The City & The City

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.