China Miéville: The City & The City

[Mirabell]

The City & The City, China Mi?ville?s seventh novel, is a well-nigh perfect work of literature. We all know Jarrell?s adage that a novel ?is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it?; true to form, there are problems with Mi?ville?s book, as well, but the overwhelming success of the books as whole, the staggering originality of its ideas and the success in pulling the whole thing off, this lifts the novel far beyond many of its contemporaries. Like much of Mi?ville?s work, it displays a firm commitment to genre, but it?s hazy about the kind of genre that is foregrounded here. At the same time it?s a police procedural, a hard-boiled thriller and a fantasy novel, with links and allusions to science fiction (without every really becoming a SF novel), and it uses the advantages of each of these elements to their fullest, to create an insightful work of art that is too complicated, ultimately, to be reducible to a message or a simple resolution; the latter being its main flaw, by the way, but we?ll return to this. Suffice to say that I urge you to read The City & The City, even if (maybe especially if) you have not been able to take to Mi?ville?s work before despite the prodding by friends or literary critics. China Mi?ville, the only three-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award so far, shapes up to be the most dominant writer in the field of speculative fiction, and despite the fact that The City & The City is smaller in scale than most of his other novels, it is a great example why he is so important, so well-praised and so extraordinarily successful. He proves himself to be as adept a creator of original concepts, as he is an insightful reader of other texts. His texts, and The City & The City maybe more than the others, appear to be the result of what Emerson called ?creative reading?, on the one hand, and a careful, aware and thoroughly critical reading on the other. The City & The City is not Mi?ville?s best book, but it is a masterpiece, and not a minor one, and China Mi?ville is a masterful writer.

full, insanely long review (w/ pictures) is here China Mi?ville: The City & The City shigekuni.



God I love that man.

[waxwing]

mirabell, I greatly enjoyed your long review and agree with much of what you say about the novel although not with the same effusiveness.

I was flummoxed by my (mis?)reading of what I thought was the central metaphor, that people are conditioned from a young age to ignore those who are different from them, from their tribe. Something terrible will happen if you cross the line. I think Mieville and most readers would regard these concepts as unhealthy and destructive.

And something terrible does happen in City when lines are crossed, Breach emerges immediately from the shadows, like Nazi stormtroppers, whisking away the offenders to an unknown sentence with no recourse to appeal. They disappear. Again, most might agree this is not a good thing.

Yet when Breach is revealed they are portrayed sympathetically, they've got cool guns, they're overloaded with work, nice guys trying to do the right thing. I found this odd. I would have thought there would have been a sympathetic portrait of the urge to unify the two cities, free them from their nightmare conditioning, but the unifiers in the novel are a bunch of thugs, easily bought. I found this odd, too.

Even without the metaphor being fully explored, the reader is still left with a pretty good detective story, and I thought Mieville handled the difficult task of explaining the Cities' absurd setup convincingly. I disagree about the ending, well I agree it's disappointing, but I find most literary novels suffer from disappointing wrap-ups as well.

I was impressed by your enthusiasm for The Other Side. I checked Amazon and the used hardcover starts at $552 and the paperback at $225. Surprisingly they also offer the ebook for the Kindle for $10! I will download it tonight.

[DB Cooper]

I quite enjoyed The City & The City, but thought Kraken was horrible. I enjoy the way Mieville sets everything up, but the way he tries to weave things together irks me for some reason. It just seems a little clunky and ill fitting. Ill probably give his new one Embassytown a go, but if it doesnt work for me I may be done with him.