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A review by gregbrown
The City & the City by China Miéville
5.0
Fantastic, will have me thinking for a while.
Miéville takes a sort of Borges premise—two cities living intertwined, with each resident trained to ignore the parallel city—and fleshes it out through a noir-type mystery, giving him plenty of opportunities to poke and play around with the rules. The end chooses to be a noir over some of the fantastic elements, which is fine and serves a larger point he's making, but is a little less exciting than when he's playing around with the bizarre world.
The metaphor of a parallel city in plain sight (but willfully unseen) is a powerful one. Reminded me of when I was younger and saw a big illustrated cutaway of city infrastructure, all these underground pipes and power lines and other utilities tucked away under our feet, unknown until something goes wrong. Another example might be the employee tunnels at the mall (or even the employee tunnels at Walt Disney World), designed to sequester the pallets of merchandise and other prosaic activity necessary to maintain the illusion. And more recently, the fascinating theme in Tenet of fighting what amounts to a time-war within the giant flows of commercial activity, parties heading forward and backward in time using shipping containers (and freeports as their way stations).
Like I said, the final chunk of the book drops some of the fantastic elements—partially to fulfill some noir genre standards, but also to make a point. There's nothing determined about the arrangements in the book: no physical laws that govern them, only the laws of men. This isn't some fantasy setup but a giant legalism, similar to the legalisms that govern our own world. They can be ignored, changed, and overthrown just as easily as any others—even though most people will choose the devil they know over the chance for something better.
Miéville takes a sort of Borges premise—two cities living intertwined, with each resident trained to ignore the parallel city—and fleshes it out through a noir-type mystery, giving him plenty of opportunities to poke and play around with the rules. The end chooses to be a noir over some of the fantastic elements, which is fine and serves a larger point he's making, but is a little less exciting than when he's playing around with the bizarre world.
The metaphor of a parallel city in plain sight (but willfully unseen) is a powerful one. Reminded me of when I was younger and saw a big illustrated cutaway of city infrastructure, all these underground pipes and power lines and other utilities tucked away under our feet, unknown until something goes wrong. Another example might be the employee tunnels at the mall (or even the employee tunnels at Walt Disney World), designed to sequester the pallets of merchandise and other prosaic activity necessary to maintain the illusion. And more recently, the fascinating theme in Tenet of fighting what amounts to a time-war within the giant flows of commercial activity, parties heading forward and backward in time using shipping containers (and freeports as their way stations).
Like I said, the final chunk of the book drops some of the fantastic elements—partially to fulfill some noir genre standards, but also to make a point. There's nothing determined about the arrangements in the book: no physical laws that govern them, only the laws of men. This isn't some fantasy setup but a giant legalism, similar to the legalisms that govern our own world. They can be ignored, changed, and overthrown just as easily as any others—even though most people will choose the devil they know over the chance for something better.