A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle) - The City & The City

A very different type of mystery which introduces the reader to an entirely new way of viewing the city as well as the city. Give yourself a couple of chapters to get acclimated and then hang on for the ride.

One dimensional characters are forgivable in this novel that finds its strengths in its setting and ideas.

Wanting to give nothing about the plot away I will say that the murder mystery central to the plot is the least interesting part of this novel. The setting is what shines, the imagery bold and detailed and the mechanics of the world that Mieville creates are well thought out and detailed.

That being said, the thing that most blew my mind after finishing this novel was the fact that, if looked at as sort of just an alternate history, nothing actually supernatural happens in this book at all. It is a thought provoking read, one that made me think deeply about culture and customs and how they shape our lives.

Plodded through the first half of this book and was disappointed by the whole
Storyline. I could kind of see where the author was going but he just didn't get there fast enough. It quickly became the boring book I read to put me to sleep. Did not have the strength to read the rest. Had to give up!

The City and the City is a thought-provoking book. It does so by placing a murder mystery in a very complex, yet intriguing setting. The City & the does a good job of keeping the reader engaged, by not only allowing the reader to guess and figure out what is coming next in the quest of finding the murderer, but also the novel allows the readers to ponder what it would be like to live in such a complicated world. China Miéville, does a good job by not wasting the reader’s time and getting straight into the mystery right from the first page and swiftly allows the reader to become engaged with the thrilling, hybrid city and the murder mystery of a college girl. The novel also puts forth the interesting concept of “unseeing” which is the way the two cities avoid intermingling with each other, yet they do, in the sense that how can one ignore something that isn’t there? Yet Miéville is able to maneuver with the concept in ways that make the reader dive deeper into the novel.
Miévile does a good job of leaving some things cryptic and allows the reader to use his or her imagination to figure things out. One example is the relationship of the two cities, Miévile allows the reader to speculate how the two cities were conjoined with one another, rather than giving a detailed explanation. This allows the reader to push further into the book in order to grasp a better understanding on how these two cities are connected. Nothing destroys the imagination and thought process like too many details does. The ability to drag out key details allows the reader a fuller engagement process, with more than a few important concepts mentioned but not fully explained until later in the novel. This makes the two cities and the murder mystery, more stimulating and keeps the reader putting together all the pieces of the puzzle until the end. But none more puzzling than the geography of the cities.
Geography plays a strong role in the novel. In this novel Miéville does a good job of diving into the details of the two cities presenting the geographical anomaly. The book takes place in two cities Beszel and Ul Qoma, in which they share a bizarre border and association. It soon becomes apparent to the reader that Beszel and Ul Qoma are effectively intertwined; some sections and regions are in one city exclusively, while others are completely interwoven between each other. A street in "crosshatched" parts of the cities can contain connecting buildings in different cities. This is the point in the novel where the pondering begins on how it would be to live in such an arrangement and how hard it would be to follow the norm. The division of the two cities is reinforced by the different style of clothing, architecture, and the way residents of each city generally carry themselves. Also enforcing the border between the two cities are the residents of the Beszel and Ul Qoma, who have been taught to "unsee" the neighboring city and its people.
Though Beszel and Ul Qoma exist in the same space, people in one city cannot intermingle with a person or object in the other city, the people, whether residents or visitors must learn a complex process of unseeing. Which is an intriguing process, because in the novel it has a situation where a driver must unsee the Ul Qoman car coming right at her, but will still swerve to get out of its way. Though unseeing is meant to ignore or block out the happenings in the other city, how can one ignore something that is there but not there? That is something that the reader deals with throughout, how can these detectives solve a murder by ignoring things that are right in front of them because they have to “unsee”. This concept is what made the story line exciting, the detectives were literally chasing someone who was right in front of them, but wasn’t.
As far as the mystery murder, Miévile does a great job taking the reader through a roller coaster ride in order to catch the perpetrator of the crime. The real interesting part of the novel is that the setting is in the same place but yet it’s not. The chase involves the detectives, Borlu and Dhatt, travelling through the same space yet different cities. The chase was really amusing in that they found clues in Bezsel yet had to travel through Copula Hall just to get back to the same place in Ul Qoma.
All in all, The City & the City was a very exciting, but it did lose some points by the end. Miévile ends the book with a lot of question left unanswered. It’s kind of like that movie you watch where everything is going well and you expect a huge climactic finish that brings closure, but the end just abruptly comes without any closure. Aside from the ending, Miévile does a great job maneuvering through the novel and allows the reader to input a lot of his or her imagination or thought process, the novel does a great job intertwining the murder into the bizarre, yet fascinating setting and should leave you satisfied.

