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Matt's Reviews > The City & the City
The City & the City
by
by
Five pages introducing a crime. Forty pages introducing the stories improbable conceit. Forty pages explaining how the crime was done. The other 230 or so pages are devoted to explaining in endless detail how the most improbable conceit is maintained. But all that detail for me just made the conceit all the more improbable, highlighting problems I probably never would have thought about if he'd just asked me to accept the conceit and go with it.
One of the most interesting things about this book for me is that it is almost impossible to classify. It's not realistic fiction. It's not historical fiction. It's some sort of speculative fiction but not easily classified as science fiction, as the situation that it describes involves no intentional aliens nor any futuristic technology. I want to classify the story as fantasy because of its sheer improbability, but it involves no overt magic either and more to the point it's very clear that the author does not want you to see any of the invents as requiring a mystical explanation. It might best be classified with that branch of science fiction that involves alternate history, but the nation and setting is entirely imaginary. Nonetheless, there is something alternative here perhaps best described as an alternative humanity, but then the author clear does not want us to see the inhabitants of The City and The City as being otherwise unusual in any fashion or categorically different than you or I. So perhaps its just best to classify the story as a mystery, because its a mystery to me how the author wants me to see the work.
China Mieville has always struck me as a smart talented young man who is always wasting his and the reader's time. Still, he manages to avoid his worst excesses of pretension, arrogance, and self-indulgence that mark some of his other works in this book, and writes a tidy little short story in just 300 odd pages. It's by far his best work since King Rat and his arc as a maturing writer was ruined by an excess of praise.
Normally, it isn't really important how you classify the story, but here whether it is science fiction or fantasy matters a rather great deal to the intended meaning of the work. It's obvious that Mieville wants to make some commentary on the fiction and myths that make a political system and a political entity exist. The lines we draw on a map that demark say Canada from the United States exist because we invent them and maintain them both as physical entities and as metaphysical entities about the identities that we assign to ourselves and which are assigned to us. All well and good and pretty standard stuff, but exactly what further commentary about the human race does Mieville intend by this most exaggerated example? Are we meant to see the system described as absurd, rendering this a satirical attack on our political pretenses, or are we meant to see this myth making power as an abundantly good, necessary and creative thing and accept it as the characters of the story do?
For my part, while I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge the power of creating identities from pieces of cloth, names, and lines on a map, the story carries this power far beyond what I believe the power of national identities, government, laws, and culture is capable of into a realm that might as well be Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. This ability to make an identity for ourselves that unites us in common purpose is far from unlimited, and is as function of our biology always wholly subordinate to our biology. The reason you don't see societies existing according to the conceits described in the book is that these fictions about belonging to a nation are not infinitely powerful, and smash like glass when they are asked to overrule biology and reality. These fictions have some real power, but they lack the nigh infinite power Mieville allows them to have within the story.
So the most interesting question for me becomes, to what extent does Mieville really believe in the power of the fictions he is exploring. Does he see this story as a work of science fiction or a work of fantasy? Does he believe that if we just told ourselves the right fictions regarding the nation or nations, or stopped telling ourselves the wrong fictions regarding nations, that just as improbable results could be obtained as what are observed in this story? Or does he want us to see any of these fictions as being ridiculous, and this story ought to properly be classified along side satires like Gulliver's Travels? Is the story meant as an attack on the reality of secret police states such as East Germany, or is it meant to subtly justify them? None of the depth I would expect when dealing with such a serious subject is to be found here, nor is there here any of the insight in to what its like to be forced to live a lie found in some writers who actually lived behind the iron curtain or who others who today still live in a real world while being forced to heed to a fictional state created one. Nor can we from the exaggeration of the story draw much insight into the parallels we have living in our own political myths.
I don't entirely feel I wasted my time, but I do wonder what a more mature thinker might have made of this conceit. I keep waiting for China to just grow up a bit. I mean, he's my age, and he still reads like he's 19. He strikes me as the sort of guy that I'd enjoy sharing an RPG table with, and who might be fun to discuss the latest Star Wars movie with, but whose insight into the real world is still filtered entirely through fantasy creations and worse, that he doesn't even realize it. Get married. Have some kids. Try to make a family or a business work, or really anything work. Go actually fight a war if you must. Knock off a bit of that teenage smugness about having all the answers. Your craft will only improve for it.
One of the most interesting things about this book for me is that it is almost impossible to classify. It's not realistic fiction. It's not historical fiction. It's some sort of speculative fiction but not easily classified as science fiction, as the situation that it describes involves no intentional aliens nor any futuristic technology. I want to classify the story as fantasy because of its sheer improbability, but it involves no overt magic either and more to the point it's very clear that the author does not want you to see any of the invents as requiring a mystical explanation. It might best be classified with that branch of science fiction that involves alternate history, but the nation and setting is entirely imaginary. Nonetheless, there is something alternative here perhaps best described as an alternative humanity, but then the author clear does not want us to see the inhabitants of The City and The City as being otherwise unusual in any fashion or categorically different than you or I. So perhaps its just best to classify the story as a mystery, because its a mystery to me how the author wants me to see the work.
