruments is necessarily based around a fudge – the smoothing out of a musical scale which, conceptually, is all about going up one step to one note and down a step to another note.

This seems to me quite analogous to Mieville’s view of culture – The characteristics that make up the shared conceptual and linguistic references that make up a culture are ultimately arbitrary but we treat them as though they are locked-in.  Locked-in by time, by our sense of identity and our will.  The City & The City‘s wider conceptual point is, it seems to me, that culture is never locked in.  We simply believe it is.  We convince ourselves that it is but the truth is that the potential for radical (revolutionary?) change is always present.

ISBN: 978-0-330-49310-9

China Miéville

Reviewed by Geoff Nelder

I could see, then unsee, why this is science fiction and yet not.

This book arrived on my shelves enveloped in controversy. It had just been awarded two science fiction awards, nominated for more, and yet journalists were asking if it was really science fiction or just a crime novel with added dimensions. If I thought it was akin to when Margaret Atwood is in denial of her obvious-to-most science fiction writing, then I’d be wrong: China insists that everything he writes is science fiction and that any discussion of such niceties is ‘silly’. But it isn’t silly when he wins awards set aside for science fiction works.

Reading the blurb, I was both pleased and gutted. Pleased anyway because I relish China’s love of the art of writing. I am not one who thinks the author should be invisible and there are phrases China uses that makes me stop and admire his skill. Pleased also because of the premise: two cities occupy the same physical space and yet the occupants of one city ‘cannot’ see those of the other; nor their buildings and vehicles. I was gutted because it seemed to me this is a story where parallel universes meet at a city-size intersection, and I wanted to write such a story. The two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, have different architecture, language and social mores yet share knowledge of the rest of the world. So they all know who Tom Hanks is, and can travel to the same Britain, Canada and the US.  The notion of parallel universes and a possible intersection is certainly a concept within the bounds of Quantum Physics and hence science fiction. For an undeclared reason it is illegal for the citizens of either city to see each other. It appears that if this happens they commit a breach of protocol and a particularly powerful body called Breach punishes them. This becomes complicated because how can someone drive along a road that is in both cities but has to unsee vehicles and buildings belonging to the other city? Accidents happen and Breach swoops. To me there are many contradictions in this aspect of the plot – it is too easy for naughty children to throw stones at windows of either or both cities, committing Breach all over the place. CCTV is referred to but the logical consequences aren’t. That is: how can anyone view a photograph of the city without noticing cars, people and buildings from the other city?

But wait. First let’s praise where it is due.

Mostly, this is an extraordinarily well-crafted crime story with three main characters – police from the two cities – who are alive and credible. You can tell who is talking from their speech patterns and mannerisms, faultless. Love the idea that a policeman from one city is needed to help solve a murder that takes place in the other. The victim is crucial to unravelling the mystery of the two cities and it seems there are groups eager to keep the secret. China does a terrifically moving job of making the two detectives distrust then come to admire each other, in their own way. Brilliant. Generally, an author has his work cut out to describe one unique city so that the reader believes they are there, but here two cities are created in the same spot. Excellent and original. I would have liked more flesh on the character of the protagonist, Borlu. We are told he has two women, who don’t know each other but we feel more for his assistant. There are times when he should be scared stiff yet isn’t. When his Breach officer is shot, he should have been worried that the other Breach would suspect him but he seems to be unaware. I like his character though I think I made up more than was revealed in the novel.

You need to have a good imagination to appreciate The City & The City and to keep having one to the end. It isn’t a light read even though it is fast paced. I’d like to say that I walk about my own city (Chester) wondering if I am in another parallel city but hadn’t noticed before. Yes, we all go through life half blind to architectural niches in a too-familiar town, but it isn’t the same. The inhabitants of both cities in TC&TC have been indoctrinated from birth to unsee the other and know they have been. This is hard to take on – it lacks credibility in a modern society with TV and international travel even with a tough Breach enforcement.

