This post is about China Miéville's The City & The City, which I finally got around to reading. I'll try to keep it fairly spoiler-free, but I make no promises. (And I am going to discuss the central conceit, but then, it's pretty clear by fifty pages in or so.)

TC&TC (it seems point-missingly wrong to shorten it to The City) is a police-procedural pastiche that takes place across two cities somewhere on the fringe of Europe called Besźel and Ul Qoma. The hook is that Besźel and Ul Qoma are culturally and linguistically distinct but "grosstopologically" superimposed on the same place. They are not side-by-side, like Berlin; they are intermingled, right down to the level of individual buildings. The citizens of each learn from childhood to "unsee" the citizens and material culture of the other, so that when on a street "crosshatched" with alternating Besź and Ul Qoman buildings, they only see the buildings in "their" city. This system is enforced by an enigmatic and seemingly supernatural authority known as Breach, who deal with even minor transgressions of these rules so brutally and inevitably that any interaction with the other city is unthinkable — not even criminals dare mess with Breach.

(This setup is both disappointing and encouraging: disappointing because I was secretly hoping that Miéville had come up with a workable depiction of a city built on the plan of a Möbius strip or a blivet, but encouraging because at least the idea he had come up with was original.)

Miéville is careful to avoid simple allegory for any one real issue. Besźel and Ul Qoma are evocative of all artificial divisions: class structure, where the rich on their way to lunch studiously ignore the poor sweeping and slumped on the sidewalk; religious differences, where ostracism and sometimes violence define the limits of the acknowledgeable; even totalitarianism, where everyone agrees on pain of death to "unsee" the fact that their rulers ride in BMWs past breadlines that don't move all day.

So everyone is free to impose their own clé on TC&TC and for me of course that is language.

It's not all my fault. Miéville makes language an issue right from the start. The story begins in Besźel, where people are named things like Shukman, Lizbyet, Vilyem: part of the Indo-European tradition, but with exotic, unplacable Eastern European trimmings. As the story progresses, the narrator constantly digresses to remark on linguistic matters: a drug called feldexplained as a "trilingual pun: it's khat where it's grown, and the animal called 'cat' in English is feld in our own language"; an aside about "the public has a right to know" as an idea seeping into Besź journalism due to "British or North American owners," plus a note that "in Besź the word 'right' is polysemic enough to evade the peremptory meaning [they intend by it]"; a line of dialogue "It wasn't that hard, and at least it made it easier to gudcop," explained thus: "we had stolen gudcop and badcop from English, verbed them."

So, two things: (1) Besź is positioned relative to English, and (2) the narrator — "Tyador Borlú" of the Extreme Crime Squad — is specifically addressing someone who doesn't know Besź. Given the lack of a "papers-found-in-a-suitcase-in-Hungary" framing device, I think it's fair to go one step further and assume that Borlú is addressing us: English speakers, the Anglosphere.

Ul Qoma's proper nouns are similarly evocative, spelled with lots of Q's and liberal use of the article "Ul." This pseudo-Middle Eastern orthography exploits obvious existing east-meets-west traditions, although I would not be willing to bet that Miéville didn't end up with "Ul Qoma" by working backwards from the internet domain .uq as an homage to Uqbar. In any case, Illitan, the language of Ul Qoma, feels more "distant" than Besź from the perspective of an English speaker, even though we are explicitly told that they "share a common ancestor." (Perhaps the proper nouns are a substrate.)

(Besź and Illitan are also written with different scripts, which to my mind echoes the distinction between "seeing" and "unseeing": a script you cannot read cannot be "seen" all the way through to its meaning; a script you can read cannot not be.)

Borlú speaks Illitan, but, significantly, he has to resort to English — and the cliched English of cop drama at that — to get his point across at times: "'Can you make a... I don't know it in Illitan. Put an APB on him,' I said in English, copying the films." ("Yeah, we call it 'send the halo,'" replies his Ul Qoman interlocutor.)

English, the language of neoliberalism and all that is antithetical to tiny, distinct cultures, is the reference point and the common ground for Besźel and Ul Qoma. English is explicitly identified as the vantage point from which the oddness of Besźel and Ul Qoma's situation can be acknowledged (for to speak of it in Besź or Illitan would be tantamount to admitting knowledge of things one should be unseeing, and therefore Breach). In fact, it's subtle, but a surprisingly large proportion of the novel's plot relies on English as a medium for development — without expats and executives and postgrads hacking callously through the semiotic tangle of Besź-Ul Qoma in search of the lost cities and fabulous riches they are said to conceal, not much of the story would be left.

So we have a story that is positioned relative to English, narrated in English, all about the effects of English. This feels like a metaphor for cultural hegemony of the sort that allows dissent only on its own terms, which makes the fact that the story doesn't end in dramatic revolution and "freedom" for Besźel and Ul Qoma a shocking anti-Hegelian twist concealed within apparent stasis.

The three writers most mentioned in reviews of TC&TC are Kafka, Orwell (specifically 1984, of course), and Borges. The comparison to Kafka feels unfruitful because there is no cruelty or inhumanity: the situation is absurd, but the rules are clear and it's quite possible to obey them and live a fruitful life. Even the outsiders thrown into Besźel and Ul Qoma treat the situation as a cultural quirk rather than a psychological torture, and no-one in or out of the cities seems any more alienated by their position than the rest of the modern world is by their own. The Orwell link is even more tenuous because instead of the proverbial boot stamping in a human face forever the two cities are simply regular cities with certain idiosyncratic (and, really, not especially oppressive in and of themselves) bylaws. Breach have absolute power but not totalitarian power: you can do whatever you want as long as you don't Breach, and it's made clear in the novel that while "thoughtcrime," temporarily imagining oneself in the other city while on a crosshatched street, does theoretically exist and would be prosecutable, Breach do not act on it.

Borges, though, I can see. The whole novel feels like an elaboration on a Borgesian idea, and while there is no air of Kafkan cruelty or Orwellian oppression, the novel is saturated with melancholy Borgesiana: libraries and alleyways and paradoxes and loopholes. On the other hand, while Miéville is an excellent writer and in particular very good at distinguishing the voices of his characters, The City & The City is ultimately a detective story, peeled layer by layer through hard work and elbow grease. This makes the story more vivid but also dilutes the sheer intellectual thrill of a Borgesian idea, and to be honest at times I found myself wishing Miéville had left some things a bit more oblique — left more for me to do with his idea.