The City & the City

This tightly-plotted murder mystery takes place in one of the most compelling imagined settings I’ve ever encountered: a double city somewhere in the Balkans where the inhabitants of each half are required by law not to see the inhabitants of the other half.

Equal parts Kafka and Philip K Dick, Miéville’s The City and the City offers a thought-provoking meditation on the haves and have-nots, as well as life in the Balkanized cities of the world, those “double places” where one-half of the population conspires not to notice the other half.

A brilliant detective story set in three cities, the city you live in, the city you know about but must not see, and the city that will destroy you if you trespass unknowingly.

The detective must navigate the seen, the unseen, and the unseeable in trying to track down and hold responsible a murderer.

This story gets us to rethink what we see and deliberately overlook in our own lives and the price we pay for choosing not to see the truth. I was enthralled at how Mieville cracked open reality and the price paid for understanding.

The speculative twist is brilliant – two cities that exist in the same place, but whose citizens are taught to ignore one another’s existence.

When someone breaks this rule to commit a murder, it is both disturbing and revealing. This is a great murder mystery that also raises difficult questions about social divisions and the ability of humans to ignore what is right in front of them.

I have read many China Miéville novels and, for me at least, they never disappoint. That said, I have singled out The City & the City because of one overarching characteristic of the two cities in which the book is set, that – even though they share a border – the inhabitants of either can never admit that the other city exists. Throw in a murder on one side, and a detective from the other, the whole idea of repressed awareness plays with the concept that what we perceive makes our world, even when such perceptions are put aside for… show more.

This book inspired me to morph my real-world research into a fictionalized account of an urban future. Mieville heads the “new weird” movement based on a type of urban, alternative-world fiction. A murder mystery wrapped inside a fantastical, dyadic city. A city divided physically, but also psychically as residents of the overlapping cities learn to “unsee” each other in their day-to-day affairs. Takes the two worlds of real-life unequal cities to its extreme and absurd level, where the “other” physically exists but is not acknowledged in the eyes of the non-other. Brilliant, illuminating fiction.

Anyone familiar with this novel will see its influence on my own book. Mieville executes a perfect murder mystery against the backdrop of two cities that share the same space. Citizens are taught to unsee or unhear the other city whenever it interferes with their own, but it's possible to simply step from one city into the other, and there might just be a third city sharing the same location.

Miéville once more challenges conventional narratives in this crime noir, with Inspector Borlú investigating the death of a young woman in the city of Beszel. However, Borlú quickly discovers that the victim was a resident of Ul Qoma, a parallel city that coexists with Beszel in the way that conjoined twins occupy the same body. They share the same geographical location, but only insofar as borders permit. The only way to cross these invisible borders is through a stringent immigration process.

What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase between two cities, where inhabitants have been taught to ‘unsee’ what is happening… show more.

The City & The City is a police procedural novel in the style of Joseph Waumbaugh or Ed McBain. The Weird setting supercharges the jurisdictional barriers that are a staple of police novels and increases the power of the mystery by positing a literal “unseen world” for the detective to navigate through. 

The twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma exist side by side, sharing the same real estate but separated by an epistemological divide. The inhabitants of each have learned to “unsee” the other, consciously suppressing their awareness of the nation next door. Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel… show more.

I wanted to finish with this book, because this novel really is all about the location. The city and the city of the title are the twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, which exist side by side, or perhaps even in the same space, somewhere on the edge of Europe. Besźel feels old, dowdy and run-down; Ul Qoma feels smart and shiny. Despite being virtually intertwined, the residents of each take no notice of each other – in fact, it is illegal to do so, and a good deal of everyone's headspace is taken up with managing not to… show more.