The City & the City

Paperback, 500 pages

Published May 1, 2011 by imusti, Pan Publishing.

ISBN:
978-0-330-53419-2
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OCLC Number:
728078448

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5 stars (1 review)

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into …

9 editions

The political thriller gets weird

5 stars

If I recall correctly, China Mieville wanted to write a novel that his mother might read. Presumably she was into crime fiction or political thrillers. What came out at the end is just as weird and inventive as China's other work. In fact it's up there with his best.

Mieville's approach to genre fills me with joy. "Mainstream" fiction, he argues, IS a genre, a niche. In other words, we genre fans are not the weirdos, you supposedly conventional readers are. In that light it's no surprise that his take on a crime/political thriller comes out as a bizarre, mutated version which is completely in keeping with his fantasy and science fiction works.

A city which is divided politically and ethnically not by a green line, but by the life-long psychological training and conditioning the denizens are given, is so weird that at first you think it's about a city …