The City & The City

Navigating and understanding the split cities made more sense than the murder mystery.

It wasn't the murder mystery element that interested me but the dynamics of the cities. The beginning is great as you try to understand the rules, the middle is quite slow because it's mainly the murder, but the really interesting part of the story is towards the end; during the big reveal. The pace is, of course, quicker but trying to keep up with both the reveal and the dynamics is to fascinating part.

Well done. I could help of humming the song, Walk on By, at the end. Very thought provoking and it will stick you for long time. I suspect when you walk down a street in your town, unseeing.

note: I did struggle in first half why the language but by the end, I was fine and won't let it impact my ranking.

Perdido Street Station was such a momentous reading experience when I was younger. It was flawed, with its occasionally unconvincing characterization, the pacing, the occasional clunkiness of the dialogue, but the way the city lived, the atmosphere, elevated it above itself. The City & The City has a hell of a premise. It has the occasional sentence that makes me envious. Occasionally I feel for the characters. But on the whole, it is unconvincing. I don't buy it. I read a line and I think, you know, that feels forced, that feels written, something someone put in this character's mouth more than what the character would say. I don't buy it. I buy his architecture and his conceits, some of his turns of phrase, but not his characters or his plots.

I've seen interviews with China and he's such an insightful, articulate speaker who clearly has a tremendous amount to offer. I have Kraken on my shelf. It might be a bit before I get to it, but I will, and I'm going to be in it with the hope of being enraptured, because China so clearly has the capacity, somewhere, to be properly enrapturing.

This book, the first by Miéville that I have read, reached into my mind and my guts and grabbed me in a way few books have. I have found myself driving and walking around my own city and suddenly seized by a frisson of vertigo, of uncertainty as to where I was. While trying to turn left at a rather odd intersection, in a lane which (you would have to see it to know what I mean) has always felt neither here nor there, I had a brief moment of panic. All because of The City and the City.

I don't mind; I'm not complaining. It is quite marvelous to find myself thrust into such an amazing and mind-bending book. And besides, when the fireworks are over, I am still left looking at my own city in a wholly new way, seeing it divided–we don't see them, they don't see us–as indeed it is and has always been.

Oh boy. Going into this, all I knew about the premise of this story was that it was about two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, somehow coexisting in the same geographical space. Having assumed that this would be caused by some supernatural phenomenon, I was shocked to find out within the first 100 pages that the bifurcation between the cities was purely psychological, that citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma were trained from birth to systematically ignore each other under penalty of severe punishment. On its face, this serves as a pretty powerful albeit obvious metaphor for the class divides in modern urban life. Unfortunately, from this point on it becomes clear that China Miéville is more interested in meticulous “worldbuilding” than he is in actually exploring the interesting thematic implications of this setting.

This “Emperor's New Clothes” society is completely preposterous, and the more Miéville fleshes out the history, politics and granular details of how people live their daily lives in Besźel and Ul Qoma, the less I'm able to take anything that happens in the novel seriously. This wouldn't even be a problem if the story was presented as a satire or with a decent helping of wit, but Miéville plays the whole thing almost entirely straight. Almost all the characters we follow are completely psychologically in thrall to the society's structure with very little acknowledgement of its absurdity. Moreover, even this would have been something I could accept if the detective story this world was built around wasn't so stale and predictable, populated with one-dimensional archetypes that come off as brainwashed drones. And if all that wasn't enough to sour me on this novel, I couldn't even get behind Miéville's prose - halting and stilted, with a sense that he's trying to cram as much information and qualification into every sentence as possible.

I've seen comparisons of this novel to Borges, but the Borges version of this would have been a 6-12 page short story with exactly enough information to understand the core concept and its thematic implications rather than a 300+ page slog in which I have to learn about the differences between Besźelian and Ul Qoman traffic laws. This novel is a great illustration of how overrated “worldbuilding” is as a literary device, even in genre fiction. All that lavish detail and none of it is remotely as moving or interesting as the simple fact of the novel's basic premise.

Shit.

Finished this like a month ago.

Meant to write some stuff about it but forgot.

Leaving this here now to try and guilt myself into writing more about it soon before anything I remember about it completely evaporates from my dumb brain.

3.5

Just wrapped it up. It's a very good detective novel though I think it's political allegory sort of falls apart by the end (or at least to the wayside). Lands in a disappointing ambiguity about the role of police and borders, seeing them as both fully artificial and hostile but also necessary because the alternative is total anarchy. I maybe expected something a bit more given Mielville's clear interest in leftist politics, but it was really closer to a Dan Brown novel but where the conspiracy is actually just a sad man with something to prove.

I seem to really love books about Cities and looking back at my “read” list they tend to live firmly in the Fantasy category, from [b:Neverwhere 14497 Neverwhere (London Below, #1) Neil Gaiman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348747943l/14497.SX50.jpg 16534] to [b:The City We Became 42074525 The City We Became (Great Cities, #1) N.K. Jemisin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585327950l/42074525.SY75.jpg 54760675]. This book manages to superimpose two Cities on each other and blends a 1960's Berlin divided, with a sort of end of century Prague feel, with modern settings. It is a police procedural in structure but it is very imaginative and rich so that the “whodunnit” is not even really all that important. I think i will revisit this one in a few years

If you charge too much for sweaters, straight to Breach.
You undercook fish, right to Breach.
You overcook chicken, also Breach.
You make an appointment to the dentist and don???t show up, believe it or not, straight to Breach.

