sawyl | The City and The City (Reply)

Like any good noir novel, China Miéville's The City & The City opens with the discovery of the body of an unknown young woman. In this case, the woman in question has been dumped in a skate park on the outskirts of Beszel, a down-at-heel place somewhere on the edge of Europe. And it is here that our detective, the lugubrious Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad, first appears. With the assistance of his enthusiastic sidekick, Constable Lisbyet Corwi, the Inspector does what every policeman does when confronted with an unknown body: tries to establish an identity.

But as the detectives' investigations unfold, it becomes clear that not everything in Beszel is what it seems. There are places in the city of Beszel — crosshatched districts — where two world seem to collide; where the events and citizens of Beszel overlap with the events and citizens of the Illitan city of Ul Qoma; and where a person's life depends on their ability to pretend not to see, to unsee and unsense, events occurring in the city not their own. Other locations are unique to each city and while these may be grosstopically close to each other, they are kept distinct and separate by a set of strict rules that prevent the denizens of one reality from breaching into another.

Acting on an anonymous tip, apparently from Ul Qoma, Borlú and Corwi discover are able to link the dead woman to nationalist groups in both cities and, even more confusingly, to a myth about a third hidden city called Orciny. This is enough to convince the inspector that the murderer must committed the murder by breaking the barrier between Ul Qoma and Beszel, and he appeals to the leaders of both cities to pass the case over to Breach, the mysterious force that monitors the divide between the cities and acts ruthlessly to quell any attempt to break the separation. But when new evidence comes to light suggesting the solution to the case lies in Ul Qoma, Borlú finds himself sent across the Besz-Ilitan border to be paired up with the excitable Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt.

The novel is real mix of influences. Borlú's detective story is obviously intended to be evocative of Chandler: a stoical detective struggling against the system to resolve the murder of a brilliant, promising young woman. The cities themselves, while intended to be read as imagined locations much in the style of Jan Morris' Hav, which Miéville acknowledges in his foreword, are, presumably, intended to be read as loosely analogues of former Yugoslav states, probably Croatia and Serbia, given the historical similarities.

In later sections of the novel, I thought I detected the influence of master semioticist Umberto Eco at work. Without giving too much away, the book plays with the nature of truth, how the truth can be just as dangerous and manipulative as a lie, and how completely our ideas about what we expect to see — or what we expect to unsee — manipulate what we think, the point where I wasn't at all sure whether the separation of the cities wasn't just a consensus constructed by the beliefs of its citizens.

Although I had slight doubts about the style of the book, especially in the first few chapters when I found myself struggling with the large numbers of accents (which, notice, I haven't been able to fully duplicate despite googling for diacritic marks and OS X) and with Borlú's slightly stilted speech patterns. But once I got into the flow of things I realised that Borlú's manner of narration was intended to give a sense of his character and nationality, particularly when contrasted with the swearing, motor-mouthed Dhatt, and really worked rather well.

In summary, I really enjoyed The City & The City, both as a detective story, a bizarre lesson in geography and, possibly, a strange lesson in the power of semiotics.