The City & the City - China Mieville [137]
RHRC: The City & The City is certainly not a traditional fantasy novel. It’s also very different from your previous fantasy novels. In fact, apart from the central conceit, the argument could be made that it’s not fantasy at all. And that conceit—of the two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, sharing physical but not legal or social space—can be interpreted both in fantastic or science fictional terms and in realistic, psychological terms. Did you set out to write a novel that was itself crosshatched—a term you’ve adopted from the graphic arts—in terms of genre? Would you consider this an example of slipstream or interstitial fiction?
CM: I consider it a crime novel, above all. The question of whether or not it’s fantasy doesn’t have a stable answer; it’s to do with how it’s read, what people get out of it, and so on. Certainly I was very aware of genre, and of the fantastic, and there’s a certain kind of (I hope good-natured) teasing of readers about the whether-or-not-ness of a fantastic explanation for the setting. And other issues, I think, about the drive to world-creation, and the hankering for a certain kind of hermetic totality that you see in fantasy, and so on. Not I hope that that stuff is heavy-handed, but it’s there in my mind. I don’t mind whether other people think the book’s “splipstream,” or “interstitial,” or whatever. I think of it as within the fantastic tradition, but for me that’s always been a very broad church. Whether it’s fantasy in the narrower sense, I don’t much mind. Certainly I’m not abjuring the term—it would be ungrateful and ridiculous for me to distance myself from a set of reading and writing traditions, and from a set of aesthetics and thematics that have furnished my mind since forever.
RHRC: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that noir fiction and the fiction of the fantastic spring from common roots, and however far they may seemingly have diverged from each other, that commonality is still there, waiting to be evoked. That certainly seems true of The City & The City.
CM: I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve said before that I’m interested in the incredibly creative and fecund disingenuity of the realist crime novel, that pretended realism of what is, I think, at its best, a kind of dream fiction masquerading as a logic puzzle. All the best noir—or at least I should say the stuff I like most—reads oneirically. Chandler and Kafka seem to me to have a lot more shared terrain than Chandler and a true-crime book. There’s a bunch of books that are more explicitly exploring the shared terrain of the fantastic and the noir around at the moment, but I think that’s a kind of uncovering as much as anything.
RHRC: The practical geography of Beszel and Ul Qoma, as a shared terrain with various available and unavailable modes of navigation, reminded me of the black and white squares of a chessboard, whose use is moderated by an essentially arbitrary but nevertheless strictly enforced set of rules. I know you have a longstanding interest in games and gaming, and I wonder how much that interest influenced the development of this book.
CM: Not so much at a conscious level. Consciously the organizing metaphor at a cartographic level was, as you’ve said, pen-and-ink artwork—cross-hatching. Draw lines one way—you have a shadow. Draw them the other way—you have another shadow. Overlay them—you have a deeper shadow. I think of Beszel and Ul Qoma as distinct layers of a shaded totality. At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games and more to do with the nature of taboos—enormously powerful, often enormously arbitrary, and (crucially) regularly quietly broken, without undermining the fact of the taboo itself. That last element, I think,