If having two different cities occupying the same geographical space isn’t hard enough there may be another, Orciny, which was there before the two started. There is a hint that an alien force created the conditions for Beszel and Ul Qoma to develop separately and unseeing from the ancient original. If anyone discovers the truth there could be disastrous consequences – in my imagination and with Quantum Mechanics in mind, I thought perhaps the true knowledge of each other might snuff out one or both. Rather like a Schrödinger Cat experiment. Because of Breach and indoctrination, such thoughts are outlawed, but there are factions. Great geopolitics here, with groups wanting unification, others demanding either Beszel or Ul Qoma as the true city.

Before I say why the ending disappointed me, I have to praise the writing. Breach are specially trained security – they are expressionless, reinforced to make them different to the normal police of either city. “Their faces were without anything approaching expressions. They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.”

Phrases I wished I’d written: “Silence went through the room, leaving itself behind.” “…was addressed to me, prisoner, condemned, consultant.” The juxtaposition of opposites there very well done, and when you read it in context, apt.

Maybe it is because I jumped to the parallel QM conclusion too early and eagerly waited for such an exposition, I was becoming anxious near the end. By half way I’d written it differently – I’d have had the messing with the seeing / unseeing of and by the citizens of each city create a sudden coming to a mathematical point, an elimination of one or both. In the end, nothing so exciting (for me) happened. It kind of fizzled out as if China didn’t know how to finish the novel – an outrageous point of view I know, and improbable. Right from the start, the QM aspects kept the book firmly as Science Fiction. Then, in the last few pages we find that it was all a con. No parallel dimensions, no QM, Breach and the indoctrination is all that keeps the two cities going. What? That to me is far too contrived. I cannot believe a dual system kept in place by force and culture like that. Fair enough, Apartheid kind of did, but in an obvious way, not with unseeing and all the contradictions that throws up. I am disappointed at the end, but I would struggle to say the novel isn’t Science Fiction. In many ways it is with the original concepts, alt history, and possibilities.

The City & The City is a great crime story for readers with intelligence and admiration of lateral thinking. Maybe it is worthy of the Clarke Award, but I hope it isn’t a sign that future Science Fiction will follow suit. Not that I want all my SF reading to have aliens and rockets, but I don’t want to watch a film of Raiders of the Lost Ark to end with a ‘sorry there was never an Ark in the first place’ either.

These last two additions complete my James Rollins collection for the most part, at least with his “non Sigma Force” novels.  Now to start working through it.

Will be interesting to see how this epic story develops in the form of a graphic novel.  Hopefully it’ll be as good as The Dark Tower graphic novel series.

I’m looking forward to this as, apart from winning awards, it’ll be my first China Mieville, who I’ve always wanted to read.

Congratulations to China Mieville and all others who made the shortlist which can be viewed on the Arthur C. Clarke Award website!

~Heidi

This could be a major year for Miéville — The City & the City had already won the BSFA Award for Best Novel, and I’m almost certain it will win at least a couple more awards. And deservedly so — it’s a very good book, genuinely unique (as far as I can judge), and one of its author’s best.

A good winner of a literary award should, in my view, be a book that you could give to any reader interested in quality fiction and say, ‘You must read this.’  The City & the City is such a  book. You won’t read another book quite like it, you won’t read the same book that I (or anyone else) did — but you should read it.

Index of my Clarke Award 2010 posts

The favourite to win the Clarke this year is The City & the City. This is a fascinating, innovative novel (the first, as far as I’m aware, to engage so explicity with the crtical taxonomy of fantasy that has emerged in the last fifteeen years), possibly China Miéville’s best-written to date. I like it very much… but I don’t think it should win. The reason I don’t think it should win is that the Clarke is an award for science fiction, and The City & the City doesn’t make sense if read as sf — one is forced into an unsatisfactory psychological interpretation. However, the novel does make sense — and is much more interesting — if read as fantasy (see my review for more on this); I’d be happy for it to win any fantasy awards for which it may be nominated, but I don’t see it as a good fit for the Clarke.