I love reading science fiction and fantasy and I really wanted to love this book. Unfortunately, it suffered from the same ailment that plagues a lot of novels in the genre - nice backdrop and weak story.

The concept of the two cities was original and relevant. How many of us can relate to "unseeing" in our daily lives? And border issues / immigration are fairly common news stories in every part of the world. The writing was also good. It fit the noir genre and assumed the reader could read beyond a fifth grade reading level. So far so good.

So why didn't I want to read this book every chance I got to find out who did it? I just didn't care about the characters or what happened to them. No matter where a narrative takes place (a mars colony or around the corner), as a reader I want to be vested in the journey the protagonist takes to solve a crime, save the world, or fall in love. In a crime / mystery novel I usually either care about the detective or the victim and in this book neither one was really flushed out enough. I wish the author took as long developing the story and characters as he did building the two cities.

Don't even get me started on the ending...

After reading _Perdido Street Station_ and _The Scar_, I have found _The City and the City_ to be much more accessible. That is not a criticism, however. Mieville has created a fantastic world that exists within our regular world of cellphones, Windows PCs, and pop culture. The seeing and unseeing that the residents of both cities must do should keep grad students in literature busy for years to come. Again, that is not a criticism. The images and ideas of the novel linger in your mind even when the book is put away. If you like the novels set in Bas-Lag, you will also like this book. If you have not read Mieville before, this is a great starting point.

Good story, well written, interesting universe but nah, it didn't do it for me.
A bit to much focus on the unseeing bit i think. It derailed the story for me sometimes, it didn't draw me in as I had hoped when I read other reviews.

I guess Meville drew a realistic alternate world but so what? I felt after reading the story that I was missing too much. There were huge holes in the whys and wherefores of the story. I expected better. I don't like finishing a story and then asking myself why did I even bother reading the book. Thumbs down.

When my brother in law recommended this book to me, the concept sounded very interesting. Take away this concept and you have a murder mystery that is about as complex as a 'Murder, She Wrote' episode. I like the world-building and the made up dialect but the rest is forgettable.

I think your response to this book will depend on what you expect. I'd never read Mieville before and I'm not a science fiction/fantasy reader; I heard about this on NPR, as part of a review of unusual and good detective novels. I'm a big mystery reader and picked it up, and I found it really haunting and a lovely take on the detective genre. Unlike some reviewers, I didn't find the ending unsatisfactory; Mieville was, I thought, true to his setting and characters.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the China Mieville books I have read before and was actively looking for one I hadn't read when I ordered this. The basic premise: that one physical city has been divided into two political cities where the citizens of each are banned by law, under penalty of death, from recognizing, acknowledging, interacting with, or "seeing" the citizens, cars, buildings, or landmarks of the other - is more than a bit contrived and forced at the outset. By half-way through this book, it was intensely annoying. so much so that, if there is a clever twist or denouement at the end, I'll never read it.

Unfortunately, I have to say I was surprised that an author of this magnitude would fall into the tired trend of writing a screenplay instead of a book, replete with brand placement (Google, Coke, Starbucks, et al) which was not central to the story (even when considering it's contemporary setting). Perhaps this was all done at the behest of a publisher pushing for a movie deal?.
There was almost none of the fantastically surreal and wildly creative writing that Chia Miéville is known for. Instead, we get a predictable, 50's-style "hard boiled" whodunnit with characters cut from such a worn template, that a casting agent would be redundant.

If you're new to this author, I very much recommend that you do not start here. Begin with "Perdido Street Station" "The Scar" or "The Iron Council". They are all jaw-droppingly brilliant and most likely not like anything you've ever read before. Whatever you choose to read, do NOT base your opinion of this author only on this particular book.

