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The City & the City
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The City & the City
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The City & the City
Audiobook10 hours

The City & the City

Written by China Miéville

Narrated by John Lee

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

New York Times bestselling author China Miéville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other-real or imagined.

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 one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman's secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 26, 2009
ISBN9780739384251
Unavailable
The City & the City
Author

China Miéville

China Miéville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction includes The City and the City, Embassytown and This Census-Taker. He has won the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. His non-fiction includes the photo-illustrated essay London’s Overthrow, Between Equal Rights, a study of international law, and the narrative history of the Russian Revolution, October. He has written for various publications, including the New York Times, Guardian, Conjunctions and Granta, and he is a founding editor of Salvage.

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Rating: 4.002539181855956 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The concept of the two cities was interesting, but I had a hard time connecting to the characters. (Almost like they were in the other city).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    China Mieville is one of the more clever writers in any genre. In The City and the City he as written a murder mystery, but one in a place like no other. The cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma reside in the same temporal space connected by crosshatches. And in-between is a shadowy nowhere, the Breach. The boundaries of the two cities are strictly enforced, mostly, so the citizens of each city have learned to “unsee” the other city to avoid entering the wrong temporal space that would put them in Breach. Being in Breach is a bad thing. It can make you disappear. Sound confusing? That’s okay. You’ll get used to it once you’ve inhabited the cities for a time.

    Within these cities, well, Beszel is where it starts, a horrific murder of a young woman takes place and we are introduced to our interlocutor, detective Tyador Borlu of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. Borlu’s search for the mysterious killer takes us across the cities, across unseen boundaries, in what is in the end, a rather intricate but not atypical murder mystery. As it turns out, the murder takes place in Ul Qoma but the body winds up in a desolate area of Beszel. This makes the murder even more mysterious as it’s not easy to pass through the cities without breaching.

    Borlu’s investigation becomes a political hot potato and takes him to the shadowy underworlds of fringe political groups like the “unifs” who want to unify the two cities, to the True Citizens, who are ultra-nationalists wanting power for their particular city. It also takes him to Ul Qoma where the murdered young lady last resided, working on a doctorate at an archeological dig that predates the splitting of the cities. It turns out she was into some rather strange beliefs herself, one of which was there is yet a third and all powerful city, Orciny, occupying this same temporal zone. That put her in a lot of hot water with a lot of fringe political groups so she had plenty of enemies and the suspects abound. And it introduces us to a mystery within a mystery. Does Orciny really exist, or is just an urban legend? And what might the murdered young lady’s search for Orciny have to do with her violent demise? I guess we’ll have to find that out too.

