Customer Reviews

The City & The City

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(46)
3 star:		(34)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I have awarded five stars to lesser books in the past, but now the bar has been raised; I know what a five-star novel is really like after reading _The City & The City_.

It's a detective novel written in the first-person; the narrator is Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. The writing style is relatively spare, reminescent of Dashiell Hammett. The narrator constrains himself strictly to observable phenomena and tells us nothing of characters' inner thoughts or emotional states, which makes the action seem very immediate and the narration very stark. Police procedures are presented believably but without too much detail. The case itself is not terribly elaborate. It starts with a murder, but about two-thirds of the way through I felt that the murder was no longer the focus. Inspector Borlu's investigation leads to fringe political groups, an archaeological site, a foreign country, and to somewhere else entirely. The setting of the novel is what makes the story work. There wouldn't be a story if it wasn't set in Beszel and Ul Qoma. It's a totally original concept, like nothing I have ever read before.

Beszel is a gloomy, decaying city which seems to be located somewhere in Eastern Europe. Ul Qoma is a bright, bustling city that seems either Arabic or Turkish. The relationship between the two cities is the central theme of the book. I can't tell you much about it without spoiling the beautiful unfolding of the novel. Of course Inspector Borlu takes everything for granted because he lives there; it's all familiar to him .. so instead of explaining things as one would to a foreign visitor, he lets details emerge through descriptions of sights and events, and the reader slowly pieces together details of the setting. One's understanding of the situation gets deeper as the novel progresses, and even though it is completely absurd, I found myself easily suspending my disbelief and becoming totally absorbed in the story. This impossible setting is PERFECTLY executed so as to seem plausible. Beszel and Ul Qoma deserve to be included in the Atlas of Fictional Places, they are so well constructed. Even the languages (as reflected in names of people and places and a few idiomatic sayings) consistently support the mood and "flavor" of the two cities.

The two cities may be a clever metaphor for the Situation of Man, but the book's highbrow literary qualities will not get in the way of its pure entertainment value. The best fiction I have read so far this year.

Much ado has been made of the change in tone and character in this most recent book, and it's true that the language is a dramatic departure from his typical baroque style, but it still bears something in common with pretty much everything Mieville writes: it requires quite a lot from the reader.

There are books that you can read at a surface level, just taking in the words one at a time as they lay out character, setting and plot much like a computer loading an image. Mieville's books - and to a lesser extent his stories - tend to be more like jigsaw puzzles without the box. In his more fantastic work, it's less jarring than here because even at his most outre, he tends to tread familiar paths as far as story and plot, so you can keep up.

This, on the other hand, is a bit of noir fiction/magical realism, and it's a bit jarring to read about a hundred pages of the book before you're really given a handle as to exactly what's going on.

That aside, the overall plot of the book - not to mention the characters and, of course, the cities themselves - makes for a good read, but be prepared to devote a considerable amount of your brain's memory cache to this book until you're finished.

I enjoyed this book, and found it a worthwhile read, but did not love it as unequivocally as the reviewers below.

On the plus side, Mieville's style is distinctive, literary and interesting. "The City and the City" isn't something you've read a dozen times before; it's original, and for that reason alone it's worth reading. The SF and mystery genres seem to breed dozens of cut-rate "me too" novels for every truly interesting work, so just reading something new and different is worth a couple of stars alone. The characters are well-drawn and interesting, as are the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma.

On the minus side, every page of this book talks about the intersection between the cities in some way - the alter, the crosshatching and so on. After a while, we get it; the point doesn't have to be belabored. Speaking of the point, we also get the point about subcultures and minorities and what we see in daily life versus what we don't, which is all well and good. But either I missed the point of the novel as a whole or just didn't get it, because at the end my first reaction was, "so what?" I understand that Tyodor has changed as a result of his experience, but I would expect that from a character written by a good writer; again, my though was "so what?" The ending left me cold, as if the book just stopped. I got the impression that the identity of the killer just wasn't that important; that it just got picked out of a hat, and tossed in right at the end to satisfy those who would be disappointed if a murder mystery never identified the killer.

Having said that, "The City and the City" is at least worth borrowing from the library. The pros outweigh the cons, and if you don't love it, you will likely at least enjoy it.

As much of a Mieville fan that I am, I've found "The City & The City" to be quite the disappointment. While it takes on a more realistic edge (something about Mieville not wanting be known as 'just a fantasy guy'), the admittedly bizarre logic and development of the previous novels has been undercut in favor of something that is too silly to be realistic and too mundane to be fantasy.

For starters, let's take what Mieville is arguably best at: World building. "The City & The City," while a more "realistic" outing for Mieville, still takes place in a distinctly fantastic setting- that is, two governments which inhabit the same city. Interesting at first, but it gets tiresome. The notion that there's a city that's really two cities, and the people who live in this city carry on willfully ignorant lives in order to ensure that things stay that way is kinda cool in a socio-speculative way, but there really isn't a whole lot beneath the surface. Mieville leaves a lot less explained than he actually explains, and continuously pounds only the most elementary & shallow observations of what should be an incredibly intricate social system in the minds of the reader: "I unsaw this," "I pretended I didn't see the buildings from [the other city] over there." Unfortunately, that's about the extent of the city's development- or its civilian's reactions to it.

Characters, on the other hand, have never been Mieville's strong point. "The City & The City" is by no means an exception to that. At least PSS and The Scar's characters had their own dictionary of profane language; The main characters in "The City & The City" have the same level of foul mouthed articulation as the poorly written heroes of an overrated cop movie [See: The Departed], using the "f" word before most objects, many verbs, and sometimes in between two and three syllable words just for spunk.

