The City & the City - China Mieville [138]
RHRC: As I began to catch on to the unique nature of Beszel and Ul Qoma, I was reminded of the short story “Reports of Certain Events in London,” which appeared in your collection Looking for Jake. Was that in any way a starting point for The City & The City? Was there a particular moment in which the idea for this book took form, or did it evolve slowly, over time?
CM: Several people have made that connection. It wasn’t something that occurred to me, but I can certainly see why people would think so, and they—you—may have a point. Though you could make a case that it’s a kind of negative influence in some ways—in its stress on fluid, predatory, unknowable geography, the short story is the anti-this. The City & The City is as much about bureaucracy as anything. The basic idea for the setting of the cities is something I’d been chewing over for several years. I kind of mentally auditioned various stories to see which would suit it best, which would showcase it but not heavy-handedly, not at the expense of narrative. That was the idea.
RHRC: Your work has always had a strong element of the surreal to it, but it struck me that in this novel you are veering away from the Daliesque—hybrids of insect and human, or a man with an occupied birdcage for a head—toward a less extravagant brand of surrealism, one rooted less in the exotic imagery of dreams and nightmares than in quotidian images from the waking world—here I’m thinking of the influence of Bruno Schulz, whom you cite in your acknowledgments. What accounts for this shift?
CM: I don’t like Dali, though of course you can’t ever escape his visual influence. I like Andre Breton’s dismissive nickname for him—Avida Dollars. But in terms of the sort of vaguely postdecadent curlicued baroque of his images, as compared to the subtler dreams of Schulz or Kafka, yes, I see that shift. What accounts for the shift, however, is an impossible question to answer. I’ve loved Schulz for a long time—like lots of people of my generation I came to him via the Quay Brothers’ film Street of Crocodiles—and Kafka, and a whole tradition of (very broadly) eastern European fantastic fiction and art, as well as a great love of the landscape of Prague, for example; and I wanted to write something inspired by that. Why the shift? I’m less breathless than I used to be. I’m older. I wanted to try something new. I wanted to write a homage to those traditions (and to the extraordinary prose of high noir). I wanted to write a book that my mother would have loved.
RHRC: In addition to Schulz, you acknowledge Raymond Chandler, Franz Kafka, Alfred Kubin, and Jan Morris. The first two I’m familiar with, and their influence here seems plain, but I’m not familiar with either Kubin or Morris, and I daresay that will be true for many of your American readers as well. What is your debt to them?
CM: Kubin was an Austrian writer and artist, and his book The Other Side, was a kind of Expressionist investigation of urban anxiety and the compulsions to create and populate cities of the mind—whatever dangers that brings—the fallacious safety of a transplanted metropolitan state in a kind of remote hinterland, was a big influence. Jan Morris is more of an argumentative influence. She wrote a book called Hav, which is the revisiting several years on of her book Last Letters from Hav, about a journey to an imagined country. I admired the book but had a very frustrated argument with it. Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not. The City & The City is having a respectful but pretty argumentative conversation with Hav. In part, I never felt Hav had enough of an identity, because she so stressed its nature as a syncretic port—and I greatly admired her abjuring of a kind of essentialist “indigenousism”—that in fact it felt mostly like a group of minorities meeting against an opaque and colorless backdrop.