    Borlu is a dedicated detective and wants justice for the murdered young woman so he works tirelessly to that end doing what most detectives do – poking his nose all over the place until some type of pattern or answers emerge. And slowly they do emerge and they get very weird indeed. As simply a very good mystery story, this novel works extremely well. Its setting and complexity make it superb.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The City & The City is the big winner this year, taking all the awards (not all, but the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo, the Locus and the Arthur C. Clarke, among others). And even if I didn’t find it mindblowing, I have to agree that all of these are well deserved.But although these awards scream Fantasy and Science Fiction, in its essence The City & The City is detective fiction, a murder mystery with some stokes of dystopia. The main character, Tyador Borlú, a detective in the Besź police, is faced with the murder of a young woman, who no one knows the name, no one knows who she is, and who no one is missing. The investigation of this murder will reveal that there is more than it seems, will upset rebel and political groups, and will take Borlú across the most peculiar of borders. The City & The City was a different book, one that I liked immensely. More than the characters and the story, I liked the cities, the wordbuilding, that was complex and believable, without losing its magic. It was a place I wish I could visit, especially because there is a complexity in geography that, were it to exist, would be amazing to experience.I did like the story, and had trouble putting the book down. There was much that was about the crime itself, but there was also space for explaining the culture of the cities, and their common history (even if I wished there was a bit more about the Precursor Era). But I must confess there was some predictability on the plot. By the middle of the book I already knew which was going to be Borlú's fate, even if I didn't have a clue about who was the murderer. Another thing that I liked about The City & The City was the dystopia side of it, a dystopia that is not that much political, but more cultural, made of bogeymen and fear. But there were things that I didn't like about this book. One of them was the writing style. I'm not sure why, I had no problem in Perdido Street Station, but here I kept finding it hard to follow. The other thing isn't so much a dislike, but something that dampened my enjoyment of the book, and it was the fact that I felt distant from the characters. They were good characters, but the story was something that was happening far away from me, I wasn't there with them.I enjoyed reading The City & The City, and if another book is written in this universe, I'll definitely read it.Also at Spoilers and Nuts
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Before starting The City and the City I had only read one other book by China Miéville, Perdido Street Station, the first of his New Crobuzon novels. I quite enjoyed Perdido Street Station--at least up until the end which I felt cheated by. But I liked the rest of the book well enough that I wanted to read more Miéville. So it was serendipitous when The City and the City was chosen for the io9 book club. I had heard many a good thing about The City and the City; even those who didn't like Miéville's previous works seemed to be fond of it. Perhaps not too surprisingly, the novel was nominated for and won quite a few awards, including Miéville's landmark third Arthur C. Clarke Award. Although I am wary when a book receives such overwhelmingly positive reviews, I was still looking forward to reading The City and the City.The two Eastern European city-states of Ul Qoma and Besźel are crosshatched--somehow physically located in the same geographic area but independent and separate political entities. The citizens of one city are practiced in unseeing and unsensing those in the other. Any breach in this etiquette is considered the greatest offense and is subject to the severest sanctions. When a woman's body is discovered dumped in a skate park in Besźel, Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad is put on the case. Soon it becomes apparent that there are Ul Qoma connections to the crime and the investigation becomes much more complicated. It seems as though the woman, a doctoral student, has made more than her fair share of enemies in both Besźel and Ul Qoma. She was researching the existence of third hidden city known as Orciny, a taboo subject in academia, but could her discoveries really have cost her her life?The City and the City is written in a much sparer style than Miéville's previous works and has a nice noir-ish feel to it. One of my favorite things about Miéville is that he's not afraid to mix his genres and conventions in order to create something truly unique--in this case a crime novel with fantasy elements. Another thing I admire is his command of the English language. Although the writing can be somewhat awkward in The City and the City and takes some getting used to, particularly the dialogue, I am always astonished by how Miéville manages to pick the exact needed word for a given situation. Because of the unusual nature of Ul Qoma and Besźel, he also creates some of his own, such as my personal favorite--topolganger.I wouldn't say I was disappointed in The City and the City, but I didn't like it nearly as well as I was expecting to. I didn't care about any of the characters and I didn't even care about the plot, but I did absolutely love the cities. They were one of the main reasons that I kept reading the book. The interactions between the characters and their environment were fascinating and Miéville obviously put some thought into making crosshatched cities work. Even though they are fantastical, the amount of bureaucracy and politicking involved is certainly believable. In some ways it seems like Miéville was trying too hard to place his cities in the real world--pop culture references like Harry Potter threw me out of the story--but overall he handled it quite nicely. Miéville has mentioned that he might write more books featuring Tyador Borlú and Besźel that occur before the events in The City and the City. Even though I wasn't as taken with the novel as others seem to be, I would still be interested in seeing what else Miéville can do with its conceit.Experiments in Reading