The plot is great. I cared about the characters. I respect the self imposed challenge of making Breach happen. After I got over the odd names and rules the middle bit of the book was great.

I don???t recommend this book. Whoever compared it to Kafka is a dolt.

Well, well, well - my first China Miéville novel and I'm smitten! This was some seriously good writing.

I started out with the Audible version and started it five or six times. Each time, at about 90 minutes, I realised that I didn't really get what was going on; my concentration had lapsed. This was going to be one of those books that I'd actually have to read, wasn't it?

Turns out yes, it was. Just that. The last time this happened was with Catch 22, and reading that with my eyes paid off big time.

Okay, used paperback bought from Amazon. There's something about used paperbacks that I really love: the smell of the aged paper, the creases, it all adds to the experience.

The premise of the novel I found super intriguing. I hadn't picked up on some of the literary cues about the second city when listening, but did so when reading. ‘Riiight, I see what's going on here'. And the whole Breach thing - so redolent of the KGB in Stalinist Russia.

It's a concept and a story that will stay in my mind for a while I'm quite sure. I gave it four stars rather than five because the the last 60 or so pages felt a little rushed and James Bondy, but only a little.

Really loved this book. Mieville's take on a detective story was definitely interesting and brought something new to the table.

My only issue was the intentionally vague talk about Breach or how the cities worked early on. It detracted from the story and the mystery quite a bit because it was difficult to visualize or understand.

It can be an effective device and I understand why he did it, I just don't think it worked that well here.

I had read 2 reviews on Goodreads that had initially attracted me to this book.
Glen gave me a magnificent overview that had me very interested.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2889171595?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

Black Oxford had his usual high quality analysis that on rereading after I had finished my read took me to areas that I would never have thought.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/693641644?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

So with me eventually diving into and now finishing this popular piece of modern Sci-Fi I have to say that I join the praise. It has actually had me thinking that it has covered apartheid. The demands of the authorities to all that they be apart, not especially via race or religion but via their city, is a concept that was fascinating to me. Could mankind actually force peoples to be so apart but be so close in proximity without any acknowledgment? And all that in what is really a detective novel? Sounds simple but it is an amazingly interesting and complicated mix.

I have little more to add other than I have just had a look at the trailer for the TV series and will not bother. It is not how I envisioned either the city nor the city and I do not want my imagination tarnished.

Recommended to anyone that wants their fantasy to be believable.

The concept of The City & the City is the hero of this novel. Two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma occupy the same physical space but are treated as two different geographical areas. Sometimes citizens of one city will see buildings, residents, events occurring in the other city but they are trained to ignore it. In fact, it is illegal to acknowledge or interact with anything from the other city.

Breaking this law is known as “breach.” There is an entire branch of law devoted to arresting and retraining citizens that commit this “crime.” That was the most fascinating part of The City & the City. It seems to me that making it illegal to acknowledge what your senses tell you is a kind of mental fascism, a 1984-ish thought police style of intellectual tyranny. The residents of the city have been indoctrinated to put up with ignoring or denying reality.

It took quite a while for me to get oriented as to what the arrangement of the two cities was and what it meant. In fact, if you read the book without reading the blurb on the back or any other synopsis material, you might be lost for several chapters.

The story is a murder mystery that incorporates the concept: a murder takes place in one city and the body is found in the other. However, the plot isn't that interesting as it plays out. It's surprisingly predictable coming from the mind of the writer who created such a wonderful premise. There aren't any especially memorable characters, even the lead investigator Borlu, isn't that well defined.

The author withholds a lot of information from the reader (information the pov character knows) so you have to “figure out” what's going on. Not a fan. But great world building and a decent plot.

great setting, got too dramatic at the end.

Though it started off a bit slow, and I got confused many times during this story, I was still enraptured by the shifting narratives, told by one person, and the many mechanisms that were invented, mentioned, or simply existed because it did. I'm sure once if I were to read through this twice, more things would be understandable. Yet, I think I'll just let it be a mystery. It is way more fun that way.

With nearly 5,000 reviews for this book on goodreads, I'm going to follow my usual policy for popular books and not say very much; I doubt that I have anything worthwhile to add. I will say, however, that I, personally, greatly enjoyed this book, which I found to be a decent crime/political mystery wrapped in a fascinating and well-realised setting. The other books of Miéville's that I've read have been much longer, but this book shows that he can work with shorter - and less overtly fantastic - material as well.

Second book by the author I quit after barely starting. His prose is definitely not my style. It only took a few seconds to known I would hate this book.

Beszel

Read 0:48/10:15 8%

4/10
Loved the concept, but i never got invested in the story i'm sorry to say

One of the rare books that Nigel and I both really liked. He likes sci-fi and I like crime novels, and this was both. We listened to it as we drove across the country and thought the narrator was excellent, too.

Hard boiled detective story in an alternate reality.

Update: came back 3 years later to give it an additional star. I think about this book all the time. We've gotten pretty close to having two societies that have so little in common that they don't even see each other.

I'm not sure what I read, but I loved it. Was it fantasy, sci-fi, a detective story? A metaphor for class, for truth and fiction? Who cares, it's all good.

In my opinion, one of the most skillful uses of beginning in media res to build curiosity and epiphany as the reader slowly discovers elements of this world that all of the characters find too obvious to comment on.

<3 detective novel set in the most ambiguous of spaces. imagine the doublethinking involved in ‘unseeing' a whole coexisting city. (what if we do this already?) thank you to everyone who recommended this one for #bookclub4m :)