Book Club: China Miéville - The City and the City

Editor's note: This episode of Bookclub is available from Sunday 1 November and will be available to listen online or for download.

China Miéville says that when he’s writing he can’t sustain interest in anything that doesn’t have elements that are unreal, and magical. It means that even when he’s writing a story like The City and The City which follows the pattern of a familiar detective thriller - in the police procedural style - his attraction to mystery leads him into territory that’s his own. He did the same in his novel Iron Council which is an American western - as he would put it himself - turned weird. China is a restless experimenter, as radical in constructing his novels as he is in politics (he’s long been a left-wing activist). The City and the City is set vaguely in eastern Europe, at least in a place that sounds as if it might be there…but you’re never allowed to know too much, perhaps because this is a city like none of us has ever known. It has a twin, or perhaps a second self, and they are separated by an authority, apparently all-powerful, called The Breach which polices, as China himself puts, the membrane between the two. So the world operates on rules that are not only unfamiliar but scary.

Against this mysterious background, Inspector Borlú begins to investigate the death of a young woman student and he behaves in a thoroughly familiar way. He’s grumpy, in a happy nod to the detective tradition, and he has a young sidekick. But his inquiry can’t proceed without coming up against the rules of the strange place in which he lives. He has to cross the divide between the cities, which their inhabitants can’t do, thanks to The Breach, and therefore he is operating simultaneously in a world that we can recognise - where police investigations are like any others - and in a different sphere where there are no understandable rules.

‘I wanted this book to be about that sense of half familiarity, and also I quite consciously wanted this to be a book that you didn’t necessarily have to be a reader of fantasy genre to enjoy, and that’s partly because it was written for my mother who was a great crime buff, loved crime novels, but who wasn’t particularly into science fiction and fantasy.’ So he produces red herrings and some of the much-loved paraphernalia of the detective thriller. And then, to use his own word, the whole thing is ‘de-gutted’ by fantasy, and allegory.

But for me as a reader not naturally drawn to science fiction and fantasy, the happy consequence of China’s plan is that the fantastic elements seem to fit nicely with what we might call the ‘real’ world. He never disappears into a place that seems to be screaming at us with some allegorical message. I was intrigued that he said during our recording that he is not attracted in general to allegories: he told our readers that he didn’t like things that simply represented other things.

‘I’ve never been bananas about Animal Farm, for example, I find narrowly successful allegories, on the whole, literarily uninteresting.’

On the other hand, he confesses a love for Gulliver’s Travels - because he thinks in parts the allegory runs away with itself and becomes something different.

So welcome to the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, where ever they are. You have never been there before, I guarantee. But you may find them enjoyable places, as long as you don’t have to lie there under the watchful eye of The Breach.

Enjoy The City and the City. Our next date, on Sunday, December 6, is with the New York-based Irish novelist Colum McCann, and we’ll be talking about Transatlantic.

Happy reading.

Jim

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4