I intended to review the entire shortlist, but, in the end, I’m one title down. The reason I haven’t written previously about Gwyneth Jones‘s Spirit is that I really struggled to get to grips with it. I grasped the basics of the story, but there’s so much else about which I’m not sure that I can’t see my way to giving the novel a proper review. Why I experienced this difficulty, I don’t know; maybe it was because of all the associated books I hadn’t read (Spirit is a re-interpretation of The Count of Monte Cristo, and is connected to both Jones’s earlier Aleutian Trilogy and her Bold as Love sequence), maybe something else. Whatever, though I’m not able to comment on Spirit in detail, I do gain an impression of a significant work.

Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson combines fictional historical biography with far-future sf, to what I found was mixed effect. It is an excellent work at times, but tries one’s patience at others, and its two aspects don’t integrate as well as they might. But there’s a lot about the book that I know I missed (I didn’t pick up on all the sbutext, for example), so I’m quite willing to accept that Galileo’s Dream is a stronger book than I found it to be, and hence a strong contender for the Clarke.

There’s also a lot about Adam Roberts‘s Yellow Blue Tibia that I know I missed — but, all the same, I thoroughly loved it. Of all the shortlisted title, this is the one I enjoyed the most, both for its humour and for what it does as a work of imaginative literature. I can’t judge in full how successful it is, because for that I’d need more knowledge of its historical setting, and the science fiction with which it engages — but it’s worthy of winning the Clarke as far as I’m concerned.

Finally, Marcel Theroux‘s excellent Far North, which is my other pick of the shortlist. A post-disaster novel which is less about the effect of change on the world than itseffect on humanity, this is a quiet book that makes its point subtly and with force. It works superbly as an aesthetic whole, to a greater extent than perhaps any other novel on the shortlist. A win for Far North would be thoroughly deserved.

So, I’d most like to see Roberts or Theroux be awarded the Clarke this year, but, really, it’s an open field, and I would not like to predict who will win. The winner will be announced this Wednesday, and I look forward to finding out whom it will be.

A murder investigation between two cities. Amazon’s #8 in Best of 2009.

Except.

The world Mieville creates here is a piece of inspired idiotic madness that I hated and loved to fucking pieces. I hated the idiocy of people living right next to each other being forced to “unsee” the things that were right there. But I loved that we’re seeing these cities through the eyes of a person who believes in the boundaries and their importance. It would have been so much easier to do this story from the point of view of a character like the reader, someone who doesn’t get the boundaries between the two cities, who would have to have it explained. But that would have been so unsatisfying in comparison. The way the book is written, you’re gradually introduced to the idea of the two cities because it’s normal. The narrator doesn’t say “This is so weird!” because that’s our role as the reader. By the time we get a tourist character who behaves the way you or I would in this mad city, we’re on the narrator’s side, but we can see ourselves in these interlopers.

This is a book I feel like I’m going to need to take apart to see how he did it so beautifully. Through the whole reading I was thinking “how could this possibly have happened?” and the book stays resolutely away from giving us an answer. Even though archaeologist characters abound. Speculation about the nature of the Cities fuels the whole thing, and even though it couldn’t possibly work in real life, the book states as fact how it does. And he does it in such a way you believe it. So fucking good.

Even though I read it in 2010, this was probably my favourite SF novel from 2009. Although looking at my shelves a bit more closely it was probably only the second SF novel I read published in 2009. (The other was Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids, see my review here, which was very good in plausible worldbuilding kind of way but lacked The City & the City’s compelling story.)

This organization, Breach, is so powerful they could act with utter impunity, but if it’s not an emergency they have to follow the rules and be asked to handle things. I like this common idea of powerful entities having rules to follow. Vampires can’t cross running water. Police need a warrant. Breach must be asked. But. I don’t care about the little guy breaking the rules. In fact, I expect it, and get sort of sad when the powerless person doesn’t try doing something other than follow the rules. I’m having a weird time with how few people agitate against Breach in The City and the City. There are some, but I keep on wanting to shout at everyone, “You can see things! You shouldn’t have to unsee them!” But it’s a book and the characters (thus far) are well enmeshed in their setting.

