The City and the City by China Mieville
Rate and review The City and the City! | What does everyone else think?
Review by George Roesch
I was pleasantly surprised by the latest from China Mieville. For a while anyway. I was about 50 pages in when I realized it was all grown up. No gun-slinging cacti, or flying birds with no wings. Just people. Full blooded three dimensional people filling up the City of Beszel. Or was it Ul Qoma? It seems through an incident referred to as “The Cleaving”, the city became two cities. But not in the usual way. Somehow they became two cities on top of each other. They physically take up the same space and time, but are not truly in the same location. For example, the fashions, the language, the cars, and the food are all different. Confused yet? Maybe this will help:
“If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besz dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.
But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Beszel, and at the end of the hall come back exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street that they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, invisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.”
The City and the City
So in a nutshell, if you are in Ul Qoma, you would have to make an international call to your next door neighbour in Beszel that you would have to “unsee” all day since they lived in another country. And if you did the unthinkable and wave a friendly “Good Morning” to that neighbour you would invoke “Breach” and disappear. Oh yes, there is a mysterious power known as “Breach” in the cities that no citizen dares cross.
Overall I found this to be an extremely well crafted novel, with a fully realized story. China’s style and love of language again made me marvel and long for more. All I could truly wish for was less philosophy and more clarity. I found myself rereading passages over again trying to understand the rules of “unseeing” and “Breach” to no true satisfaction.
Strangely enough, I had thought changing the scene from the New Crobuzon world to our own would give China more of a personal identity. Unfortunately for me it made him feel even more like Neil Gaimen’s little brother.
The City & The City (Amazon.co.uk)
Author: China Mieville
Binding: Hardcover
Number of pages: 312
Publication date: 2009-05-15
Publisher: Macmillan
RRP: £17.99
Lowest new price: £6.08
Lowest used price: £3.69
Certain writers absolutely defy categorisation – and China Miéville is most definitely of that rarefied company. His prose is exhilarating, poetic, coruscating with ideas and atmosphere – and it has enhanced a body of work that has almost no parallels in modern writing. Heretofore, if Miéville has brushed shoulders with any identifiable genres, they are those of fantasy and science fiction – which makes his remarkable new book, The City and The City, such a surprise. The author's publishers compare this novel to Philip K Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984 – which at least gives a series of corollaries for this book, however tentative. There are elements here of the crime thriller, but very much refracted through Miéville's highly individual imagination.
The body of a murdered woman is discovered in the remarkable, crumbling European city of Besźel. Such a crime is par for the course for Inspector Tyador Borlú, who is the premier talent of the Extreme Crime Squad – until his investigations uncover evidence that bizarre and terrifying forces are at work – and soon both he and those around him will be in considerable peril. He must undertake an odyssey, a journey across borders both physical and psychical, to the city which is both a complement and rival to his own, that of Ul Qoma.
Like all of China Miéville's work, The City and The City will not be to everyone's taste – the very individuality of the prose and the surrealistic inventiveness will not attract those preferring more prosaic fare. But for readers who hanker after untrammelled imagination – and look for literary fare unlike anything they have read before (even, it has to be said, by Miéville himself), then this is a journey to be undertaken. But with caution, perhaps. --Barry Forshaw
Amazon.co.uk Review
The City & the City (Amazon.com)
Author: China Mieville
Binding: Hardcover
Number of pages: 312
Publication date: 2009-05-15
Publisher: Macmillan
RRP:
Lowest new price: $18.50
Lowest used price: $40.98
When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Bes el, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he probes, the evidence begins to point to conspiracies far stranger, and more deadly, than anything he could have imagined. Soon his work puts him and those he cares for in danger. Borlu must travel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own, across a border like no other. With shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984 , "The City & The City" is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.
Product Description
Submit your own mini-review
Let people know what you think about The City and the City. You can write your own mini-review and give the book the rating that you think it deserves. Your reviews will go towards giving The City and the City its overall rating that will decide where The City and the City finishes in the top 100 fantasy books of all time.
Books you may also enjoy...
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
After I was introduced to Tim Powers through his Cold War fantasy, Declare, I attempted to track down his earlier works at libraries and used bookstores. Several proved impossible to find. Among these was the novel that first made him famous: The Anubis Gates, so eventually I gave in and bought a new copy. Now, having read it, I understand the reason for its rarity: no one in their right mind would relinquish a copy of such a marvelous book! ... read the full review
Summary: The Anubis Gates is the real thing, a classic.
Before the Gods by KS Turner
This is where it all began. Everything. Love, hate, good, evil, us and them. This is before they were gods. A mute prophet, a damaged sensitive, and a wayward leader, hold the fate of the world in their hands. But the ultimate choice? That belongs to the innocent. It’s what started the battle for life. It’s what made our world the way it is today. I have heard them called many things: Strangers, gods, angels, visitors. Do not forget their real names, Because they know our pasts and are not as we’ve been told. ... read the full review
Summary: A work of speculative fiction that is as refreshing as it is accomplished.
Also in this sub-genre...
Book of the Month
Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson
On the Letherii continent the exiled Malazan army commanded by Adjunct Tavore begins its march into the eastern Wastelands, to fight for an unknown cause against an enemy it has never seen. The fate awaiting the Bonehunters is one no soldier can prepare for, and one no mortal soul can withstand - the foe is uncertainty and the only weapon worth wielding is stubborn courage.
Latest interviews
Interviews plus question and answer sessions with authors, narrators and publishers.
Must-reads
The following reviews are of books that begin the very best fantasy series available.
Competition: Win Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars trilogy
Alyss, born in Wonderland, is destined to be a warrior queen. After a bloody coup topples the Heart regime, Alyss is exiled to another world entirely, where she is adopted into a new family, renamed Alice and befriended by Lewis Carroll. At age 20 she returns to Wonderland to battle Redd and lead Wonderland into its next golden age of imagination.
Special Feature: Fantasy Book Review talks to the Book View Cafe
Book View Cafe is a cooperative site created by a group of writers - including internationally renowned authors Katharine Kerr, Ursula Le Guin and Vonda N. McIntyre - who want to take advantage of the internet's possibilities for reaching a wider audience and to distribute their work directly to their readers. The Book View Cafe is a place where you can find free, original fiction plus the authors' best and out-of-print work for a fee. Fantasy Book Review spoke to Book View Cafe member, science fiction author and memoirist Chris Dolley in February 2010.
Special Feature: Understanding the author of Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll, the elusive author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, has been the subject of enduring fascination for the past hundred years. The destruction of many major documents about his personal life by his descendants has only magnified the mystery. Jenny Woolf's biography, published to coincide with the release of the new Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland film, lays waste to the myths and suspicions that have obscured Carroll's reputation by placing him firmly in the context of his own time.
