Review: The City & the City

The City & the City by China Miéville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



China Miéville's The City & the City is an interesting "high concept" take on the noir/pulp detective story. I picked it up seeing it on some other lists of strange but fantastic detective novels. This, as it turns out, is both.

The mystery itself is well crafted; there are twists and turns aplenty as what starts as a simple investigation into a dumped body starts to take on stronger political implications and the possibility of an international incident at work complicates the investigation. So far, pretty typical mystery fair, though. The real genius here is in Miéville's crafting of Beszel and Ul Qoma.

The easiest way I can think to describe the setting is if you took the concept of "there are two Americas" (e.g. "white America and black America" or "rich America and poor America" etc), and, instead of leaving it a metaphorical concept, made it literal. Two cities/countries that overlap in the same physical space. Some areas--entire neighborhoods even--are one or the other, but there are lots of spaces where the divisions are "crosshatch", and go from one to the other every few feet, or store front by store front.

How Miéville explores this conceptual stew is what elevates this from throw-away neo-noir. His extrapolations of what such a world would look like, how such a world would function, and how the people would see themselves (and unsee the others) is excellently done (if profoundly weird).



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