A lot of fiction I read deals with the individual and celebrates the individual, especially in the face of power. For example, there’s an article I linked to a long time back about Murakami always wanting to be on the side of the egg not the wall, and you know how I feel about Murakami stories. Yesterday I watched a National Film Board movie from the 60′s called “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen.” He was all young and bright-eyed. In one bit Pierre Berton is trying to get young Leonard Cohen to say what he stands for, what great idea drives him, what issue burns in his soul. And Leonard Cohen says, “No idea; I just check if I’m in a state of grace.” His companion explains that Leonard Cohen is talking about the task of the individual to live one’s own life, but Leonard Cohen is sort of dismissive. I like that.

Of course, it’s easy to “identify” with the powerless when you’re a white guy with a beard and a Mac.

If you’re looking for book recommendations, you can visit the blog of our venerable Book Goddess year-round.

However, whenever December rolls around, you can’t cross the street without tripping over a book list.  “Top 10 of 2009,” “Best Books for Your Holiday,” “Best Books of the 00′s…”  They’re everywhere!

Here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting lists out there.  To see more information about the books, click on the name of the list.  To request a copy from our library (if available), click on the title of the book.

NPR – Librarian Nancy Pearl’s 2009 Under-The-Radar Books

• Spooner by Pete Dexter
• When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler’s Journey of Staying Put by Vivian Swift
• The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
• Liar by Justine Larbalestier
• Going Bovine by Libba Bray
• When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
• In the Town All Year ‘Round by Rotraut Suzanne Berner
• Bubble Trouble by Margaret Mahy
• Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile by Sara Wheeler

Amazon – Best Books of 2009 (Editors’ Picks)

• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
• Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
• Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad
• The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
• The City & the City by China Mieville
• Stitches by David Small
• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba

Publishers Weekly – Best Books of 2009 (Top 10)

• Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
• Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
• A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
• Big Machine by Victor LaValle
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
• Stitches by David Small
• Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
• Jeff in Venice, Death in Veranasi by Geoff Dyer
• Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

New York Times – The 10 Best Books of 2009

• Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Maloy
• Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
• A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
• Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Wells
• A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
• The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
• Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr
• Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed
• Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka

Of course, the list wouldn’t be complete without my own list!  While they’re not all new books, I truly enjoyed the experience of reading them, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend any of them.  Have a question about one of them?  Email me at krabillb@mycitylibrary.org and I’d be happy to tell you more about it and why I liked it.  In fact, I’m always happy to give book (and movie and music) recommendations!

My Favorite 10 Books Read in 2009

• Stitches by David Small
• The Impostor’s Daughter by Laurie Sandell
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
• Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr.
• Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach by Laurence Leamer
• Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith
• Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
• The Seduction of the Crimson Rose by Lauren Willig

What’s your first book of 2010 going to be?  I’m leaning towards either A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore or How to Rule the World From Your Couch by Laura Day.

Happy reading!

** Britta**

By China Mieville

* Publisher: Del Rey
* Number Of Pages: 336
* Publication Date: 2009-05-26
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0345497511
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780345497512

Product Description:
New York Times bestselling author China Miéville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other–real or imagined.
When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.
Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.
What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.
Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.
____________
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Despite being a bit too long, I enjoyed listening to Random House’s new audiobook recording of China Miéville‘s second novel, Perdido Street Station, read by John Lee. Perdido Street Station is Miéville’s first novel set in the steampunk world of Bas-Lag, a strange world populated by plenty of bizarre races and even more bizarre “Remades,” persons who have been forced (or in some instances have chosen) to restructure their biological makeup to perform (very) specific jobs. This sci-fi adventure story centers around protagonist Isaac Van der Grimnebulin, an overweight renegade scientist trying to perfect a new technology he calls “crisis energy.” Isaac is trying to help a Garuda named Yagherak who, as a form of punishment, has had his marvelous wings cut off. To this end, Isaac experiments with a strange caterpillar that feeds off of an hallucinogenic drug called “dreamshit.” Unfortunately, the caterpillar turns into a giant dream-feeding, brainsucking moth that, along with its relatives, terrorizes the city at night. Isaac tries to stop the moths and save his girlfriend, an artist with a bug’s head. Lots of picaresque adventuring ensues.

