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A review by sosers
The City & the City by China Miéville
challenging
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
It only took me a whole summer to finish this one! I gotta say, up front, this was one of the more challenging reads I've had in a while. It asks the reader to engage in a lifestyle choice/mission to understand what's going on. Granted, the characters in the story have had their whole lives to perform this request properly. There are characters that visit the plot's main settings and they need to take a course on the special restrictions of the twin cities the title of the book references, we are these less-than-ready tourists to Ul Qoma and Beszel: two cities that are PHYSICALLY sharing space but CONCEPTUALLY foreign countries with their distinct cultures, languages, and everything. The characters in the book "unsee" that which belongs to the other city and this conceptual backbone is rather fun. The difficulty is imagining the scenario play out, but the challenge is exciting and fresh, and then you think about real life examples of people being ignored even though they exist right in front of you: think disabled, homeless, or untouchable people of society. Therein lies a great metaphorical connection to the unseeing that MAY occur in the book, but the majority of "unseeing" is to protect people from the unseen police force called Breach. They're the surveillance state, they're the boogeymen, the thing that strikes fear into many people's existences and prevent them from acting up.
The formation of two separate cities stacked on top of each other, the creation event, the great schism, is unfortunately (or fortunately) lost to time and many have their theories, but what we know is that precursor civilizations have left artifacts from the past and scholars/archaeologists are trying to understand what these objects mean. Our catalyst for the story is a student who was murdered and whose body was found in an area she didn't belong to, and made more confusing because this is a foreign-born person come to study the twin cities' lore. Our main characters are detectives corwi, borlu, and dhatt, and the school team borden, nancy, yolanda, and more, and then secondary characters or main characters that appear later involve the ties binding all the players together: suspects, punk rogues who wish to unite the two cities, the surveillance boogeymen of breach, and the supporting cast in their respective detective settings. There's not a huge variance in behavior amongst many of the detective forces main characters, they're all relatively hardworking and always awake and ready to put in work, corwi is a little more stubborn and diligent, borlu is our protagonist so we explore through him, dhatt is classic boss who's tired of bullshit but still wants to solve things. The type of genre these characters normally belong to, the police procedural, is not at all in my enjoyment zone but in order to expand my knowledge, I needed to visit these archetypes. All in all, they were a fun bunch of intelligent, hardworking, mildly quirky detectives crossing borders and doing things in the usual way of legal until you run into dead ends and then you have to keep secrets or cut corners, classic detective story.
Where this story differed from the genre it pulls from is in the descriptors of the largest unmentioned characters: the two cities. Besz and Ul Qoma have divergent and convergent architecture, fashion modeled loosely after (correct me if im wrong) as christian-adjacent and muslim-adjacent cultures respectively, and the conceit of blindness to things and people that may be centimeters from your view. This book is largely carried by its novel concept and the truly deeply explored manner with which Mieville acts as tour guide through both cities. I love how detailed and forthcoming Mieville is with his geography and topology, the description of this new space and place was enough to get me to visit a genre I would never really willingly investigate.
At times, this book was very predictable given its detective story, and the main purpose for the "villains" kinda comes out of nowhere towards the end in that it's a megacorporation driving things and controlling specific players that even though you're introduced to them early on, the corporation isn't mentioned the whole time. I will stay loose here because once you do ascertain who the individuals on the villainous side are, you'll think "oh yeah I totally thought it was them."
The story is divided into 3.5 sections (the .5 comes from it having a coda at the end that is a short extension of part 3), each dedicated to a different location, and the bulk of interesting narrative due to novelty is at the beginning. As the sections go by, my enjoyment waned, even though there was novelty in the setting and beautifully dictated, just something about the case and the pacing weren't to my liking. But I think this has to do with my own personal tastes, as I think being genre-blind for this, it hit the right beats for detective work: there's a mystery, get competent people to solve it by running around and finding culprits, get secret clues that no one else can decipher, on and on. If the "Weakest" aspect for me is that the book has archetypes of the genre, that's honestly not a terrible weakness to have as I'm sure others might eat it up. I would like to know more about the politics that influenced Mieville to divide the story's setting as it is because the real life parallels are there in so many places especially in 2024's global politics. Of course, this book offers no solutions to the split of two cities and sort of ends with a non-definitive ending (more like "the characters will continue doing their best as they did in the story"). But yeah, this probably reads differently depending on one's historical interests.
