The City and the City – China Mieville - 3 October
Starting positively the book throws you straight into the fantastic, and highly original, idea of two cities existing coincidently both side by side and in places overlying each other. The two cities share characteristics and can be seen by each others citizens but those citizens must endeavour to “unsee” the other city. There is the ever present threat that if they fail to do this, they will commit “Breach” and Breach will come for and take them. Breach along with the debatable nature of the cities existence – is this a physical reality that there are two cities, existing in the same time and space, or is it more of a psychological Berlin Wall situation, are unexplained and un-understood, even by the citizens of the cities. These ideas are not over explained or deeply investigated. They are accepted as the phenomena of everyday life, while the cities themselves have distinct identities and different economies.
Within this setup, which perhaps surprisingly is located within a recognisable wider modern world, the reader is then taken into a classic murder mystery, the answers to which hinge on the premise of a supposed third city, existing between or even before the current two. The murder is investigated by the upright, fundamentally decent police inspector, Borlu, and is complicated by the fact that the victim appears to have been murdered in one city but left in the other one. The victim, a foreign student, was also investigating the myth of the third city. Borlu is an inspector in Bezel, which is portrayed as the shabbier, less advanced, poorer and more exotic city – its atmosphere is a mix of run-down ex communist eastern European, while its twin Ul-Quma is shinier, more up to date, modern and better resourced.
The consensus of the group was that the first part of the book which introduces us to these ideas and themes was nicely done and atmospheric, setting the scene well. However, we further agreed that after that the book became rather laboured, and not a particularly good thriller. Although we were grateful for the character of Borlu, a decent jobbing copper without any of the usual hang-ups which so many of fictional police seem to be burdened with. +We wanted to like it better than we did. But the police procedural wasn’t engaging enough, and the information about how the cities cross over and interlink were repetitively over explained deadening the impact of the novelty, while failing to explore these concepts in more depth.
There were a lot of ideas to consider about these ambivalent, ambiguous, co-located cities – themes of identity for citizens, immigrants, and refugees; political and national identities, and how these are established and maintained through culture, architecture, language, religion, alphabet/writing and food. However, the novel does not follow these up after the introduction of these possibilities in favour of the detective noir trope. Following the zesty introduction to this world the novel became laboured and even to a certain extent bogged down with the need to progress the investigation. To us this suggested a lack of confidence in the ideas, and a certain amount of caution which we wished had been thrown to the wind. We also felt that the story became over burdened by description and explanations about the duller aspects of the narrative, when we wanted to explore more of the esoteric, weird, even sci-fi aspects than those of the crime novel. However, while we were somewhat disappointed by this book, which many of us had looked forward to reading, we also agreed that one of the great strengths of the reading group is that we all read books that we would otherwise not have picked up. Even when a book may not live up to anticipated expectations, it is well worth reading different writers. And in respect of this read, more than one of us intends to try other works by this author.
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