Miéville’s Bas-Lag world is finely detailed and richly imagined, and will no doubt appeal to anyone who digs H.P. Lovecraft or William Gibson. Miéville certainly has a handle on both of his many concepts (artificial intelligence, the nature of bodies, difference and (literal) alienation), and his story unfolds with the thrilling clip one expects from pulp fiction. Still, the book felt overwritten to me. Miéville never settles on just one adjective if two (or three) come to mind, and he’s in love with adverbs (oh the adverbs in this book! Is there a sentence without one?). And while exposition of a sort is certainly necessary in a novel about such a profoundly strange world, I think that Miéville would get a bigger payoff if he trusted his reader a bit more. Perdido Street Station feels rhetorically claustrophobic, as if Miéville is afraid to let his reader imagine even a little of Bas-Leg for him or herself. It’s a bit selfish, really. On the whole though, a great read (or listen, in this case), and it intrigued us enough to go straight into Miéville’s latest book, The City & The City (also newly released this summer from Random house, also read by John Lee).

The City & The City combines noir detective fiction with one of science fiction’s greatest gambits, namely, positing something utterly implausible, unimaginable, and then making it ordinary. In The City & The City, two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupy the exact same geographic space, yet their citizens are trained from birth to “unsee” and “unhear” all aspects of the other city. Inspector Tyador Borlu is drawn into the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman (is there an older trope? Edgar Allan Poe even wrote an essay on why and how you should use beautiful yong dead girls in your literature). His investigation leads him into crossing the border between the cities, an impossible border, of course, and yet the genius of the book here is that, through Borlu’s narration, the reader doesn’t experience this bordercrossing (and its attendant “unseeing”) as satirical or even ridiculous; rather, we witness the uncanny alienation of double consciousness. Miéville, a Marxist, is working in part from some of Althusser‘s ideas, and he’s not afraid to namedrop Foucault or Žižek. Thankfully, however, Miéville not only knows his theorists, he knows enough not to let theory get in the way of a Chandleresque murder mystery that explores themes of surveillance, alterity, and what it means to see someone seeing you seeing them seeing you (seeing them seeing you . . .). Great stuff.

I'm a guest panelist at Readercon 2009 and working on my assigned reading, which includes China Miéville's "The City & The City."  I never managed to finish "The Iron Council" a couple years ago, so I groaned a little upon ordering Miéville's latest novel.  Silly of me.  My biggest mistake in reading "The City & The City" was starting too late in the evening to finish the book in one sitting.  Alas, my eyeballs turned into bloodshot pumpkins at midnight and I had to wait to discover "who done it."

One might consider "The City & The City" as being set in a parallel world.  Yet the sense of place is so real.  As I read the novel, I visualized the eastern edge of Europe in our own world, and stretched my imagination to make room for the cities of Ul Qoma and Besźel.

As the novel opens, an unidentified woman is found murdered in Besźel.  Unknown at the time, she was a foreign graduate student working in Ul Qoma.  Ul Qoma and Besźel both are sovereign with restricted passage between them.  Their cityscapes–with some shared areas–intertwine, complicating the subsequent investigation of the crime.

Residents of Ul Qoma and Besźel learn from an early age to see what happens in the city they are located in and "unsee" what doesn't–even if they must unsee something several feet away from them.  Sounds impossible to believe?  Miéville pulls it off.