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    China Mieville is a very unusual writer. If you are familiar with any of his other books, such as Perdido Street Station or The Scar, you know that he has an incredibly fecund mind that creates complex alternative worlds in which to set his stories.This latest book, his attempt at a “police procedural” (he has said he wants to write a book in every genre, but somehow I’m guessing he’ll skip “chick lit”) is very different from the average murder mystery (or even the non-average murder mystery). It seems that the whole rest of the world exists more or less as it does now, but two cities - somewhere on the edge of Europe - exist in a quantum state. That is, Mieville sets up his cities like Schroedinger’s famous cat. [Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, also called Schroedinger’s paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 to illustrate a problem with quantum mechanics. Briefly, a cat, a flask of poison and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The odds are 50/50 each hour. Since the probability of each is equal, the cat is said to be simultaneously alive and dead, although clearly, if you look inside the box, you would see the cat either alive or dead but not both. Quantum theory has been successful in spite of the paradoxes however (success being defined as the ability to predict). But it’s definitely weird.]In Mieville’s book, the city and the city [sic] reflect this paradox. In the same space, you are either in Beszel city or Ul Qoma. Whichever one you grew up in, you have been trained to “unsee” the other one. If you seem to recognize or interact with anyone in the other city, you will be picked up by a mysterious force known as Breach. People who have breached disappear forever, and no one knows what happens to them. And yet, somehow connections between the two cities persist. [Another principle of quantum mechanics is that of quantum entanglement (a paradox developed by Einstein and his coworkers). This is an amazing phenomenon by which two or more objects seem to be entangled even if they are far apart, so that one object cannot be adequately described without knowing the properties of its counterpart. Mieville invokes this brilliant metaphor for the crime investigation portion of the book.]So what's the plot of the police procedural?Inspector Tyador Borlu a middle-aged career policeman with the Extreme Crime Squad of the city of Beszel. A young girl has been found dead in a seedy part of the city, and he discovers that she was from the (superimposed) city of Ul Qoma. Thus it appears that someone has killed her in one city, and dumped her body in the other. Crossing the border without passing through immigration and undergoing training is illegal and will invoke the Breach, the mysterious force that keeps the dual city workable. Yet the Breach has not been called into the matter, and Borlu and his colleagues realize there is something bigger going on than just the murder. Eventually, Borlu is forced to go to Ul Qoma himself, and work with his counterpart there, Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt. His partner in Beszel, Lizbyet Corwi, is not allowed to accompany him, but can help via “long distance” calls.In the course of the investigation, the detectives confront an unexpected possibility: is there yet a third city, somewhere in the spaces between the city and the city?Discussion: Mieville has many fans for his books that, as the UK Guardian writes, are “packed with grotesque characters, gorgeous imagery, amazing monsters, political parables and intricate plotting.” This doesn’t make for light or easy reading. In fact, Mieville makes other noir look blanc. (This concept was explored by Alexander McCall Smith, writing tongue in cheek in The New York Times):"Perhaps we need a new literary tradition – the opposite of the noir. And what would that be? Blanc fiction, I suppose. Blanc would be about good deeds and acts of kindness, rather than about crime. And even crime writers would have their place in this tradition. But rather than writing about murder – which seems to obsess them – they would write about minor crimes, such as parking offences.” With Mieville's deep noir in mind you can see I was delighted to find that The City & The City is much easier than Mieville’s other books. It is set in a recognizable time and place, and there are even a number of humorous references to current popular culture. Borlu is on the phone to Corwi, describing for her what he found on the dead girl’s computer:"Borlu: Lots of Hi Mom love you emails, a few essays. She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.Corwi: You have no idea what you’re saying, do you, boss?Borlu: None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.”The resolution of the crime itself is clearly of secondary interest to Mieville, to whom “ambience” if you will, is everything. Even when Mieville is not explaining how the two superimposed cities work, he is skilled at evoking atmosphere:"(on approaching a gang of thugs) They were milling as we approached, lounging, smoking, drinking, laughing loud. Their efforts to claim the street were so overt they might as well have been pissing musk."Why, you might ask, has Mieville written a “whodunit” that is more like, as he says, a “doesitreallymatterwhodunnit?” In an interview, Mieville had this to say about the genre:"Reviews of crime novels repeatedly refer to this or that book’s slightly disappointing conclusion. This is the case even where reviewers are otherwise hugely admiring.… The reason, I think, is that crime novels are impossible. Specifically, impossible to end. … [D]etective novels are not novels of detection, still less of revelation, still less of solution. Those are all necessary, but not only are they insufficient, but they are in certain ways regrettable. These are novels of potentiality. Quantum narratives. Their power isn’t in their final acts, but in the profusion of superpositions before them, the could-bes, what-ifs and never-knows. Until that final chapter, each of those is as real and true as all the others, jostling realities all dreamed up by the crime, none trapped in vulgar facticity. That’s why the most important sentence in a murder mystery isn’t the one starting ‘The murderer is…’ – which no matter how necessary and fabulously executed is an act of unspeakable narrative winnowing - but is the snarled expostulation halfway through: ‘Everyone’s a suspect.’ Quite. When all those suspects become one certainty, it’s a collapse, and a let-down. How can it not be? We’ve been banished from an Eden of oscillation."Here is where you can see just how creative Mieville is as a writer. He has created a quantum setting for a quantum narrative, as if he is saying to other crime authors, “anything you can do, I can do meta!”Evaluation: This noir-like mystery steeped in fantastical elements is not for every mystery fan, or fan of science fiction, even though the author won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel of 2009 for this book. (This is the third time Mieville has won the award, having previously won in 2005 for Iron Council and in 2001 for Perdido Street Station.) But if you want to experience this author, this book is a "friendlier" way to do so than most of his others. When I read Perdido Street Station, for example, I felt as if it would be more appropriate for me to read it with hair dyed purple, skin pierced and tattooed in many places, and sitting in a coffeehouse, smoking. With The City & The City, on the other hand, I almost felt at home in my living room!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger’s pedestrian.