It doesn't help that all the characters pretty much talk this way, and that they all pretty much act the same- even when they live in the "other" city that's supposed to be so much different. Don't be surprised if you get to back cover of this book can't remember anyone's name. There's no level of depth to any of the characters and nothing within the books near 300 pages that would make you remember them.

In short, while it's an interesting idea, it's tragically underdeveloped. It helps that the setting unfolds naturally- you don't really realize that book takes place in two cities until a few chapters in, unless you've read the jacket. However, by the time Mieville reaches the climax, all elements of suspense become shadows of those paradoxical Sci-Fi and Fantasy cliches Mieville and his fanboys hate so much.

[SPOILER ALERT: "There's a city between the cities that runs everything!" "Main chara's gonna become a member of the secret class shadowclass and never look back"]

I know that giving it "one star" is a risk, especially as the Mieville fanboys generally don't like admitting anything the author writes could possibly be anything less than gold, but I feel that this novel doesn't live up to Mieville's other work on any of the levels. In my opinion, "The City & the City" is his worst book. The rising action is trivial in relation to the main plot more often than not, and everything after the first part seems contrived. Nowhere near the level of patience or intricacy we've come to expect from Mieville, this one would've done better off as a novella.

I was intrigued by the premise of this novel, the two cities existing in the same space, but I'm not impressed with the execution of it. Poorly developed characters, minimal description of the cities, boring plot do not make a great novel. I had to force myself to finish it. I also somewhat agree with one reviewer who objected to all the swearing - it doesn't offend me, but using swearing to make characters seem "tougher" or hard-edged doesn't work.

I have not read any other books by this author (although I bought another one at the same time I got this one, so I'll read it and decide whether to read more) and was surprised by the enthusiastic reviews of this book. I was never drawn into the story emotionally or intellectually. I did not care about the characters.

I think this story would have worked extremely well as a graphic novel or an anime movie; it is really hard to pull off this kind of plot unless you are a very adept writer. I think it would be easier to accept the minimal story line/characters if it were accompanied by great visuals or illustrations. Maybe a writer like Phillip K. Dick or William Gibson might have been able to do something with it. But it really didn't work for me and so I can't give it a great review. It's one of those books I wanted to like a lot more than I actually liked.

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.

Exciting premise. Intellectually engaging. I thought I'd found a new classic. However, The City & The City falls short of being brilliant because it fails to follow through with the interesting ideas it raises. This book has one of the best premises I have read in awhile and also raises some very unusual philosophical ideas on modernity and society. The writing is excellent, but the canned ending rings false. A disappointment, to say the least but only because the book has so much promise. The novel's ingeniousness should have been developed into a work that breaks the limitations of the genre style. The ending reads as though the author had been forced to adopt an ending and formulaic plot to conform to a publisher's idea of commercially viable literature. This should not have merely been a very good science fiction/detective novel - this should have been a modern classic.

I've loved China Mieville's novels in the past, and I began THE CITY AND THE CITY with high hopes. The idea of two entwined cities was fascinating, though after a while I wanted to know more about how this entwinement evolved and how one goes about "unseeing" something. I suspect that this book is an allegorical statement about such places as Jerusalem or the West Bank, and that analogy was both persuasive and suitably haunting. Even so, I wish that we had learned more about how these two cities came to be and how they came to diverge. The noir elements of the plot were well-done, but, again, sometimes I felt as if the author were missing opportunities to probe the differences in the two cities' cultures that would give us more reason to believe in how these cities diverged over time, why the two governments accept this partition, and why the menacing Breach organization that polices relations between Besz and Ul Qoma does what it does. Indeed, I was notably disappointed in Breach when [for reasons that I can't mention because they would be spoilers] we finally get to see Breach in action. In theory it was more menacing, mysterious, and interesting than in the flesh, so to speak.

China has, as usual, created a very interesting fantasy setting for this book and for the most part does a good job describing the landscape and bringing you into the setting, but I found character development was bad. Just lacking. If I get to the end of the novel and I really don't care if any of the characters live or die, or worse, can't care to remember their names, it's a pretty good indication that there is a glaring hole in the novel. Descent murder mystery with loads of blind alleys but alas, impotent in total. He has a great plot and environment but stumbled and missed the landing.

". . . [M]any prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it." -- Matthew 13:17

The City & The City is ostensibly a first person detective novel about trying to solve a murder that occurred in two cities that co-exist in the same space . . . but which social convention requires be treated as though they are quite far apart. The mystery is there to help you accept the fantasy of two cities deliberately ignoring one another while being perfectly aware of each others' existence. To me, this wasn't as much a fantasy as a commentary on the trend toward isolation in modern urban and suburban living. You might be surrounded by people, but you will do your best to act as though they are not there.

From that perspective, the book is a terrific exploration of how deliberate choices to limit our knowledge causes us miss out on the potential of what's in front of our noses and all around us. I would have graded it higher, but I found that Mr. Mieville's treatment of the central theme was much too drawn out to be fully rewarding. It felt a little to me like the times when someone has told me a joke for which the punch line was obvious, but who insisted on telling me the punch line again and again . . . hoping I would laugh aloud on one of the tries.

The detective story is more interesting and amusing near the beginning than near the end, the opposite of most good police procedurals. I did enjoy Mr. Mieville's taking his story seriously enough to develop the detailed complications that he fantasy world must contain.

I don't normally read much fantasy, but here I thought that the fantasy served its purpose better than traditional contemporary fiction writing would have.

Nice!