Miéville has given "The City and The City" strong forward momentum.  His protagonist, Inspector Tyador Borlú of Besźel's Extreme Crime Squad, is sympathetic and compelling.   Miéville has created a plot as intricate as his two sovereign societies and marvelous city sights.  The only downside I noticed was in the paragraph structure of some of the dialogue.  I had to reread some sections to ascertain the identity of the speaker.  All in all, I highly recommend this wonderful and literary piece of speculative fiction.

Repeat warning:  this book is hard to put down, a real page turner.  Start reading "The City and The City" many hours before bedtime.  Your eyeballs will thank you.

Laurel Anne Hill

Author of "Heroes Arise"

http://www.laurelannehill.com         

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The City & the City by China Miéville (2009)
The City in These Pages by John Grant (2008)

Here are two fantasy-inflected police procedurals, or perhaps two crime-flavoured fantasies, or perhaps both. The two texts offer interesting approaches to mixing crime fiction and fantasy, yet in some ways they are polar opposites.

***

First, to China Miéville’s new novel, The City & the City. (I’ve been reading discussions on this book by Niall Harrison, Dan Hartland, and Adam Roberts; I’ll be referring to them a few times in this post.) Two things you can almost guarantee of a China Miéville novel are that it will have an urban setting, and that it will play games (albeit probably with serious intent) with genre. And here, indeed, we get both: our setting is somewhere in the region where Europe and Asia meet, in the fictional cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, which are unique in that they overlap in physical reality.

(Technically, this is a spoiler, but I reveal it because it makes the book more interesting, and because Miéville reveals it himself forty or fifty pages in. Actually, it’s possible to work out what we’re dealing with before then, because the very first chapter mentions an area called a ‘crosshatch’. Now, ‘crosshatch’ was coined as a critical term in the Clute/Grant Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997); it means a region where different realities intersect — and, in this novel, crosshatches are the points where the realities of Ul Qoma and Besźel become intertwined. Like Jeff VanderMeer in the comments on Niall Harrison’s post, I’m not sure why Miéville feels the need to employ misdirection over this: if you know what a crosshatch is in a fantasy context, there’s no mystery; and if you don’t, the first-person narrator is happy to spill the beans soon enough, so why does he pussyfoot around to begin with?)

Anyway, the cities overlap, and it’s possible to sense both of them at once. It’s not wise to do so, however, because if you cross the border illegally (and there’s only one place to cross legally), you will have committed ‘breach’, and the mysterious forces of ‘Breach’ (more distinctively different names would have been nice) will take you away and… well, nobody knows, but you won’t come back. So people in both cities try their best to ‘unsee’ the other place.

(Another aside, but I found this ‘unseeing’ business rather wearying. It’s very tempting to read it as a metaphor for the way we ‘unsee’ people in our own lives — indeed, the instinctive ’pull’ towards this metaphorical reading is as strong as any I’ve felt in a long time — but I don’t think it holds up to close examination. To generalise, the people we may choose to  ’unsee’ tend to be [so we believe] worse off than ourselves; but the default ‘other’ in The City & the City is Ul Qoma, which is better off than Besźel. And actually, we don’t really ‘unsee’ people in the same sense; we ignore them, we might even pretend that they don’t exist — but that’s very different from actively trying not to perceive something, as happens in Besźel and Ul Qoma.

(My point here is that I’m left unsure whether I’m supposed to take this metaphorical reading seriously, and there are problems either way. If I am, the metaphor doesn’t work; if I’m not, it’s intrusive. Miéville is surely too canny a writer not to know that this reading is possible, but why make it so noticeable if it doesn’t work? Unless he’s making a point about metaphors themselves, in which case, I wish he’d found a less annoying way to make it.)

Back to the story: our narrator is Tyador Borlú, a Besź detective investigating the murder of a young woman who turns out to be an Mahalia Geary, an American archaeology student, working on a dig in Ul Qoma that was looking at artefacts of the mysterious Precursor civilisation that existed before the two cities became conjoined (whether Besźel and Ul Qoma were originally two cities that fused, or one that split apart, is unknown). Mahalia, it transpires, believed in the existence of Orciny, the third city rumoured to exist in the interstices of the other two, and thought by most to be superstition. She also seems to have made enemies amongst the myriad extremist political factions of the cities. Borlú’s investigation takes him not only to Ul Qoma, but on a journey of discovery to the very heart of his reality… but you’d expect nothing less, would you?

