YIKES, Wish the forum had a spoiler tag.
Being totally unfamiliar with Mieville’s other works and the content of The City & the City, I decided to dive in based on the awarding of the Hugo for best novel.
Upon encountering what seemed to be some very postmodern notions of divisions, transgressions and boundaries and some very direct pointers to current and historical locations divided by political and ethnic ideologies, I settled in for some heady and abstract storytelling. What I found however was a squandered opportunity to explore these issues and subjects in favor of a somewhat gritty detective story. These missed opportunities take the form of Unseeing, Breach, and the Divided City.
Unseeing:
From the beginning of the novel we are at odds to determine whether the Unseeing and the existence of the two cities or nations is something more akin to parallel universes, quantum realities and such or something more grounded in reality as a mere social convention. This for me formed an essential mystery that I had hoped might not be resolved but explored and played with within the range of these possibilities. However, within the first few chapters we learn that Unseeing is merely a social construct, a way of acting and behaving that must be taught to children.
The idea that this way of being and seeing is merely an ingrained way of behaving and not a more fundamental existential and psychological condition is born out when Inspector Tyador Borlú must transgress the boundary to the other city to continue his investigation. He characterizes the efforts of the Ul Qoma to transform his way of seeing so that he may see Ul Qoma to avoid “Breaching” as childish and insulting, and of course, unnecessary.
Mieville strips away what could have continued to be a mystery and a space to explore in favor of a very narrow, very physical explanation. By making the notion of Unseeing and likelihood of incidental Breach so ordinary, he squanders the opportunity to have his characters discover or explore the basis of the division of the cities and of Unseeing, and for himself as the author to explore the nature of this division, be it social, psychological, physical, and/or ideological, and of division itself.
Breach:
Breach is a numinous mystery whose power preserves, adjudicates, and maintains division. That the agency of this power is later physically manifested in the form of an Avatar that carries mere technological implements was deeply disappointing. For most of the novel, the relatively abstract nature of Breach provides a fertile ground for thinking about the nature of transgression. The physical manifestation of Breach removes these possibilities in favor of some mere technological and “alien” authority.
The text also suggests a more political interpretation of the idea of Breach as interceding and controlling authority. The political powers of the two city nations bristle at the suggestion that the murder investigation be turned over to Breach, characterizing Breach, as a foreign power. The parallels in The City and the City to politically and ideologically divided locations such as Berlin, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Srebrenica, Jerusalem, and Palestine led me to see Breach not only as some force beyond normal reality but also as an indication of the external political forces that reinforce division amongst peoples.
By giving such an ordinary manifestation to Breach, Mieville squanders all the mysterious cache he builds up in favor of supermen, of avatars, of a science fiction cliche.
The Divided City:
The tangible connections that Mieville intends for the reader to make between this divided city and its real world counterparts adds gravity and sense of relevance to the entire proceedings. The people of Bes?el and Ul Qoma would seem to be none other than the Serbs and Croats right down to one people’s use of Roman and the other’s of Cyrillic alphabets. The setting is Balkan to be sure. Yet, Mieville allows in his Berlin, in his Jerusalem, absolutely no tangible consequences of this division to these divided people. This divided city is post-conflict, post-industrial, post-consequences, where an all powerful authority maintains division and the only consequence is for the individual who Breaches. Yet in these real world counterparts people do indeed suffer. There is conflict. There is suffering. There is death. And no convenient super-authority to keep the peace.
Mieville cashes in on the political weight of these real divided locations of suffering to add gravitas to a division without difference, without consequence. The economic fates of one city/nation or another is passed off as mere history or ebb and flow/rise and fall. The ideological differences are couched in mere amorphous terms of authoritarianism vs social democracy with one being hard to tell from another. Or the divisions are of the variety of mildly religious vs secular. There is none of the weight, none of the consequence of the real, thorough and abiding economic, social, ideological, and religious divisions that Mieville seems to want the reader to find within the story of these two city nations.
Here again, Mieville squanders the opportunity to ground this division in something tangible and to explore this space where division and transgression intersect in suffering and death. The division between these two peoples is bloodless and is mediated by an authority outside themselves which denies them any accountability for that division and for maintaining that division. There are no real consequences for these people other than a denial of the existence of the other, whereas the consequences of the divided city and the divided nation in our own world are real, are deadly, and are within our own responsibility to overcome.
While there was much that I did enjoy about The City and the City, I had entirely different expectations of the subject matter than what Mieville had intended. That he chose to eschew these much larger and difficult issues and to tell what seemed to be a less than complicated detective story full of hard-bitten, swearing gumshoes interrogating hapless twenty somethings and ideological idiots with a touch of “Dan Brownian” intrigue in the form of Orciny was wholly disappointing. I enjoyed the prose. The concepts were interesting but unexplored. And the opportunity squandered.
