The City & The City, by China Miéville
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. This presents Borlú with the central difficulty of his investigation, and the reader with the central premise of the book, and its one fantastic element.
The separation between Beszel and Ul Qoma is strictly maintained and more than physical, though it is possible — by negotiating serpentine bureaucratic procedures — to pass from one side to the other through the precincts of Copula Hall, an administrative centre for both cities. To breach the border elsewhere is the ultimate crime, so serious that it is handled by a shadowy authority (known simply as Breach) against which there is no appeal, and whose sanctions seem limitless.
The cities, in fact, exist not only side by side but, in some fashion, cross-hatched upon each other: the inhabitants of both have learned from childhood to ‘unsee’ anything from the other side. Borlú’s investigations quickly bring him into contact with politicians, radical groups which favour either unification of the cities or stringent nationalism, and an archaeological dig in Ul Qoma where the victim (an American, it turns out) has been working on a theory that a third city, Orciny, somehow exists beside the other two.
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