Unseeing is believing

The City & The City, by China Miéville

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China Miéville’s second book, Perdido Street Station, made his name by reimagining fantasy as thoroughly as had M. John Harrison’s Viriconium or Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. He followed it with two more novels set in the same world, and a children’s fantasy (Un Lun Dun) that was hailed as an instant classic and made the New York Times bestseller lists.

The City & The City, however, has not a single monster, demon or alien. It is, at first glance, a straightforward police procedural. When a murdered woman is found dumped on waste ground in Beszel, a rundown city somewhere on the eastern edge of Europe, Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad realises that she comes from the neighbouring city of Ul Qoma, a more prosperous metropolis reminiscent, perhaps, of the modern sections of Istanbul.