The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 24 June 2015
by China Miéville
In what city do you live? Is your life different in your city from the life of a very rich person living in your city? For a poor person? For an artist? For a theif? For a man, or a woman? As much as the landscape looks pretty much the same for each of us, we each have our own experiences of a city, based on our identity, our activities and preferences, our dreams. Living in the Bay Area, I know that the city is a very different place for people living lives very different from my own. Are they, literally, different places? Can they be? One can imagine a dystopian vision in which the very poor are barred from even walking the same streets as the very rich. In some ways, this is already the case. So, ultimately, on the very same map, can you have two cities separated by mere identity? It is an intriguing notion, one potentially full of pitfalls for the story-teller. In this genre-bending novel, China Miéville explores this very idea, placing a straightforward police procedural in the fantastical cities of Bezél and Ul Qoma, two apparently present-day Eastern European cities that occupy the same piece of real estate. Miéville is often thought of as a science fiction author, but this is not necessarily a science-fiction concept, and he makes this clear by setting the cities firmly in a familiar wider world.
Tyador Borlú is a Besz police officer, on the case of a murdered woman found dumped in a poor part of town. What ensues is an increasingly complex murder investigation complicated by cross-border logistics that are not merely physical, but cultural and behavioral. The woman's story underlies the history of this bizarre construct, and the political climate that keeps it going, particularly the shadowy secret police of Breach, given the task of keeping people from even acknowledging the presence of another city, right where they stand. One doesn't want to expose too much about how these two cities work or are even connected to one another. Miéville gives us a slow reveal on the place, and one of the main pleasures of the book is in imagining how such a weird thing would or would not work. The author is careful to avoid metaphorically connecting this divided city with those with which we are familiar, such as Jerusalem, Cold War Berlin, Belfast of the Troubles, and other more subtly divided places. Beszél and Ul Qoma are not any of these places, but the notion of a divided city informs the reader's experience of the novel.
Raymond Chandler defined a certain kind of Los Angeles in his genre-defining noir fiction. Other authors, Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz cited here by the author, and, famously, Italo Calvino, have made the urban landscape key metaphors in their fiction. And so, Miéville defines another kind of city, the psychological city, the city of identity. It isn't as strange as it may seem. As in Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City each identity draws a different urban map. Miéville's deft treatment of this conceit shines a light upon familiar modern urban faultlines.
Of course, despite the extremely inventive structure of the landscape of the story, in the end it is the story that needs to hold up. This is a pretty basic police procedural, once the reader accepts the strange logic of its setting. Like many such books, the threads of investigation get tangled and a bit muddled from time to time. The investigation drags a bit, but by the end, the author devises a denoument satisfying and relevant to 21st century readers. Over all, a pretty remarkable novel.