Yes, another China Miéville book so soon. I enjoyed his story collection Three Moments of an Explosion enough to send me almost immediately to one of his novels.
The City and The City is fundamentally a noir-esque detective novel. The narrator is a detective who catches a murder case involving a young woman who was studying at a controversial archeological dig. His investigation leads him into dangerous subcultures and suggests larger forces at work. As I say, a detective novel.
The fantasy element comes with the locale. The detective lives in the (Eastern European?) city of Besźel; the murder victim came from the city of Ul Qoma. Besźel and Ul Qoma are neighboring cities with distinct clashing cultures, but they happen to occupy the same physical space. Citizens of each municipality learn to "unsee" everything about the other municipality. Our hero has to solve the case without "breaching" the boundary between the city and the city.
It's a great concept, impressively pulled off. It was tough going early on as I tried to imagine the logistics of unseeing, but I eventually settled into it and got engaged with the plot. The book's imitation of the detective genre extends to the resolution: our narrator spouts a bit too much exposition when he faces off against the perpetrators.
The City and The City is fundamentally a noir-esque detective novel. The narrator is a detective who catches a murder case involving a young woman who was studying at a controversial archeological dig. His investigation leads him into dangerous subcultures and suggests larger forces at work. As I say, a detective novel.
The fantasy element comes with the locale. The detective lives in the (Eastern European?) city of Besźel; the murder victim came from the city of Ul Qoma. Besźel and Ul Qoma are neighboring cities with distinct clashing cultures, but they happen to occupy the same physical space. Citizens of each municipality learn to "unsee" everything about the other municipality. Our hero has to solve the case without "breaching" the boundary between the city and the city.
It's a great concept, impressively pulled off. It was tough going early on as I tried to imagine the logistics of unseeing, but I eventually settled into it and got engaged with the plot. The book's imitation of the detective genre extends to the resolution: our narrator spouts a bit too much exposition when he faces off against the perpetrators.
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