1/2011 Winner: China Miéville, "The City & The City

[MovieDude]

Casilda, I certainly agree that novels don’t have to explain themselves in order to be good, but the ideas must feel coherent and must provide us with the allusion (and possibly illusion) that this world could work. Throughout the novel, I kept being broken out of this reality by questions of human nature. If you are being attacked by someone and the only person around is in the other city, nature will demand you breach for self-protection. If a dog enters one city from another and knocks you down, that would be Breach. Driving requires that you watch for other drivers while trying to appear like you ignore them.

The whole concept is little more than Fascade if you think about it. Everyone Breaches every day, but have to pretend that they don’t . You have to see them in the corner of your eye as to not run over them, but pretend they are not there. These are stupid rules that have no social, economic or practical purpose. Even in the middle east where certain countries require women to hide any sign of skin, the purpose is religious (and to an extent, meant to control women).

Normally I would put it in the realm of Twilight Zone, but Mieville isn’t using this device to tell a larger point or to even explore the psychology of such a life as this, but seems to have it there just to have a strange society. It just feels lazy.

[Casilda]

MovieDude I guess that’s where we’re different kinds of readers - to me the ideas were coherent and didn’t pop me out of my suspension of disbelief, like I said, but there are other books that I know a lot of GWCers like/love, but that I’m not a fan of, because I get shocked out of it (Heinlein comes to mind, but there are others, too).

When you say that they are “stupid rules that have no social, economic or practical purpose,” I think you’re minimizing what I was referring to before about socialization in different cultures. I can think of lots of rules in the society in which I live that I would categorize that way, but that doesn’t keep us from reinforcing them, consciously or not. They control our expectations and to some extent, our actions. The Cities have different rules from the rest of the world, and they seem odd and ridiculous to outsiders (which is common when you look at social practice across cultures), but that doesn’t mean that in an of themselves, they are bad or unbelieveable rules. Think of a novel like The Giver - the “rule” that you get assigned your job/social position/career is patently ridiculous in contemporary US society. However, Lowry’s dystopia is not therefore less realistic or believable for the reader because of that difference.

You give the example of being attacked in one city, and having the only people around being in the other city. That made me think of the bystander effect - sure, people would see things, but most people don’t take action. This just takes that idea a step further, and requires each person to unsee. For me, it makes the environment that much more threatening, in that every individual has to buy-in to these rules, and while Breach exists to enforce them, that disciplinary structure works well enough to mandate individual practice.

Either way, if you didn’t like the book, that’s fine.

[Starbuccaneer]

Spoilers ahead, kids. Skip this is you haven’t finished reading.

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.

First, Breach. This is the one part of The City and the City that really fell flat for me. The idea of Breach as embodying both the state of transgression and the authority that polices transgression is fascinating. Yet the depiction of Breach a reinforcement of the divisions between Beszel and Ul Qoma was discordant. As soon as Borlu was taken by Breach I felt like the book had to suggest an answer to the question of why Breach exists. I just didn’t feel satisfied with where that thread of the story went.

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.

I don’t feel that the opportunity of the book was wasted–in all, I am satisfied with The City and the City. It was a solid read. I actually like the way that the larger questions were raised obliquely and never directly addressed. The reader could not have helped but think about the thorny issues; we were invited to exercise our minds independently but also not to work them too hard–to keep having fun with the detective story while we turned over the hard ideas in our minds. Isn’t that how we live real life most of the time?

There were definitely some Dan Brownian elements to the Aha! moments. Borlu, however, was no Robert Langdon. He was not especially special, not even by virtue of being chosen by Breach. He was certainly no secret son of Christ. None of the shadowy powers were so cartoonishly drawn as good and evil, either, which I appreciated. Orsiny, I agree, was a silly distraction.

I sat down and read the whole thing this morning. I love the concept of seeing/unseeing, and Borlu’s obsession with solving the case, and really, the plot in general. I think I need to think on it a bit more, but it’s been ages since I’ve read a “fun” book that was so well written, though it took me awhile to get used to the sentence structure at the start.

Re: seeing and unseeing. I think that the thematic heart of the book is cognitive dissonance. The citizens of Ul Qoma and Beszel live every day purposely not processing half the information in their lives and yet forcing their brains to work overtime to make it work. It’s exhausting and it enforces a strange incuriousness in most of the people we meet, even the law enforcement officers other than Borlu. In that context, the detective story is a perfect frame for this book.

Casilda, I agree, it’s the smartest fun book I’ve read in a while. I liked it a lot, though some of the problems of plot and world building detracted from my enjoyment upon post-reading reflections.

[Sithwitch]

This book was my introduction to China Mieville (via audiobook, so I’m not even going to try and spell anything) and I adored it. I found the idea of a taboo as bizarre as Breach to be fascinating–think of the taboos that you have in your culture that you just take for granted because someone drilled it into you and it became second nature. Don’t curse in certain public places. Don’t drive twice the speed limit. Follow the dietary rules of your religion when appropriate. All the little and big stuff that means that you and your neighbor don’t look at each other funny and get along relatively well, and/or nobody gets arrested. And then have someone have to willfully break just about the worst taboo you can think of in order to solve a crime. I love that idea–it’s what intrigues me about the comic Chew, too.

I don’t care about the implausibility of two cities occupying almost the same space, because I find the implications to be just that cool. How would you deal with very deliberately not seeing the other people and buildings? How would people just deal with something like that becoming second-nature? Hell, my head starts hurting after trying to look at those pictures where you see an old lady and a young woman at the same time for too long, but then again I’m used to only dealing with one reality at one time. Eee, I love it.