Some negatives: Miéville’s prose and characterisation seem… not so much lacking as unsatisfying; these may be consequences of the story he has chosen to write. There are, of course, moments of very effective writing (on the contrast between the office and the crime scene: ‘Black tea and bread and paperwork, the boredom and striplights, all so much not like the peeling back of that wet-heavy, cumbersome mattress, in the yard, in the dark’), but on the whole, the prose seemed so restrained that the individual cities didn’t come to life in my mind. There’s much more spark when Miéville is writing action and describing the intersection of realities; maybe it’s that the investigation format restricts the author’s opportunities to write those kinds of passages.

In terms of characterisation, Tyador Borlú’s voice comes through as a voice, while nevertheless exhibiting Miéville’s signature style. But Borlú and colleagues feel somewhat flat; they don’t seem to have much personality (though this may be because the narrative is so focused on the investigation that we don’t get chance to see the characters ‘in the round’), nor are they distinctive enough individually.

Be that as it may, the real interest of The City & the City lies elsewhere. Between them, Harrison, Hartland, and Roberts raise two related issues (at least, to my mind they’re related) that get at the heart of what I think is most interesting about this novel. These issues are how far it is possible to accept the fantasy notions as existing in the real world; and how well the modes of fantasy and crime fiction work together. And most interesting about the novel for me is what I think Miéville is trying to do with the fantasy: to take something fantastic, and make it part of reality — and not just in the sense of ‘what would it be like if..?’, but in a truly fundamental, formal sense.

Niall Harrison and Dan Hartland both have problems ‘believing’ in the overlapping cities, or at least in the cities’ existing in our world. I was trying to pin down exactly what they meant, when I realised there was an unspoken assumption in their discussion: it seems to me that they assume the conjoined cities are a product of shared delusion, that Besźel and Ul Qoma are one city, and that the ‘boundaries’ between them are just in people’s minds (so are all place boundaries, technically, but I trust the distinction I’m making is clear).

Now, it never entered my head — and still doesn’t — to think that the situation in the book is anything other than as literally described; I assumed, and still assume, that Besźel and Ul Qoma are two places whose realities are intertwined; their inhabitants don’t have to ‘believe’ in the relationship between the cities, because that is how things are. So, from that point of view, I have no trouble accepting Miéville’s basic reality, because he imagines it solidly enough.

Why do I assume all this is ‘real’ and not delusion? Because of the words Miéville uses: ‘crosshatch’ is the clearest suggestion that we’re dealing with physical realities here, but there are subtler hints. The author makes other critical terms into everyday words (I spotted ‘alterity’ and ‘equipoise’, to name two); people talk about ‘invoking’ Breach, as though it’s not clear to them whether that agency is supernatural or not, or whether that makes any difference. This all seems to me an attempt to deliberately blur the lines between the fantastic and the mimetic, at the level of the text itself; and in that respect, I think it works very well indeed.

(This is not to imply that I have no problems with Miéville’s reality-building; I do have trouble accepting his characters’ response to their reality. I can’t believe people would have the discipline to keep ‘unseeing’ things for hundreds of years; the sheer effort would surely be too great, not to mention that it’s impracticable (you have to be able to dodge out of the way of traffic from either city, for one thing). I also can’t believe that the rules of Breach, shown as they are to be absurd and morally reprehensible (Breach will come down on you like a tonne of bricks if you accidentally stray across the boundary, but will leave the most heinous crime untouched if it didn’t involve actual breach), could have lasted for so long without protest. Perhaps this is Miéville’s comment on people’s unthinking adherence to unjust rules; if so, it’s too exaggerated to have real impact.)