China Mieville has always struck me as a smart talented young man who is always wasting his and the reader's time. Still, he manages to avoid his worst excesses of pretension, arrogance, and self-indulgence that mark some of his other works in this book, and writes a tidy little short story in just 300 odd pages. It's by far his best work since King Rat and his arc as a maturing writer was ruined by an excess of praise.
Normally, it isn't really important how you classify the story, but here whether it is science fiction or fantasy matters a rather great deal to the intended meaning of the work. It's obvious that Mieville wants to make some commentary on the fiction and myths that make a political system and a political entity exist. The lines we draw on a map that demark say Canada from the United States exist because we invent them and maintain them both as physical entities and as metaphysical entities about the identities that we assign to ourselves and which are assigned to us. All well and good and pretty standard stuff, but exactly what further commentary about the human race does Mieville intend by this most exaggerated example? Are we meant to see the system described as absurd, rendering this a satirical attack on our political pretenses, or are we meant to see this myth making power as an abundantly good, necessary and creative thing and accept it as the characters of the story do?
For my part, while I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge the power of creating identities from pieces of cloth, names, and lines on a map, the story carries this power far beyond what I believe the power of national identities, government, laws, and culture is capable of into a realm that might as well be Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. This ability to make an identity for ourselves that unites us in common purpose is far from unlimited, and is as function of our biology always wholly subordinate to our biology. The reason you don't see societies existing according to the conceits described in the book is that these fictions about belonging to a nation are not infinitely powerful, and smash like glass when they are asked to overrule biology and reality. These fictions have some real power, but they lack the nigh infinite power Mieville allows them to have within the story.
So the most interesting question for me becomes, to what extent does Mieville really believe in the power of the fictions he is exploring. Does he see this story as a work of science fiction or a work of fantasy? Does he believe that if we just told ourselves the right fictions regarding the nation or nations, or stopped telling ourselves the wrong fictions regarding nations, that just as improbable results could be obtained as what are observed in this story? Or does he want us to see any of these fictions as being ridiculous, and this story ought to properly be classified along side satires like Gulliver's Travels? Is the story meant as an attack on the reality of secret police states such as East Germany, or is it meant to subtly justify them? None of the depth I would expect when dealing with such a serious subject is to be found here, nor is there here any of the insight in to what its like to be forced to live a lie found in some writers who actually lived behind the iron curtain or who others who today still live in a real world while being forced to heed to a fictional state created one. Nor can we from the exaggeration of the story draw much insight into the parallels we have living in our own political myths.
I don't entirely feel I wasted my time, but I do wonder what a more mature thinker might have made of this conceit. I keep waiting for China to just grow up a bit. I mean, he's my age, and he still reads like he's 19. He strikes me as the sort of guy that I'd enjoy sharing an RPG table with, and who might be fun to discuss the latest Star Wars movie with, but whose insight into the real world is still filtered entirely through fantasy creations and worse, that he doesn't even realize it. Get married. Have some kids. Try to make a family or a business work, or really anything work. Go actually fight a war if you must. Knock off a bit of that teenage smugness about having all the answers. Your craft will only improve for it.
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Ahh... I see. So the question is, am I odd one for not doing all this unseeing all the time, and so think this realistic fiction is fantasy, or are you the odd one for thinking this fantasy is real?
I read your entire review wondering how you could give such an extraordinary book only 3 stars. But then I looked at my (far less substantial) 2010 review, and was surprised that I had also given it 3 stars.
For me this was one of those rare books where my experience of reading it was good-to-average, but where the author’s concepts slowly insinuated themselves into my unconscious mind, changing both my esteem for the novel and also altering the way I look at the world.
The only other novel I can think of that’s had the same effect on me is Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness. I’d be curious to know if your thoughts on this book change between now and, say, a year from now (if in fact they do).
For my part I read the story as an allegory. Or at least the most potent level on which the story worked for me is the allegorical one, which has nothing whatsoever to do with nations.
Living in a large city you learn to un-see things all sorts of things. It’s a largely unconscious process, driven by the fact that the brain can only process so much and must therefore triage what it takes in.
But after reading 300 pages of a story that went deep into the various ways and means of unseeing I started noticing how I un-saw things all the time, and tried to correct for it. It turns out that we (or I, anyway) un-see lots of things, first among which are people who are not like me.
After living with this realization for a while I understood Mieville’s thesis to be that there are whole places that we don’t see but which exist in the same place as places we do see, and that this un-seeing is an (often unconscious) elective act driven by identity, politics, and other catalysts that are worth exploring and interrogating.
It's an insight that has shaped the way I interact with the place I live ever since I read it 5 years ago. Somehow a crime thriller in a partitioned pseudo-Eastern bloc city was the ideal vehicle for this concept. Go figure.