If you are willing and ready for a tough read about a fantastical place that performs seemingly silly acts such as unseeing one's neighbor and a thrilling mystery of a murder with overarching political strangeness due to two cities being stacked on top of each other, definitely this scratches the itch of wild worldbuilding and detective novel. Once you get used to the idiosyncrasies of performing like a citizen of the two cities, you'll just have a great time exploring these new worlds and following a competent detective on their assignment through three worlds.
The formation of two separate cities stacked on top of each other, the creation event, the great schism, is unfortunately (or fortunately) lost to time and many have their theories, but what we know is that precursor civilizations have left artifacts from the past and scholars/archaeologists are trying to understand what these objects mean. Our catalyst for the story is a student who was murdered and whose body was found in an area she didn't belong to, and made more confusing because this is a foreign-born person come to study the twin cities' lore. Our main characters are detectives corwi, borlu, and dhatt, and the school team borden, nancy, yolanda, and more, and then secondary characters or main characters that appear later involve the ties binding all the players together: suspects, punk rogues who wish to unite the two cities, the surveillance boogeymen of breach, and the supporting cast in their respective detective settings. There's not a huge variance in behavior amongst many of the detective forces main characters, they're all relatively hardworking and always awake and ready to put in work, corwi is a little more stubborn and diligent, borlu is our protagonist so we explore through him, dhatt is classic boss who's tired of bullshit but still wants to solve things. The type of genre these characters normally belong to, the police procedural, is not at all in my enjoyment zone but in order to expand my knowledge, I needed to visit these archetypes. All in all, they were a fun bunch of intelligent, hardworking, mildly quirky detectives crossing borders and doing things in the usual way of legal until you run into dead ends and then you have to keep secrets or cut corners, classic detective story.
Where this story differed from the genre it pulls from is in the descriptors of the largest unmentioned characters: the two cities. Besz and Ul Qoma have divergent and convergent architecture, fashion modeled loosely after (correct me if im wrong) as christian-adjacent and muslim-adjacent cultures respectively, and the conceit of blindness to things and people that may be centimeters from your view. This book is largely carried by its novel concept and the truly deeply explored manner with which Mieville acts as tour guide through both cities. I love how detailed and forthcoming Mieville is with his geography and topology, the description of this new space and place was enough to get me to visit a genre I would never really willingly investigate.
At times, this book was very predictable given its detective story, and the main purpose for the "villains" kinda comes out of nowhere towards the end in that it's a megacorporation driving things and controlling specific players that even though you're introduced to them early on, the corporation isn't mentioned the whole time. I will stay loose here because once you do ascertain who the individuals on the villainous side are, you'll think "oh yeah I totally thought it was them."
The story is divided into 3.5 sections (the .5 comes from it having a coda at the end that is a short extension of part 3), each dedicated to a different location, and the bulk of interesting narrative due to novelty is at the beginning. As the sections go by, my enjoyment waned, even though there was novelty in the setting and beautifully dictated, just something about the case and the pacing weren't to my liking. But I think this has to do with my own personal tastes, as I think being genre-blind for this, it hit the right beats for detective work: there's a mystery, get competent people to solve it by running around and finding culprits, get secret clues that no one else can decipher, on and on. If the "Weakest" aspect for me is that the book has archetypes of the genre, that's honestly not a terrible weakness to have as I'm sure others might eat it up. I would like to know more about the politics that influenced Mieville to divide the story's setting as it is because the real life parallels are there in so many places especially in 2024's global politics. Of course, this book offers no solutions to the split of two cities and sort of ends with a non-definitive ending (more like "the characters will continue doing their best as they did in the story"). But yeah, this probably reads differently depending on one's historical interests.
If you are willing and ready for a tough read about a fantastical place that performs seemingly silly acts such as unseeing one's neighbor and a thrilling mystery of a murder with overarching political strangeness due to two cities being stacked on top of each other, definitely this scratches the itch of wild worldbuilding and detective novel. Once you get used to the idiosyncrasies of performing like a citizen of the two cities, you'll just have a great time exploring these new worlds and following a competent detective on their assignment through three worlds.