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By Root 1014 0

to me, are by M. John Harrison. And yes, I think you’re absolutely right that this is part of that lineage. And I don’t even mind the term “deflating.” I think it’s fair and it was, so far as it goes, quite deliberate. Now obviously I know that won’t work for all readers, and I know, in fact, that some readers have disliked the book for precisely that point. That’s fair enough. But to me, that hankering for the opening-out, the secrets behind the everyday, can sometimes be question-begging. Of course I have it, too—I’m a fantasy reader, I love that uncanny fracture and whatever’s behind it—but surely it’s legitimate and maybe even interesting not merely to indulge that drive but to investigate it, to prod at it, and yes, maybe precisely as part of that, to frustrate it.

RHRC: Yet at the same time, you also encourage speculation in the fantastic—most notably, I think, in the archeological artifacts recovered from the Ul Qoman dig, a bizarre mix of primitive objects and what seems to be the remnants of an advanced technology.

CM: Well it’s certainly the case that the book never forecloses the possibility of any fantastic elements. The strange properties of the archeological physics, for example—it’s not proven, but nor is it falsified. I was interested not so much in the aspects of possible magic—though certainly that question mark is there—but in the question of opaque logic. There is clearly, to the investigators, a logic to this seemingly impossible coagulum of material culture; that’s why they’re investigating it. But it’s a logic that escapes them; it’s something they can’t parse. Even if you have no way into it, that seems to me importantly different from something having no logic at all.

RHRC: Your narrator and main character, Tyador Borlú, is rational, a skeptic, but also enough of a romantic to be seduced by mysteries—in other words, a familiar type from noir fiction. But he’s also very much a product of his peculiar environment. Even before this case, and his close encounter with the Breach, his life abounds in interstitiality, from his relationships with women to his preference for the wonderfully named DöplirCaffés, where Jews and Muslims sit side by side in a microcosm of the two surrounding cities. Geography really is destiny, isn’t it?

CM: A familiar type from noir, and also from a thousand other things, including the real world. Interstitiality is a tremendous buzzword, and it can be quite easy to locate it at all levels. One of the reasons for the kind of microcosmic foreshadowing of the relationship between the cities in the DöplirCaffés, etc., was precisely to undercut any seeming portent about them. Sure, they’re rather extraordinarily doubled, meaning there’ll be interstices and gray areas, etc., etc., but that’s just an unusually extrapolated version of the kind of thing that goes on all the time, at all levels. That was the idea. Interstitiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you’re going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of some of its theoretical partisans, I think.

RHRC: The Cleavage, the event that separated Beszel and Ul Qoma in a past all but lost to history, remains, like Orciny itself, shrouded in mystery. Was it a science fictional event, a catastrophic phenomenon of quantum physics that sent parts of a single ur-city into congruent and occasionally intersecting dimensions? Or is the Cleavage to be understood purely in psychological terms? Does it matter how readers interpret this aspect of the book?

CM: The event that separated Beszel and Ul Qoma or possibly joined them together. Cleave being one of those magic, camply semiotically rich words which means two exactly opposite things. And of course I’m not going to answer the question! If it even has an answer—on which I couldn’t possibly comment. I know what I think, and you’ve mentioned it before, in terms of the generic status of the book, but it would be quite unhelpful I think for me to dictate