China Mieville

by The City

“Accidents. Road accidents, fires, inadvertent breaches …”

  “Yes. Of course. If you race to get out again. If that’s your response to the Breach, then maybe you’ve got a chance. But even then you’re in trouble. And if it’s any longer than a moment, you can’t get out again. You’ll never unsee again. Most people who breach, well, you’ll find out about our sanctions soon. But there is another possibility, very occasionally.

  “What do you know about the British Navy?” Ashil said. “A few centuries ago?” I looked at him. “I was recruited the same as everyone else in Breach. None of us were born here. We were all once in one place or the other. All of us breached once.”

  There were many minutes of silence between us. “There are people I’d like to call,” I said.

  HE WAS RIGHT. I imagined myself in Besźel now, unseeing the Ul Qoma of the crosshatched terrain. Living in half of the space. Unseeing all the people and the architecture and vehicles and the everything in and among which I had lived. I could pretend, perhaps, at best, but something would happen, and Breach would know.

  “It was a big case,” he said. “The biggest ever. You’ll never have so big a case again.”

  “I’m a detective,” I said. “Jesus. Do I have any choice?”

  “Of course,” he said. “You’re here. There’s Breach, and there’s those who breach, those to whom we happen.” He did not look at me but out over the overlapping cities.

  “Are any volunteers?”

  “Volunteering’s an early and strong indication that you’re not suited,” he said.

  We walked towards my old flat, my press-ganger and I.

  “Can I say good-bye to anyone? There are people I want to—”

  “No,” he said. We walked.

  “I’m a detective,” I said again. “Not a, whatever. I don’t work like you do.”

  “That’s what we want. That’s why we were so glad you breached. Times are changing.”

  So the methods may not be so unfamiliar as I feared. There may be others who proceed the traditional Breach way, the levering of intimidation, that self-styling as a night-fear, while I—using the siphoned-off information we filch online, the bugged phone calls from both cities, the networks of informants, the powers beyond any law, the centuries of fear, yes, too, sometimes, the intimations of other powers beyond us, of unknown shapes, that we are only avatars—was to investigate, as I have investigated for years. A new broom. Every office needs one. There’s a humour to the situation.

  “I want to see Sariska. You know who she is, I guess. And Biszaya. I want to talk to Corwi, and Dhatt. To say good-bye at least.”

  He was quiet for a while. “You can’t talk to them. This is how we work. If we don’t have that, we don’t have anything. But you can see them. If you stay out of sight.”

  We compromised. I wrote letters to my erstwhile lovers. Handwritten and delivered by hand, but not by my hand. I did not tell Sariska or Biszaya anything but that I would miss them. I was not just being kind.

  My colleagues I came close to, and though I did not speak to them, both of them could see me. But Dhatt in Ul Qoma, and later Corwi in Besźel, could tell I was not, or not totally, or not only, in their city. They did not speak to me. They would not risk it.

  Dhatt I saw as he emerged from his office. He stopped short at the sight of me. I stood by a hoarding outside an Ul Qoman office, with my head down so he could tell it was me but not my expression. I raised my hand to him. He hesitated a long time then spread his fingers, a waveless wave. I backed into the shadows. He walked away first.

  Corwi was at a café. She was in Besźel’s Ul Qomatown. She made me smile. I watched her drinking her creamy Ul Qoman tea in the establishment I had shown her. I watched her from the shade of an alley for several seconds before I realised that she was looking right at me, that she knew I was there. It was she who said good-bye to me, with a raised cup, tipped in salute. I mouthed at her, though even she could not have seen it, thanks, and good-bye.

  I have a great deal to learn, and no choice but to learn it, or to go rogue, and there is no one hunted like a Breach renegade. So, not ready for that or the revenge of my new community of bare, extracity lives, I make my choice of those two nonchoices. My task is changed: not to uphold the law, or another law, but to maintain the skin that keeps law in place. Two laws in two places, in fact.

  That is the end of the case of Orciny and the archaeologists, the last case of Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad. Inspector Tyador Borlú is gone. I sign off Tye, avatar of Breach, following my mentor on my probation out of Besźel and out of Ul Qoma. We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city.

  READER BEWARE! Spoilers follow in this interview with China Miéville, and those who wish to fully enjoy The City & The City—and indeed this interview, as well—are strongly advised to read no further until they have finished the novel.

  A Conversation with China Miéville

  Random House Reader’s Circle: In many ways, The City & The City represents a departure for you in subject and style, but before we get to that, I’d like to focus on a central element of this book that has been a consistent and characteristic component of your fiction right from the start: that is, the city … and more, the fantastic city. Why this intense engagement with cityscapes both real and imaginary, and how has that engagement evolved over time, from the London of your first novel, King Rat, to New Crobuzon, UnLondon, and, finally, the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma?