The premise, that people could live side by side or even overlapping, and not cross the line to see the other under any circumstances, is not tenable. I could not get past the concept. This is the type of book that introduces too many characters with strange names, you have to have a good memory to keep track of who is who.

In The City and The City, China Miéville, branches out into a new form of genre fiction: the mystery. While past novels, like Perdido Street Station and the Scar, have firmly established Miéville as a scifi/fantasy superstar they have not been proving grounds for writing a good mystery. Miéville works in some of his scifi and fantasy tendencies by creating this city in a version of our own world and having it split. Citizens of each city are supposed to unsee each other. Effectively, they act as though they have blinders on and the other city is non-existent. If they do notice it or cross over, this is seen as breach, and a mysterious police force intervenes. The idea is a little compelling, but not compelling enough for three hundred pages. The city is what Miéville is most interested in, and the overall murder mystery becomes quite secondary.

Most of the dialogue in the book is poorly constructed. Characters speak to give the reader information. It's a poor attempt to move the story forward that hurts the novel in another way. Character development is as non-existent as the boundary between the cities. The narrator is not intriguing or endearing. We never really see his motivations beyond it being his job. Yet, he is working outside the system. He must have motivations. Often times the characters seem as though they've been created by someone who has watched a lot of police dramas. The other awkward area in this novel is the attempt to ground it in our present world. There is an internet, email, and all the big corporations that litter expressways with billboards. To what effect? The pop culture corporate name dropping doesn't add anything. It doesn't make the Cities any more strange by seeing them next to our world.

Miéville is an exciting writer who will most likely write more books. For the time being though, this is one to miss.

The City and the City by China Mieville

Science Fiction meets Police Procedural

I think it is fair to characterize China Mieville's The City and the City as science fiction so long as we understand that the science is sociology.

Tyador Boru is detective in the Extreme Crimes Unit of the Besz police department. Besz is a Slavic-speaking, Orthodox religious, parliamentary state - a city - located vaguely in the region of - I believe - Bulgaria. The clues are that it has an estuary and seems to be an area near Turkey, so I'm going with Bulgaria on the Black Sea.

Boru is called into a murder of an unidentified woman who the other detectives assume is "working girl." Boru has his doubts and begins his investigation by putting up posters of the woman throughout Besz. He is stymied until he gets an international call from Ul Qoma that hints that the girl may have had connections with the revolutionary element of Besz.

Boru is horrified by the call because the anonymous caller making the call from Ul Qoma has seen the posters in Besz and the phone call threatens Boru with Breach!

By that point, you should be hooked. What is "Breach"? Why is it so horrifying that someone from Ul Qoma saw a poster in Besz?

The answers to those questions involve an interesting bit of sociological world-building. Ul Qoma is the other "City." Besz and Ul Qoma intertwine around each other, sharing roads, dividing neighborhoods, often dividing buildings like a checkerboard. The residents of Besz and Ul Qoma are trained not to see each other or the other city by a process of "unseeing" and "unhearing," learning to step around each other on their common steps without ever acknowledging each other's existence. Residents of the older, more European Besz do not see the neon lights and tall glass sky-scrapers of Ul Qoma. Ul Qoma seems to have a Turkish culture, although the religion involves some adherence to the Light, which is not explained.

No amount of training could keep this society running and so the division of Besz from Ul Qoma requires Breach. Breach is mysterious. Is it a force, a paranormal element, magic? Breach is always watching. If a Beszi stares at something in Ul Qoma, they can easily disappear without warning. We get some answers to the question of Breach by the close of the book, but those answers do not resolve all of our questions.

I enjoyed the character of Boru. I thought he doggedly handled his assignment, putting together clues that were available for us to follow. Boru's investigation takes him to Ul Qoma, which means that he is walking the same streets but this time "unseeing" Besz. We learn that the murderer's have gone to extreme lengths to avoid any breach. We also learn that the murder seems to involve the mysterious precursors who set up this mad culture and have left behind a confusing mix of archaeological artifacts. I have no complaints with the police procedural elements of the story and it certainly works on that level.

But the book works exceptionally well on the "gosh-wow" level. What would it be like to live in a culture where you must ignore the plain facts before your eyes and pretend that things don't exist which clearly do exist?