Then there’s the issue of crime versus fantasy, and whether there need be a ‘versus’ at all. Roberts in particular argues that the two modes don’t really work together in The City & the City; and I agree with him — but I also think the novel depends on that being so. I’d agree that the fantasy keeps the pages turning more than does the mystery (certainly I was gripped the most when I was reading about the fantastic elements); but the two are bound together as tightly as the cities themselves. The mystery element plays into and, to an extent, subverts our expectations of the fantasy — and, ultimately, eats away at the fantasy until all that’s left is a core.

The City & the City works well enough as a detection: it has the requisite plot twists, and the denouement is as satisfying in its unmasking of the villain — but that’s all. The fantasy element is by far the most interesting part of Miéville’s novel; and his stripping away of the fantasy to bring the crime story to the fore means the book loses some of that interest. It’s a case of a book which is fine at what it does, but still makes one wish it was doing something else instead.

***

John Grant is another writer who’s not afraid to push the buttons of genre to see what happens (and, by coincidence, he was one of the editors of the very same encyclopedia in which the critical term ‘crosshatch’ was coined); that quality is richly displayed in his novella The City in These Pages. As its title suggests, this is an homage to Ed McBain’s ’87th Precinct’ novels — though it soon becomes rather more than that. The basic story is that the boys of New Amsterdam’s 14th Precinct have a serial killer on their hands; they dub him the ‘Humor Guy’ because of the darkly comic nature of his modus operandi (the first sees a local crime boss found inside a giant condom, for example). The killings grow more and more incredible, until the Humor Guy turns himself in, claiming that the world itself is not as it seems…

I’ve read only two Ed McBain novels, but all the same, I recognise enough of the similarities Grant’s novella shares. There’s no need to be familiar with McBain’s work, though. For one thing, the style of prose Grant uses here is a joy to read; rapid-fire, with tongue nicely in cheek (‘[the cops] watched in close-up the stationary back of a truck belching pollution at them. It was in town to deliver farm-fresh organic produce for the health benefit of everyone whose lungs it was corroding’), I’d say it’s more successful than Miéville’s style, in its different way. Characterisation is broad-brush, and sometimes feels awkward (one of the cops occasionally ponders some Big Questions, which proves necessary for later in the story, but still jars a bit with the way the rest of his character is presented), but they’re still engaging, thanks to Grant’s humour.

The crime story is… not really a crime story at all (there is a ‘crime’, in a sense, but it’s not the one you think it is). Certainly it’s not a detection as such, because the protagonists don’t undertake a proper detective process — the Humor Guy calls all the shots. In short, the crime story isn’t the point. What is the point is the fantasy, and here Grant excels. I’ve read quite a lot of his fiction and, enjoyable though I often find it, I sometimes feel that, if I know where he’s coming from, I might be able to see some of where he’s going. Not in this case.

The City in These Pages swings from humorous police procedural to grand cosmic speculation — as I kind of expected it would. But, just when you think you’ve got it pinned down, it wriggles free of your grasp and does something else. Even now, having read it, I can’t decide on a definitive interpretation of what happens. The novella offers many ideas to fire the imagination, of which I’m prepared to reveal one: you know all those brief period of life that you can’t recall in detail — boring journeys to work, and so on? What if those periods of time ‘escaped’ and someone else could live in them? Grant’s skill in juggling ideas like this, and all the other elements of his story, makes for a remarkable novella

***

Let’s conclude by asking once more: do fantasy and crime fiction work well together? Based on these texts, in one sense the answer is ‘no’, because neither is comfortable with being both genres at the same time: Miéville sacrifices fantasy to tell his crime story; Grant uses crime fiction as a springboard into his fantasy story. On the other hand, the friction between fantasy and crime has produced a couple of fascinating works here, even if those works aren’t entirely successful. Maybe a little antagonism between genres isn’t such a bad thing after all.

The City & the City has been nominated for the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Read all my posts on the Award here.

“China Miévilles The city and the city är FUCKING AWESOME“

(boken är lätt 5 gånger tuffare än den här tanten)

5/5 asbra!

/karl