Digital Sextant

The City and the City

by China Mieville

Mieville flexes his inspiring, impressive author muscles again, making me jealous and happy at the same time.  He’s a great writer, and this book goes in a different way than many of his others have gone.  (To be fair, I’ve only read two others, Perdido Street Station and The Scar, which are both novels in the New Crobuzon world.)

The City and the City tells the story of two cities that are topplegangers of one another — they have a shared physical space but are two separate countries, with two separate populaces and two separate governments.  There are some parts of the city that are completely Ul Quoma, other parts that are completely Bezel.  And then there are shared spaces where people from both cities mingle while assiduously pretending they don’t. Oh, and it’s a murder mystery involving someone from one city killed and dumped in the other city.

Some thoughts:

• Mieville, like so many great writers, develops a fantasy world that just works like it does.  He doesn’t go out of his way to explain how it works (nor why), but we quickly come to accept that it is the way it should be.
• The parallels with the eastern bloc and its tiny post-Soviet nations shape the story in significant ways.  One half of the city refused Western help and yet has found its own niche in the modern world.  The other accepted Western help and has foundered in it, failing to climb up at all.
• I love the invocation of secret societies, of nationalist and unification political groups, of varying methods of policing, arcane technology, and archeology.  All these things dot the story.
• Yet we never get an explanation of how or why the city IS the way it is.  We just know that to cross from one city to another illegally is BREACH, and brings down the eponymous mystical, slightly magical authority of the interstices and the gutters between the cities.
• We read this book for my SF book club, and one of our members (newly immigrated from France) emailed me to ask about the words breach and crosshatching.  I puzzled for a little while before I felt I could explain them adequately.  You can read the summary of our discussion on our book club blog.
• My question to anyone else who’s read this — is it your impression that there are two distinct topographies, and that citizens of the two cities can only see one another in and from within and through the “cross-hatched” zones, or is it your impression that physically, this is one city with two groups living in it?  Or, to ask it another way, in the areas of the city that are ONLY Bezel, is there a corresponding area in the Ul Qoma map that matches that area?

One can’t help but read the story in the context of ideas about urban spaces.  Lynch’s idea in Image of the City, that we each learn our cities by use and experience more than by the bureaucratic shaping of city planners combines with Davis’ City of Quartz suggestion that we control populations through our own reverence for accelerating panopticism.  Trying to help undergraduates wrestle with the idea of white privilege, I invoke my own experience driving in the United States.  In my entire lifetime, I’ve been pulled over once.  For a broken tail light.  On a rural road in the middle of the night.  Most black people have an entirely different experience of community policing.  My experience of the roads is far different than theirs.  A second example — when I travel downtown, I use my electronic CTA card, which is linked to my credit card which is linked to my bank account which is linked to my employer.  Circuits of transactions occur without me worrying or even noticing the cost, $3 being part of my routine budget as a middle-class white-collar worker (or are academics said to have some other kind of collar?  Am I a middle-class mortarboard worker?).  Someone who has to use a cash card and remember how much is on it and perhaps beg fellow travelers like myself for 75 cents so he can get on the bus after his train ride has a much different experience of the same city.

The City and the City makes literal the figurative lines of class and society that we each enact daily.  Whereas the citizens of Ul Qoma “unsee” Bezelians wearing shabby clothes and driving shitty cars, Chicagoans do the same for the indigent in our city.  It’s an effective metaphor, and a great book.