    While I have never actually visited Beszel or Ul Qoma, I have felt the weight of the Breach. I have sensed the practice of unseeing. It is all very personal for me. The conditions do appear to be finite. limited to and subject to expiration. This is encouraging. Mieville's novel caught me unprepared for this distillation of a human solution to certain realities.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    China Miéville is very smart. Here he follows through with an excellent idea. The ending is very meandering, but I suppose that's part of the detective-noir genre. Will be wanting to read more of his work.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    China Miéville's preferred genre is 'weird fiction', and a sub-genre within that is urban fantasy. Kraken, for example, is set is a barely recognisable London, and the earlier The City and the City is set in the twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma, "somewhere at the edge of Europe". Besźel and Ul Qoma aren't quite like Buda and Pest, or Istanbul spread between Europe and Asia Minor, though they do share that sense of liminality, of neither-nor. And the dividing line between the two isn't as physically evident as, say, the Danube or the Bosphorus: individuals who stray across (let alone stare across) that divide, who literally "breach" (particularly in so-called "cross-hatched" areas), are likely to fall foul of a shadowy force called Breach.Into this knife-edge world strides the Besz police inspector Borlú, investigating the murder of an unknown young woman. Where the investigation leads him is the increasingly nightmarish plot of Miéville's novel which I found fascinating and which engaged me almost up to the final dénouement. The urgency that suffused the action, beautifully placed in a vividly-imagined and almost credible urban setting, for me just lost its impetus in the closing pages, tarnishing a magnificent concept with a slightly banale conclusion. But that really doesn't take away from the wonder of Miéville's creation.Part of the joy of this modern tale of two cities is the richness of the world the author creates, one that you can almost imagine inhabiting, or at least visiting (though that with great difficulty). Much of that richness is down to his invented lexicon for people and places. We are led to presume that these two cities are somewhere in Eastern Europe (neighbouring states are Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, direct flights by BeszAir go to Budapest, Skopje and Athens). Borlú's home town of Besźel looks related to the Hungarian word beszél, "he, she or it speaks"; the inspector's own name is similar to a town in the western Turkish province of Manisa. There are nearly fifty Besz locations mentioned and at least thirty in Ul Qoma, all contributing to an illusion of verisimilitude, though physical maps of the two localities are virtually impossible to reconstruct; and incidental details, of culture, architecture, the mix of modernity and tradition, are liable to send the entranced reader ransacking travel guides and websites.Some have criticised the apparent lack of characterisation of many of the protagonists and others. I'm less concerned about this: Borlú is a cop, and most likely to give "just the facts, ma'am" than indulge in fanciful descriptions in this first-person narrative. In any case, there's enough reported speech to assess any one person, and you can gauge a lot by their actions and reactions. More problematic is the fact that there are nearly seventy named individuals (many with non-Western names), and I had to resort to taking notes, like a detective, to keep track of them. Whether it was worth it to assess who dunit is another matter, however.Miéville acknowledges a number of authors to whom he's indebted, and some are obvious suspects: Chandler and Kafka, for example. The debt to Jan Morris must be, rather than to her studies of Hong Kong and Venice, for instance, owed to Hav, reports of her fictional visits to a fictional peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean, riven by its backwards- and forwards-looking inclinations and dominated by a dualist Cathar heresy. Here, surely, is one inspiration for The City and the City. Another inspiration, though unmentioned, could be Jorge Luis Borges' tales, especially his Death and the Compass about a detective seeking patterns for murders in an unnamed South American city. Another Borges story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius begins "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia." Uqbar, like Ul Qoma, is hard to place, but appears to be in but not necessarily of the Arab world; Uqbar's first two letters, coincidentally, form the '.uq' suffix of some Ul Qoman websites. Meanwhile, Borges says that Tlön, one of his cities, "is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men", and in a way any attempt to understand the Besz and Ul Qoman environments and realities is equally labyrinthine in its complexities. Borges' narrative also reflects on Orbis Tertius, a deliberately inaccurate Latin approximation of 'Third World', and this may well have influenced Miéville's concept of