Book Review: The City & The City by China Mieville

The City & The City
by China Mieville (Mieville)

The City & The City, by British author China Mieville, was one of the most acclaimed SF novels of 2009, winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and being a finalist for the Nebula Award.

 

This novel is what you get when you cross a noir-ish gritty police procedural with mind-blowing alternate history and high-concept scifi. Trying to describe this novel in a nutshell is quite difficult, as the author himself takes many chapters to even begin to let you in on the secrets of his world. Narrated by world-weary Tyador Borlu, an investigator in the Extreme Crime Squad in the fictional small East European nation/state of Beszel. He is called in to investigate when the disfigured body of a foreign student is found dumped in his territory. The complication is that his country of Beszel occupies the same physical space as another country, Ul Qoma — they overlap but residents of one country have been trained by lifetimes of experience to “unsee” residents and buildings from their twin. Was the murder victim killed in Borlu’s own Beszel or was she killed in Ul Qoma and dumped in Beszel? How can a detective investigate a crime, when he cannot even directly acknowledge part of the space he finds himself in. Through in radical students, “freedom fighters” and visiting foreigners with inexplicable motives, and mysterious enforcers whose job is to make sure the citizens of both Beszel and Ul Qoma don’t “see” each other, and you’ve got one of the most challenging SF puzzlers in many years. The City & The City is a complex and complicated work. But if you’re willing to dedicate the time to get fully sucked into Mieville’s world, you won’t be disappointed!

 

( Wikipedia page for China Mieville )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

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