The City & the City - China Mieville [136]
Corwi was at a café. She was in Besźel’s Ul Qomatown. She made me smile. I watched her drinking her creamy Ul Qoman tea in the establishment I had shown her. I watched her from the shade of an alley for several seconds before I realised that she was looking right at me, that she knew I was there. It was she who said good-bye to me, with a raised cup, tipped in salute. I mouthed at her, though even she could not have seen it, thanks, and good-bye.
I have a great deal to learn, and no choice but to learn it, or to go rogue, and there is no one hunted like a Breach renegade. So, not ready for that or the revenge of my new community of bare, extracity lives, I make my choice of those two nonchoices. My task is changed: not to uphold the law, or another law, but to maintain the skin that keeps law in place. Two laws in two places, in fact.
That is the end of the case of Orciny and the archaeologists, the last case of Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad. Inspector Tyador Borlú is gone. I sign off Tye, avatar of Breach, following my mentor on my probation out of Besźel and out of Ul Qoma. We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city.
READER BEWARE! Spoilers follow in this interview with China Miéville, and those who wish to fully enjoy The City & The City—and indeed this interview, as well—are strongly advised to read no further until they have finished the novel.
A Conversation with China Miéville
Random House Reader’s Circle: In many ways, The City & The City represents a departure for you in subject and style, but before we get to that, I’d like to focus on a central element of this book that has been a consistent and characteristic component of your fiction right from the start: that is, the city … and more, the fantastic city. Why this intense engagement with cityscapes both real and imaginary, and how has that engagement evolved over time, from the London of your first novel, King Rat, to New Crobuzon, UnLondon, and, finally, the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma?
China Miéville: It’s a bit of a lame answer, but truthfully I just don’t know. I’ve always lived in cities and always found them tremendously exciting places to live, but also loved how they get refracted through art. There’s such a long, powerful, and brilliant tradition it would be more surprising if I wasn’t pulled that way, I think.
The evolution is probably something other people are better placed than me to judge. But it feels like after the unrestrained splurge—and I don’t say that as a self-diss, I know it certainly doesn’t work for all readers, but I do think there are things you can do with a lack of self-discipline that you can’t do with more discipline—of Perdido, which was a kind of chaotic homage to cities in a very rococo way, I’ve got, relatively suddenly with The City & The City, more interested in something of a more restrained, maybe even melancholic urban sense. Of course, as soon as the next book comes out, that might change again.
RHRC: The use of language in this novel is notably sparer than in any of your previous books. How much of that is due to the demands of the story and perhaps even of the genre of the police procedural, which provides a certain structure to the novel, and how much is a natural progression of your style?
CM: Each book demands a particular voice—I don’t think this is a progression in the sense of an ineluctable movement in this direction. I think it’s enormously possible I’ll move back and forward between more and less baroque prose. But 1) there are things you can do with a restrained prose that you can’t with lusher prose—and vice versa; 2) it was a first-person narrative, and if you have an interior monologue of