I understand that Mieville is a Socialist, and I reckon that this book could be an extended treatment of false consciousness but I did not get the sense of receiving a political lecture. Nothing in the book offended my conservative sensibilities. I enjoyed the read and recommend it.

PSB

I never considered myself a reader who needed to have things spelled out for him. The City & the City makes me doubt that conviction.

Nearly halfway through the book I believe I figured out the "high concept" behind the two cities' interrelationship. Or at least I think I did. I'm still not sure if it was purely mental or also physical.

I'm also not sure I should have to work that hard to determine that nature, seeing as it was critical to the ultimate plot.

On balance, take away the bizarre trappings, and the story is your basic detective novel, complete with misdirection and twists. There's nothing bad about that scenario, just nothing groundbreaking. So maybe spending half the book just trying to figure out what was going on was good since it deflected focus from solving the mystery.

The writing style/structure was mildly distracting, as were the plentiful and unfamiliar names. Most of that passed after a few dozen pages, though, added to the time spent trying to determine the nature of the two cities, it likely caused me to get less engaged in the story.

An interesting diversion from my regular reading habits, but not anything that will prompt me to read more by the author.

I get the "hard-boiled" inspector, Tyador Borlu, and the parallel cities premise, the concept of unseeing, the notion of some in-between zone and all that. But the book was just too boring, overly complicated, and the constant banging on the f-bomb was pointless and seemed to compensate for a lack of quality writing. I tried hard to find some kind of allegory here with the modern world, alienation, the unknowable "other," Foucault, etc, but even as I staggered to the end (and I did finish), I just didn't care anymore about all that. I really cared a lot more that I took precious time away from reading something way better, like anything by Jose Saramago, for instance. Don't think this is worth your time either.

"The City The City" by China Mieville [July 23, 2016 - fantasy - 0714]

My reading experience with "The City & The City" (2009) by China Mieville was reminiscent of a long ago visit to a hall of mirrors. As you entered the surroundings were normal but as you proceeded down the hallways the distortions and faceted reflections became more apparent and disquieting.
The tale begins with the most common of crimes: a murder. A female graduate student, Mahalia Geary, is found slain near an archeological dig she was researching. The dig is adjacent to the border of two dissimilar cities - well, dissimilar is an understatement - think East and West Berlin during the height of the Cold War and a secret police not beholden to either city that monitors border violations and doles out punishments for violators in secret prisons.
The detective from Beszel, Tyador Borlu is directed to travel to Ul Qoma and work with his counterpart Qussim Dhatt. Think of a CIA agent sent to East Berlin to "co-operate" with the KGB to solve a shadowy murder investigation with political implications.
There is a lot going on in this book - the dig finds cryptic artifacts no on can make sense of, some believe strongly in a secret city, Orciny, "between" the contested cities and citizens are conditioned from birth to "look thought" any aspect of the opposite city.
To be honest Mieville books are an acquired taste - not to say he is not popular with the reading public - but his books are challenging but oh so rewarding.

Imagine a tale of two cities separated not at all by distance but by perception. Now insert a murder. This is China Mieville's formula for The City & The City.

The novel carries the reader through this fantastical framework by means of the familiar - a police procedural, complete with aging police detective Tyador Borlú, a slightly cynical bachelor with enough curiosity to prod around the edges of a murdered woman no one wants him to investigate.

On its face (faces?), the city is absurdity. Mieville constructs a fabulous mosaic of a city, a modern thing drenched in a dual history. Its details are rich and raw and completely fabricated. The conjoined-twin cities occupy some uncertain spot, perhaps between Turkey and Bulgaria. They are fictional uncertainties, yet vibrant ones with the hallmarks of Mieville's proclivity for settings richer and more engrossing than his characters. Mieville unveils this veiled place one neighborhood at a time, taking his time with the strange culture required to ignore the parts, pieces, and people of a foreign city that uses the same streets. He invents names and histories, even archaeological artifacts, that seem at once plausible and strange.