Breach, guardian of the junctures between the two cities. And I can't resist mentioning here Ursula Le Guin's Orsinian Tales, stories about a fictional Central European country in the 19th century; reportedly influenced by the example of Czechoslovakia, now returned to the status of two separate nations (Slovakia and the Czech Republic), Orsinia might have provided inspiration for the mythical third 'other' city of Orciny that crops up throughout The City and the City.And, finally, Borges gives Sir Thomas Browne's classic 1658 Urn Burial as a complimentary reference; this meditation on death, modes of burial and us, the readers, as questioning historians also mirrors events in The City and the City, beginning as it does with a death, a mysterious Ul Qoman archaeological dig, and whether life carries on when one is no longer in this world. A strange, wonderful but not quite perfect novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Mieville's 'The Last Days of New Paris' was my favorite book the year I read it, so I expect great things from him. Mysteries other than Sherlock don't seem to be my thing, so this book probably wasn't bound to be my favorite. I think Mieville couldn't have improved this book any more though. It's from the perspective of a detective living in Beszel, trying to ignore an overlapping city, Ul Qoma, while also worrying about Breach making an appearance if he makes any mistakes. A procedural hinging on a very unique concept: two cities overlapping that are supposed to ignore each other when in the other city, for fear of the mysterious Breach serving justice. And is all this possibly to hide the even more mysterious ancient Orciny? I do like that he tried to fill the book with the mundane investigation to distract from the crazy concept but sometimes was a little too explainy for me. Unfortunately, the book wasn't grabbing my attention like I'd wish. To be fair, many books these days aren't getting the attention from me that they deserve. This one reminded me of Roadside Picnic which I hear Mieville mentions in Railsea, so that influence might not be just a guess from me. It's a little like 1984's Winston being a detective in a crazy city (and the city) that could have been in Calvino's 'Invisible Cities'.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I share some feelings with other reviewers: the characters (even -- or especially -- the narrator) are quick sketches and the story is really an old-fashioned police procedural. But the setting ...! The setting, or more specifically how Mieville introduces, unfolds and presents it is a 100% breathtaking tour-de-force, and I am humbled by it. At first, I wasn't quite sure how the division between the cities 'worked', but I think that's intentional. Once I had fully embraced it I was stunned by its audacity, and its political aspects.In the end I felt as I have with many of the novels of Richard Powers: huge intellectual thrill, but ultimately a rather cold affect. If I had felt deeply for the characters it might have been unbearable (as Perdido Street Station was at a few points). Do read this.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Hidden like a book in a library - worth reading just because of that scene , the setting of that idea into a story of investigation, a story of betweenness.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I first learned about this book because of the fact that in the BBC television series based on it, the creators decided to use the Georgian alphabet for one of the two cities -- because they found it sufficiently weird. Having now read the book, which came highly recommended by a number of friends, that turns out to be the least weird thing about it. The author has imagined two cities situated in the same place, sharing the same roads, and in some cases the same buildings, where it is illegal for residents of one city to see or hear the residents of the other. He creates a verb for this very purpose -- to "unsee" -- and it's bits like that which have led some to compare the author to Orwell. It's a thought-provoking book in the most literal sense; one is forced to pause and think many times about the issues raised, like divided cities, national and ethnic divisions, and of course social class. Michael Harrington famously described "the other America" more than half a century ago as the poor part of a wealthy society that went largely unseen by most. I haven't yet watched the BBC series and am keen to begin, not least because I cannot imagine how one can visualise two cities that largely exist only in the minds of their residents, who are busy "unseeing" what is often within touching distance.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I had mixed feelings about this book. I read it because I'd heard much praise poured upon the author and because comparisons had been made between it and Jan Morris's 'Hav', a book that I love (I saw a new copy of the latter, incidentally, on sale for 25 pence. If ever an illustration were needed of the disconnect between literary merit and author popularity, this was it...). I read it quickly and enjoyed much about it. I had serious misgivings too, though.

