The City & the City - China Mieville [141]
RHRC: Orciny first seems like a myth, then real, then a hoax—and yet it’s never really disproved. Indeed, Bowden’s extraordinary attempt to walk out of the cities, at once utterly mundane and thoroughly uncanny, seems to show that Orciny does exist, at least in potential.
CM: Yes. This, I guess, is all part of that teasing thing I was talking about before. They disprove nothing in the absolute, only that a prime suspect for the commission of these crimes (a city), turns out not to be guilty of these crimes in this case. Of course, that said, there’s also been a poking around with the ideas of why that might be such an appealing possible solution, why the drive to that kind of explanation.
RHRC: Do you have any plans to return to Beszel and Ul Qoma, perhaps to explore their shared prehistory?
CM: Possibly. The conceit of the book, at least for me, was that there are indeed several other stories set in Beszel—and possibly involving Ul Qoma—featuring Tyador Borlú, and that they’d come before this. That this particular book was the last of his adventures. The novel was originally subtitled “The Last Inspector Borlú Mystery.” But I was told in vigorous terms by everyone involved in producing the book that it would confuse readers, who would see it, decide to start with the first of the series, and leave the shop without anything when they couldn’t find that earlier volume. So I took the subtitle off. But for me, it’s still there, invisible.
RHRC: It must have been hard, as you were writing the novel, to avoid moments of inadvertent breaching. How did you train yourself to unsee and unhear? And what was the personal impact of that? Did your perceptions of London change?
CM: My perceptions didn’t really change: the whole of the book was predicated on my thinking about those urban perceptions, so while I might have been slightly more conscious of them, they were still as they had been. However, part of the thing about the setup is that it is, precisely, very hard, indeed impossible, to avoid moments of breach. You cannot train yourself to successfully and sustainedly unsee and unhear—you do them all the time, but they also fail, repeatedly, and you cheat, repeatedly, in all sorts of small ways. The book mentions that several times. It is absolutely about absolute fidelity to these particular urban protocols, exaggerations or extrapolations of the ones that I think are all around us all the time in the real world; but it’s also about cheating them, and failing them, and playing a little fast and loose, which I think is an inextricable part of such norms.
Reading Group Questions
and Topics for Discussion
In the accompanying interview, China Miéville says that he considers The City & The City “a crime novel above all.” Do you agree with his assessment? Why or why not?
Try to think of the novel primarily in science fictional or fantasy terms instead of as a crime novel. Is there any evidence that the novel falls into either of these categories? How would looking at the novel from these perspectives change your perception of the story?
Do you think Miéville wants readers to come at his story from a variety of directions? How would this be related to the idea of cross-hatching as it appears in the novel?
In the interview, Miéville also states that “each book demands a particular voice.” How would you describe the voice that he uses to tell the story of Beszel and Ul Qoma—the voice of Tyador Borlú? Do you think it was the best choice? What other voices could he have used to tell the story, and how would that choice have changed the novel? For example, imagine how the story would be different if it had been told from the point of view of Borlú’s Ul Qoman counterpart, Qussim Dhatt, or his assistant, Lizbyet Corwi?
Miéville calls the crime novel “a kind of dream fiction masquerading as a logic puzzle.” What do you think he meant by that, and how does The City & The City measure up to that definition?
So much of The City & The City