Mieville inserts twists on these real-world analogs -- where Ul Qoma seems Muslim in spirit, it's a strictly secular place with a recently thriving economy. Beszel is the run down eastern European world of bureaucrats, nationalists and “unificationists” who wish to see the split personality of the city obliterated. These tweaks give the cities more character, and thankfully skirt around the black hole of allegory.

The book is more powerful for it. The metaphor outgrows a tired East versus West analogy, and instead explores polarized identities so hard set against one another that they literally refuse to see, hear, and smell each other. The book seems prescient since its 2009 debut, though that’s more a testament to Mieville’s ability to capture human division more than current events.

Lurking in the cracks of it all is the Breach, an Orwellian threat everyone seems to fear should they break the convention of recognizing anything in the mirror image of their city. Breach’s strict and arcane law is prime, and Tyador comes face to face with it.

The mystery itself is intriguing, though not pulse-racing. More interesting are the perceptions Tyador and his rival city cohort wrestle with as they investigate. The book avoids navel gazing, but the thick and inventive writing force one to pay attention. This is a book to savor, layered with metaphor and intrigue, spiced with fantastic perspectives, without become intellectual medicine. It is a book not everyone will enjoy, but a rich and unique read for those who do.

The City and the City was my recent introduction to China Mieville based on a co-worker's recommendation. The story is highly original and complex, and I would categorize it as belonging to the detective genre. The characters in the story are well-developed and the plot is easy to follow despite the background in which the story takes place (I.e. the uniqueness of the two cities - Beszel and Ul Qoma - which overlap each other). The story begins with a woman (graduate student) being murdered, and the chief protagonist, Detective Borlu (of the city of Beszel), must navigate the complex relationship between the two cities in order to find who is responsible. Eventually, Borlu must work with his doppleganger from Ul Qoma to solve the case. The author skillfully takes the reader through the labyrinth that Borlu must go through to find the killer. I give the book 5 stars for its originality and for Mieville's excellent writing.

This book starts slow, and early on one could think it is merely a somewhat noir cop procedural. It's not. Rarely does a book linger with me as this one did. It's not sci-fi, and not really fantasy. Fitting it into any standard genre is not possible, or at least I won't attempt it.

Imagine a large city somewhere in the region of Hungary, in the here and now. Further imagine that two peoples lay claim to the same geographical space for "their" city. An undisclosed arbiter long ago imposed on the two peoples a scheme whereby both occupy the same geography, but members of each must "unsee" the people and buildings living in the other people's city. Entering the space -- or addressing a person whom -- one *must unsee, constitutes a "breach," which is taken more seriously than any crime, even homicide.

The entire scheme is an absurd conceit, but provokes a great deal of reflection on many things, such as the reality that all of us actually do "unsee" others all the time.

Also, this book is just a ripping good homicide story, with interesting characters. And you just know a breach will occur at least once, and when it does it's quite fascinating.

Five stars for a book is rare from miserly me. This one gets it.

[Edited to add: This was my first Mielville read. Looking at other reviews it seems prior acquaintance with the author can heavily influence one's reaction. The terse, Chandler-esque writing style is apparently not the author's usual. But it worked for me.

As with others, I felt some annoyance at the end, but elaborating would constitute a spoiler. Let's just say the work begs for a sequel and some explanations. But I affirm the five stars: the effect on me was profound, and I still frequently think about "unseeing" people, and what that would be like if raised that way and if compliance was mandatory.]

There’s no denying Miéville’s intelligence, ingenuity, and imagination: THE CITY AND THE CITY has at its core one of the most original concepts I’ve encountered in a long time. And he imbues his enigmatic world with a wonderful sense of elusive, arcane mystery. Comparisons with Kafka and Philip K. Dick are sometimes made when it comes to Miéville’s work and it’s easy to see why. This is, however, a little misleading as Miéville has a style and authority all of his own. His prose is assured and artful, although he does, at times, indulge a fondness for abstruse vocabulary, which might put some readers off. I enjoyed the TCATC but I still have reservations. For me the use of a whodunit structure was the book’s weakness. The police investigation never really gripped me as much as I would have liked and I was left with the sense that such a creative concept as that deployed here would have been better served by another narrative framework. That said, it’s evident that Miéville is a considerable talent, and I look forward to reading more of his work.
3.5/5