  China Miéville: It’s a bit of a lame answer, but truthfully I just don’t know. I’ve always lived in cities and always found them tremendously exciting places to live, but also loved how they get refracted through art. There’s such a long, powerful, and brilliant tradition it would be more surprising if I wasn’t pulled that way, I think.

  The evolution is probably something other people are better placed than me to judge. But it feels like after the unrestrained splurge—and I don’t say that as a self-diss, I know it certainly doesn’t work for all readers, but I do think there are things you can do with a lack of self-discipline that you can’t do with more discipline—of Perdido, which was a kind of chaotic homage to cities in a very rococo way, I’ve got, relatively suddenly with The City & The City, more interested in something of a more restrained, maybe even melancholic urban sense. Of course, as soon as the next book comes out, that might change again.

  RHRC: The use of language in this novel is notably sparer than in any of your previous books. How much of that is due to the demands of the story and perhaps even of the genre of the police procedural, which provides a certain structure to the novel, and how much is a natural progression of your style?

  CM: Each book demands a particular voice—I don’t think this is a progression in the sense of an ineluctable movement in this direction. I think it’s enormously possible I’ll move back and forward between more and less baroque prose. But 1) there are things you can do with a restrained prose that you can’t with lusher prose—and vice versa; 2) it was a first-person narrative, and if you have an interior monologue of that kind of verbal indulgence you immediately create a rather unlikely, or mediated or foppish or something narrator. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. Because yes, 3) this was to do with wanting to be completely faithful to certain noiresque police procedural protocols.

  RHRC: The City & The City is certainly not a traditional fantasy novel. It’s also very different from your previous fantasy novels. In fact, apart from the central conceit, the argument could be made that it’s not fantasy at all. And that conceit—of the two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, sharing physical but not legal or social space—can be interpreted both in fantastic or science fictional terms and in realistic, psychological terms. Did you set out to write a novel that was itself crosshatched—a term you’ve
adopted from the graphic arts—in terms of genre? Would you consider this an example of slipstream or interstitial fiction?

  CM: I consider it a crime novel, above all. The question of whether or not it’s fantasy doesn’t have a stable answer; it’s to do with how it’s read, what people get out of it, and so on. Certainly I was very aware of genre, and of the fantastic, and there’s a certain kind of (I hope good-natured) teasing of readers about the whether-or-not-ness of a fantastic explanation for the setting. And other issues, I think, about the drive to world-creation, and the hankering for a certain kind of hermetic totality that you see in fantasy, and so on. Not I hope that that stuff is heavy-handed, but it’s there in my mind. I don’t mind whether other people think the book’s “splipstream,” or “interstitial,” or whatever. I think of it as within the fantastic tradition, but for me that’s always been a very broad church. Whether it’s fantasy in the narrower sense, I don’t much mind. Certainly I’m not abjuring the term—it would be ungrateful and ridiculous for me to distance myself from a set of reading and writing traditions, and from a set of aesthetics and thematics that have furnished my mind since forever.

  RHRC: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that noir fiction and the fiction of the fantastic spring from common roots, and however far they may seemingly have diverged from each other, that commonality is still there, waiting to be evoked. That certainly seems true of The City & The City.

  CM: I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve said before that I’m interested in the incredibly creative and fecund disingenuity of the realist crime novel, that pretended realism of what is, I think, at its best, a kind of dream fiction masquerading as a logic puzzle. All the best noir—or at least I should say the stuff I like most—reads oneirically. Chandler and Kafka seem to me to have a lot more shared terrain than Chandler and a true-crime book. There’s a bunch of books that are more explicitly exploring the shared terrain of the fantastic and the noir around at the moment, but I think that’s a kind of uncovering as much as anything.

  RHRC: The practical geography of Beszel and Ul Qoma, as a shared terrain with various available and unavailable modes of navigation, reminded me of the black and white squares of a chessboard, whose use is moderated by an essentially arbitrary but nevertheless strictly enforced set of rules. I know you have a longstanding interest in games and gaming, and I wonder how much that interest influenced the development of this book.

  CM: Not so much at a conscious level. Consciously the organizing metaphor at a cartographic level was, as you’ve said, pen-and-ink artwork—cross-hatching. Draw lines one way—you have a shadow. Draw them the other way—you have another shadow. Overlay them—you have a deeper shadow. I think of Beszel and Ul Qoma as distinct layers of a shaded totality. At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games and more to do with the nature of taboos—enormously powerful, often enormously arbitrary, and (crucially) regularly quietly broken, without undermining the fact of the taboo itself. That last element, I think, is sometimes underestimated in the discussions of cultural norms, where they are both asserted and breached. Both those elements are foundational.

  RHRC: As I began to catch on to the unique nature of Beszel and Ul Qoma, I was reminded of the short story “Reports of Certain Events in London,” which appeared in your collection Looking for Jake. Was that in any way a starting point for The City & The City? Was there a particular moment in which the idea for this book took form, or did it evolve slowly, over time?

