THE CITY AND THE CITY (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

Published 2009, 312 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B
Plot: B+
Pacing: A-
Poignancy: A-

Unfortunately, I don't think any book could ever be as badass as the cover of The City and the City suggests, but China Mieville's intricate, atmospheric mystery gives it a pretty good go.  Though the story is framed around a political murder, and never strays too far from other noirish police procedurals in scope of plot, the setting that steers most of Mieville's novel is unlike anything I've ever read.  With the feel of very dry magic realism and gothic dark fantasy, Mieville's style has been described as a cross between Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, and I can't really improve upon that.  That, I hope, should be endorsement enough.

The two cities of the title are Beszél and Ul Qoma, conjoined but separate cities somewhere in Eastern Europe, each essentially its own country.  Parallels to real-life separated cities are obvious, like Berlin during the Cold War, but Mieville pushes well past social commentary and into elaborate mind-game.  Beszél and Ul Qoma — though distinct cities with their own unique cultures, languages and histories — share the same, overlapping physical space.  Rather than divided down the middle, each city is spliced together with the other, necessitating a complicated system so that citizens of one town do not "breach" into the other.  The population learns from birth to "unsee" the other city, memorizing which streets exist in which jurisdiction, what shops belong to their nation, and even which cultural signifiers make citizens of the "other" place practically — though not literally — invisible.  It sounds like an outlandish concept, but there is no magic or fantasy involved, only politics.  Mieville plays it so dry that it's easy to accept this scenario as plausible, even if no government could ever realistically make it work.  For obvious reasons, a good deal of the novel is expository — sort of like Inception, which I seem to be referencing a lot lately, in that both are standard thriller plotlines, easy enough to follow on their own but tied to a complicated central structure.  Those anticipating many layers of strangeness and surrealism beyond the basic pitch will be disappointed, but Mieville is able to extract so much from his premise that it really shouldn't matter.

The setting is easily malleable enough to provide its own twists and turns, and therefore a great deal of the narrative is spent establishing the nature of Beszél and Ul Qoma.  Mieville is clever enough to make these the focus of the book — really, its main characters — without ever going off on tangents, or driving his story into the absurd.  Unfortunately, his other characters are never quite as strong, and the structure of the story prevents them from developing much beyond their occupational roles.  This is not to say that the characters are unbelievable or poorly written — they are bland and not particularly deep, but in the way that many real people are bland and not particularly deep, and their actions are always well-scripted and fully convincing.  If The City and the City suffers from one chief weakness, it is that the ending fails to impress after the steady brilliance building up to it.  The conclusion simply lacks the imagination of everything preceding it — many of the red herrings tossed out along the way might have led to a more interesting ending, and the final showdown requires so much exposition as it's unfolding that any tension or suspense is lost.  I had hoped Mieville might have taken the metaphor inherent in his setting a bit further, or add more layers to the many he had already concocted, but the climax is true to the grounded tone the rest of the novel takes.  Mieville has defended this arc as a sort of anti-fantasy — after being given a glimpse of potential, a hint that the book could expand into entirely new worlds, the narrative instead dips down and touches ground again, adhering to the boundaries of reality.  Even if you, like me, are frustrated by this less-exciting turn, The City and the City is still one of the more adventurous, interesting novels to come along in years.