The City & The City | ||||||||
China Miéville | ||||||||
Del Rey, 320 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Martin Lewis
Now he has moved East. The exact location of Beszel and Ul Qoma is unclear but they seem to nestle close to the
Black Sea, crowded in by more familiar European states. They are not two cities but the city and the city. They
co-exist whilst being utterly divided; not as East and West Berlin once did -- the comparison is laughingly
dismissed -- but more intimately:
Inspector Tyador Borlú is -- of course -- investigating a crime, a murder in Beszel that (we are
unsurprised) may have links to Ul Qoma. How then can he navigate the paths of a crime which take him into
territory that he must assiduously "unsee"? When a higher power than him polices the demarcation? The answer
is slowly and by degrees.
Early on, alone in his flat, Borlú eats a "pick-pick supper of olives, cheese, sausage" (p. 36) in order
to "cushion" the accompanying bottles of wine. The City & The City is like this for the reader: pick,
pick; tease, tease; slowly unravel. As Borlú chews over the evidence, we digest what we have learned of the
city (and the city). A gradual and total immersion takes place; only after we have sunk into the world
Miéville has created does the pace quicken and the thrill of the hunt begin.
Borlú's voice is our guide. It is toothsome and foreign without every being stylistically
ostentatious. To take an innocuous, almost bland example:
This is simply Miéville's finest work to date. Never before has he demonstrated such sustained control
over both message and medium. It is also -- and, given the venue this review appears in, I feel this needs
stating -- his least fantastic. You could read The City & The City as being entirely mimetic,
excepting the Ruritanian presence of the cities themselves. Yet at the same time it presents a world
which is odder, more unsettling than all the splendid monsters of Bas-Lag. While telling a noir story,
he has stripped away the pulp elements that were joyously present but also de-stabilising in his earlier
work and replaced them with a deeper strangeness.
Martin Lewis lives in East London. His reviews have appeared in venues including Vector, Strange Horizons and The New York Review of Science Fiction. He blogs at Everything Is Nice. |
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