The dish

The City & the City.

China Miéville’s The City & The City, co-winner of the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel, takes the idea of the split city – Berlin, Budapest, Jerusalem – to an entirely new level, one where the boundaries are less geographic than psychic. His novel takes place entirely within such a metropolis, where a murder in one part involves the police in the other and eventually invokes the shadowy authority that governs the tenuous territory that connects them.

Besźel and Ul Qoma are twin halves of a whole city, one with a nebulous history that at some point split the population into two groups, with distinct governments, religions, and customs, albeit two languages that appear to be almost the same aside from their alphabets (as with Serbian and Croatian). Citizens of both city-states are taught to “unsee” everything from the other half – buildings, vehicles, people. Streets may be “cross-hatched” – located in both Besźel and Ul Qoma – or may include adjacent buildings in different countries, with salients from one side jutting out to include one Besź building between two Ul Qoman ones. While residents of one country can walk partway into the other, they are expected to unsee any foreign elements there, lest they “breach,” a psychic trespass that calls up the third power, called Breach, that can simply “disappear” anyone shown to have thus ignored the barrier between the two nations.

That setting is by far the most fascinating aspect of The City & the City, which is otherwise a fairly straightforward political thriller/murder mystery. A body is dumped in Besźel by a van that was stolen and apparently crossed the border from Ul Qoma, where the murder was committed. A legal manuever through the one true border crossing (a central building called the Cupola) keeps the investigation away from Breach and in the hands of the Besź Inspector Borlu, the narrator, eventually, an Ul Qoman counterpart who helps with the joint investigation when the trail leads back across the border. The investigation involves a sort of forbidden archaeology that hints at the shared origins of the city-state and the long-rumored existence of a third society, called Orciny, that exists in the spaces between the other two nations, people who would be unseen by both Besź and Ul Qoman people alike, and who’ve inhabited such spaces (called dissensi) for generations.

While review quotes on the book’s cover refer to Chandler and Kafka, Miéville never quite evokes the paranoia of the latter or the panache of the former. Breach is discussed, and eventually its agents appear, but it acts with clear rules and within clear boundaries to its authority – the story is marked by Breach’s refusal to investigate the original murder because the crime occurred beyond its jurisdiction. There’s no sense of foreboding here, or of patently unfair or arbitrary rulings; when Borlu is taken off the case, it’s not as if he’s suspended for no good reason or without an explanation. Miéville creates a wildly compelling setting, with a deeply consider geopolitical construct and even some clever portmanteaux to express it (although it took half the book for me to get some of them straight), but the story he layers on top of this milieu doesn’t measure up to it in depth or imagination.

Next up: Corinne Willis’ Hugo winner, the comic time-travel novel To Say Nothing of the Dog.

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