The City & the City - China Mieville [142]
Is the power that Breach exercises arbitrary and absolute, or are there limits in place that are respected by everyone involved? Is there a real-life analogue to Breach in the United States?
Is Tyador Borlú a trustworthy narrator, or are there moments when he misleads readers … and himself? Identify some of these moments, and decide whether they are purposeful or not. Are these moments related to breaching, and if so, how?
Did you read this novel as an allegory about the post-9/11 relationship of the West and the Islamic world? Would such a reading be justified? Why or why not? Do you think this novel encourages a particular reading, or is it open to a variety of interpretations?
Why do you think Miéville, in the interview, calls this novel an anti-fantasy? What does that term suggest to you? Do you agree that it describes The City & The City?
Miéville is both stingy and tantalizing in conveying information about the artifacts uncovered at the Bol Ye’an dig in Ul Qoma. What do you make of this aspect of the novel, perhaps its only truly fantastic element? How do you account for the existence of these artifacts?
Do you think the Cleavage—the epochal event that once upon a time separated (or joined) Beszel and Ul Qoma—is best understood and interpreted as having been a physical event or a social/psychological one? What evidence can you find to support either of these positions? Are there clues to Miéville’s own belief on this point?
What about Orciny? Is the question of its existence answered definitively in the novel?
As an exercise, take the room in which you are meeting and assign parts of it to Beszel and parts to Ul Qoma. Now divide your group into citizens of the two cities. Try and hold your book club meeting without breaching. How long before a breach occurs?
Imagine that you are in the position of Mahalia Geary’s parents, who travel to Beszel after her murder looking for justice and for answers. Would you have acted differently than Mr. Geary in that situation? How would you have approached it?
At the end of the novel, when Bowden is using his knowledge of both cities to escape Borlú’s pursuit, he seems poised to walk out of the cities unapprehended. Yet he ends up surrendering to Borlú—why?
What do you think happens to Bowden once he has surrendered and vanished into the Breach?
Knowing what you know about Borlú—or Tye, as he has now become—do you think he’ll be content to remain an avatar of Breach?
READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM
KRAKEN
by China Miéville
PUBLISHED BY DEL REY BOOKS
An everyday doomsayer in sandwich-board abruptly walked away from what over the last several days had been his pitch by the gates of a museum. The sign on his front was an old-school prophecy of the end: the one bobbing on his back read FORGET IT.
Inside, a man walked through the big hall, past a double stair and a giant skeleton, his steps loud on the marble. Stone animals watched him. “Right then,” he kept saying.
His name was Billy Harrow. He glanced at the great fabricated bones and nodded. It looked as if he was saying hello. It was a little after eleven on a morning in October. The room was filling up. A group waited for him by the entrance desk, eyeing one another with polite shyness.
There were two men in their twenties with geek-chic haircuts. A woman and man barely out of their teens teased each other. She was obviously indulging him with this visit. There was an older couple, and a father in his thirties holding his young son. “Look, that’s a monkey,” he said. He pointed at animals carved