    Let's be clear. No novel gets everything right. If it did it'd be the perfect book, and no such thing exists. There are always trade-offs (action versus character development, for instance). The evocation of place in the two imaginary cities described here was a genuine achievement. There was something about the plot's twists and turns that kept me reading. The characters, on the other hand, were hardly developed at all. And the stylised dialogue, which drove the narrative much of the time, was often clichéd and sometimes confusing. You couldn't always work out which character was supposed to be speaking since they all sounded the same and a paragraph might begin with one of them talking and end with another doing so. Bizarre. At other times, the disjointed patterns of real speech were reproduced brilliantly. And after so much build-up, the key revelation when it came was something of a damp squib. Still, on balance, I'm pleased that I read it and might yet try another.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A fun concept, but the descriptions are often overdone and the central mystery turns out to be rather pedestrian.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Did not expect a Hard Boiled mystery from this. Not an easy read, but none of his books are... all are worth the trip.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    At the center of "The City & The City", China Mieville's new novel, is a stunning, beautiful conceit that is revealed, in its basic dimensions, over the first six or so chapters. Reading these was about the most fun I've had with speculative fiction in years; then the book got better as Mieville developed his idea still further, from that point. The reader gets a taste of the lived experience of a world existentially very different from ours, or any world I've ever encountered in fiction. The development of his idea's implications is as thrilling as a well-paced chase scene. I repeatedly was left shaking my head in amazement as I read.What idea? Here we have a problem. The novel is due for public release May 26, 2009; I have an ARC, an advance reader copy. The conceit is so central that most every review will outline it, thus spoiling the reader's joy in discovering it through the consciousness of Inspector Tyador Borlu, of the Extreme Crime Squad. As that suggests, this novel is in part a mystery, a police procedural starting from the discovery of a murder victim in Beszel, Mieville's imaginary city somewhere in Europe. The mystery, Borlu's encounters with his city, its people and the greater world - it's the 21st century, and Beszel is connected via TV, Internet and mobile phones to the rest of Earth - is well done. In contrast with his earlier novels, e.g. "Perdido Street Station," Mieville uses a sparer, clipped prose style here, reminiscent of some of his short stories.But the detection is perfectly integrated with the speculation, and can't be discussed separately. I can say that Mieville has attained a new, higher level of artistry in this novel, challenging his readers to keep up. In place of his usual flood of dazzling concepts and images is the rigorous working-out of one great, immensely metaphorically fertile, conceit. If you're already a Mieville admirer, that should be all you need to know - indeed, you didn't need to hear from me at all. Don't read a review first - even the LT product information, from the publisher, tells a bit too much. If you haven't read him yet, "Perdido Street Station" or his YA "Un Lun Dun" should show you how good he is when writing fantasy, although those earlier novels are very different from the new book. If you must, read the reviews when they appear and miss some of the marvelous experience of the early chapters - but do read this book.And I'll say more, below, after the novel is released in May.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is an intriguing police procedural with an insane sci fi/urban fantasy premise, and I mean that in a good way. Two cities occupy the same space and their respective citizens studiously ignore (unsee) each other. They don't even speak the same language. There is Breach, an elite force that punishes unauthorized travel between the cities or intentional contact between citizens. When the body of a murdered young woman is dumped in one of the cities, the police of both cities must cooperate to solve the crime. Oh, and there may also be a third city between the other two. This book was fascinating and very elegantly written. I would love to have a sequel to this. John Lee, the narrator of the audiobook, was very good.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Did quite enjoy this, but annoyed that it was never fully explained why the central conceit of "Breaching" was such a heinous crime.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Raymond Chandler in SF. Science fiction, not Hammetland. Well done mystery in a divided city ruled by an elaborate etiquette of unseeing. Ten pages in, I thought this was a pretty prentious conceit, but Mieville pulls it off masterfully. The usual not-entirely-sensical conclusion as we'd get with Chandler, but the book carries on the tradition of the gritty urban mystery into a imaginary realms with surprising success.