The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.

Raymond Chandler

Let me start by saying this: I really wanted to love this book. I had waited for it to come out with an inappropriate amount of book lust. I’d specially ordered a hardcover first edition from the States. I’d revisited his short stories in anticipation. I’d raved about it to my friends, before I’d even read it. China Miéville* writing about an existential detective story across a multi-layered city. It couldn’t go wrong, could it?

China Mieville, author of The City and The City

The City and the City delves into new territory for the author, deviating from his previous fantasy worlds, Bas-Lag and Un Lun Dun. It takes a fantastical setting, two cities that live on top of one another, and sticks them squarely in the real world of eastern Europe. A murder has been committed, and so enters Detective Tylador Borlu and the Extreme Crime Squad to investigate. The murder is not as simple as first thought and Borlu must cross the boundaries of language and space to solve it.

China Miéville, for those who are familiar with his work, has a very distinctive voice, a beautiful, lilting combination of ethereal prose and nuances, daring monsters and stunning plot developments. As much as I love Miéville’s previous books, his choice to step back from his traditional style left an absence in The City and the City. (There’s no monsters either, in case you were wondering. No sound golems, no badass nighty bat things, no jelly blobbers. Nada.) His grasp of language is one of the prime reasons I read his books; you won’t find another fantasy writer with a vocabulary bigger than a dictionary. As a reader I revel in beautiful language, and rightfully I miss it when it is not there.

There are moments when his voice breaks through the sparse prose, such as this great description, a prime example of Miéville at his best:

‘The sweep and curves of Ul Qoman byzanterie ajut over and around the low mittel-continental and middle-history brickwork of Beszel**, its bas-relief figures of scarfed women and bombardiers, Beszel’s steamed food and dark breads fugging with the hot smells of Ul Qoma, colours of light and cloth around grey and basalt tones, sounds now both abrupt, schwa-staccatoed-sinuous and throaty swallowing.’

The detective, Tyador Borlu, investigates an existential crime

But for the most part, it’s a parched novel, and the story suffers as a result. There’s not a lot of world building, and in an existential, make-believe world, it takes away from the conviction of these places. It just seems like an ordinary crime novel in an extraordinary location.

The crime aspects of the novel seem too generic; while he claims to be inspired by Dashiell Hammett, there’s little of that punchy noir dialogue and witty exchanges. The only similarity is the handy MacGuffin that keeps Tyador Borlu wandering through the streets of Beszel. It bears the most comparisons to Philip K. Dick’s style, but it reads more like his lesser known works like We Can Build You. You know it’s by a great author, it’s just not his best book.

His main character, Tyador Borlu, suffers from chronic inaction and a lack of personality. There’s a few moments when you think ‘Hey, he’s going to grow some balls, break down some doors and do something,’ but then they go and speak to another fricking academic and it’s another yawn moment. Even the plot seems to suffer from personality issues; there’s hardly any surprising moments. I found the book less of a crime novel and more an examination of flânerie, a style of writing popularised by Charles Baudelaire. A flâneur being “a person who walks the city in order to experience it” (not a creator of flans). Viewing the novel in this light perhaps adds more to the complexity of the novel, but I doubt your average layman has read Les fleurs de mal.

For those of you familiar with the work of China Miéville, you’ll recognise similar themes to his novella The Tain, about a parallel London taken over by reflections. The City and the City is filled with innovative ideas, and there are few authors writing today who could make the subject matter 1) comprehensible and 2) interesting. There is an underlying theme examining the problems of unification within cities divided by politics and cultural difference, an issue that arises in many modern conflicts; the Middle East, Ireland and Berlin. Miéville’s PhD in Marxist politics meanders through this book like the dark shadow of Breach itself.

I’m all for writers trying new things. Authors should never be pigeonholed. But you’ll spend the first one hundred pages of the The City and the City trying to figure out the complete mindf*** that is Breach, the second hundred meandering like a tourist around Ul Qoma, and the third in your average Hercule Poirot point the finger youdunnit moments. The City and the City promises so much, but in the end doesn’t deliver on it’s bold promises of Kafka-esque glory.

Footnotes

*It’s Mi-eh-vil NOT China ‘Bloody Herman’ Melville as everyone I know calls him.

** I’ve got no idea how to pronounce ‘Beszel’, it’s got an accent aigu on the z.

Gorgeous photo of the city detective mural by Untipographico (on flickr)

One Response to “A tale of two many cities: The City and The City”