The City and the City by China Mieville is an extremely clever book. I read it shortly after Christmas when I was given it by my sister, who obviously felt I needed a good dose of surrealism.
It starts as a fairly normal feeling murder mystery put pretty soon you realise that this is no normal ex-Communist European city – whilst it’s physically one city it is in fact two completely opposing ones. What is brilliant is that the borders between them are purely psychological and are enforced by laws, customs and a regime of terror and control of citizens. It is divided Berlin, but without the Berlin Wall.
Children are taught from a young age not to look across the street when the other side is in the other city. Residents pretend that they cannot see each other near the boundaries and if they ignore this, or the many other protocols, they are in Breach – not a turn of events you should want to happen to you, at all.
But there is just enough that makes the story all seem very logical and normal – how visitors from abroad get visas to visit one city or the other for instance, until you are suddenly thrown up against the bizarre reality of a very abnormal place.
The detective story unfolds as the rules get broken to try to get to the bottom of why this foreign woman has died. And at the end you’re left knowing that you have just read a very special book indeed.
Glad you enjoyed it. I thought it was one of the cleverest and most profound books I had read for some time.
It made me think of other real cities that are, or were, divided: Belfast, Baghdad, Beirut (why do so many of them seem to begin with the letter b?) that had whole neighbourhoods that didn’t acknowledge the customs if not the laws of other communities in other neighbourhoods.
I also enjoyed Meiville’s Perdido Street Station, although it didn’t grab me as much as this one – slightly too colourful and baroque for my taste, I think.