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fantasy? Science Fiction? I eventually plumped for science fiction, but it was a near-run thing. Seems to be set in contemporary times, but for one enormous plot-hole which didn't spoil my enjoyment one iota. However, I think that anyone of a youthful disposition would just say but why didn't they just use the internet and texting. Oh and borders - how are the borders of the cities isolated?. I think the central premise of the overlapping and intertwining cities is fabulous, and the detective story is very well played out. Of Mieville's works, I've only read 'Un Lun Dun' before, and this was far superior.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Murder mystery in a mysterious dual-city. A bit too confusing for its own good.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A fascinating look at how we can live in the same place and see things differently with a great detective story in this setting.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not my favorite Mieville, but not my least favorite. This is another one were the environment is the plot, I mean there are characters, and there is a mystery, but the environmental factors stick out more than any of that. It was interesting and well written, but I felt like I never really fully understood, the environmental mechanic, so I feel like I may have missed some finer points.Since Mieville has written some of my all-time favorite books I'll keep reading his stuff in hopes for that same reaction to future books.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Brilliant.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The City and The City is a gritty detective novel that takes place in two cities--the downtrodden eastern European city of Beszel, and the up-and-coming middle eastern city of Ul Qoma. The conceit is that these two cities actually exist in the same exact location--through some sort of unexplained past event, the two cities somehow divided, and now people can only access the other city through specific points where the cities are imperfectly stitched. Unauthorized travel between the cities is strictly prohibited, and even seeing the faded images of the other city's citizens where the cities overlap is forbidden, rules enforced by the mysterious and seemingly supernatural organization Breach. The story follows a Beszel detective named Borlu as he investigates a murder case that seemingly crosses city boundaries multiple times, but always in a such a way to avoid the scrutiny of Breach. While Borlu is trying to unravel the murder mystery in his competent and no-nonsense style, the reader is trying to unravel the mystery behind the co-located cities. And while there is still plenty of mystery at the end, it's certainly an engaging journey.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    But I'm scifi dumb, so that must equal at least a 7 out of 5 were I to invoke interstitial math skillz. Yep. Ima genius. My Miéville cherry has finally been popped! This was probably the best of his novels for me to lose it to as I didn't feel overwhelmed by fantastical-weird-steam-noire-fiction. But I also would not have been unhappy with a little more cuddling; maybe a glass of wine? Miéville has constructed an intricate yet, in some ways, simple tale. What I would really love to see is his storyboard for the novel.I think, from what I have read of Miéville, this novel is about what it is he is trying to do with his writing. I sense he is not really interested in being beholden, rigidly, to one genre or another. There is a lot of crosshatching out there and it is possible to be successful in breach of formal genre etiquette.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's really hard to say anything about this book without giving away something crucial in the experience of reading it. Many detective novels treat you as a passive passenger, following along without really engaging your deductive abilities in any way. This book's triumph: while Detective Tyador Borlu frantically tries to solve a murder in the East European city state of Besz, this book quietly, almost secretly, presents the reader with another, entirely different mystery to solve. This mystery is right on top, in the text, and you feel almost split in two trying to follow two enigmas, one of which only you can solve. This is by far the best book I've read in the last seven years.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very nice blend of fantasy and police procedural. Can't wait for the next.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was a honest, emotional, gut-wrenching story. To candid, I initially chose it out of curiosity, but in just a few minutes it enveloped me. I found myself imagining what it would be like to "unsee" and how much more complex my world- city- social life would be if I were part of this amazing world. It opened my eyes to the genre and I trust I will not be quick to abandon it any time soon. Thank you for such an amazing read!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A detective novel in a wholly unfamiliar setting, two cities that occupy the same space. This fantasy has a great premise and it is a pleasure to read.. The Mystery of the crime is far outweighed by the mystery of the Breech, or even the mystery of how these peoples can coexist in such a precarious situation. Simply outstanding!