  CM: Several people have made that connection. It wasn’t something that occurred to me, but I can certainly see why people would think so, and they—you—may have a point. Though you could make a case that it’s a kind of negative influence in some ways—in its stress on fluid, predatory, unknowable geography, the short story is the anti-this. The City & The City is as much about bureaucracy as anything. The basic idea for the setting of the cities is something I’d been chewing over for several years. I kind of mentally auditioned various stories to see which would suit it best, which would showcase it but not heavy-handedly, not at the expense of narrative. That was the idea.

  RHRC: Your work has always had a strong element of the surreal to it, but it struck me that in this novel you are veering away from the Daliesque—hybrids of insect and human, or a man with an occupied birdcage for a head—toward a less extravagant brand of surrealism, one rooted less in the exotic imagery of dreams and nightmares than in quotidian images from the waking world—here I’m thinking of the influence of Bruno Schulz, whom you cite in your acknowledgments. What accounts for this shift?

  CM: I don’t like Dali, though of course you can’t ever escape his visual influence. I like Andre Breton’s dismissive nickname for him—Avida Dollars. But in terms of the sort of vaguely postdecadent curlicued baroque of his images, as compared to the subtler dreams of Schulz or Kafka, yes, I see that shift. What accounts for the shift, however, is an impossible question to answer. I’ve loved Schulz for a long time—like lots of people of my generation I came to him via the Quay Brothers’ film Street of Crocodiles—and Kafka, and a whole tradition of (very broadly) eastern European fantastic fiction and art, as well as a great love of the landscape of Prague, for example; and I wanted to write something inspired by that. Why the shift? I’m less breathless than I used to be. I’m older. I wanted to try something new. I wanted to write a homage to those traditions (and to the extraordinary prose of high noir). I wanted to write a book that my mother would have loved.

  RHRC: In addition to Schulz, you acknowledge Raymond Chandler, Franz Kafka, Alfred Kubin, and Jan Morris. The first two I’m familiar with, and their influence here seems plain, but I’m not familiar with either Kubin or Morris, and I daresay that will be true for many of your American readers as well. What is your debt to them?

  CM: Kubin was an Austrian writer and artist, and his book The Other Side, was a kind of Expressionist investigation of urban anxiety and the compulsions to create and populate cities of the mind—whatever dangers that brings—the fallacious safety of a transplanted metropolitan state in a kind of remote hinterland, was a big influence. Jan Morris is more of an argumentative influence. She wrote a book called Hav, which is the revisiting several years on of her book Last Letters from Hav, about a journey to an imagined country. I admired the book but had a very frustrated argument with it. Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not. The City & The City is having a respectful but pretty argumentative conversation with Hav. In part, I never felt Hav had enough of an identity, because she so stressed its nature as a syncretic port—and I greatly admired her abjuring of a kind of essentialist “indigenousism”—that in fact it felt mostly like a group of minorities meeting against an opaque and colorless backdrop. They never seemed to gestalt into anything bigger. I seem to be in a minority in this feeling, but when I realized that I’d been thinking about the book a lot as I wrote The City & The City, even thinking about it in frustration, it seemed only appropriate to give it a shout-out.

  RHRC: Some readers and critics will no doubt be tempted to see this novel as an allegory of the relations between the West and the Muslim world, due to the resemblance between the city name of Ul Qoma and the terrorist group Al Qaeda. And many other allegorical readings are possible based on various political, social, and sexual divisions and/or cross-hatchings. Do you have any sympathy with such readings?

  CM: Personally I make a big distinction between allegorical and metaphoric readings (though I’m not too bothered about terminology, once we’ve established what we’re talking about). To me, the point of allegorical readings is the search for what Fredric Jameson calls a “master code” to “solve” the story, to work out what it’s “about,” or, worse, what it’s “really about.” And that approach I have very little sympathy with. In this I’m a follower of Tolkien, who stressed his “cordial dislike” of allegory. I dislike it because I think it renders fi
ction pretty pointless, if a story really is written to mean something else—and I’m not suggesting there’s no place for polemical or satirical or whatever fiction, just that if it’s totally reducible in a very straight way, then why not just say that thing? Fiction is always more interesting to the extent that there’s an evasive surplus and/or a specificity. So it’s not saying there are no meanings, but that there are more than just those meanings. The problem with allegorical decoding as a method isn’t that it reads too much into a story, but that it reads too little into it. Allegories are always more interesting when they overspill their own levees. Metaphor, for me, is much more determinedly like that. Metaphor is always fractally fecund, and there’s always more and less to it. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that in no way do I say some of those readings aren’t valid (though I must say I have very little sympathy for the East versus West one, which is explicitly denied in the text more than once), but that I hope people don’t think the book is “solved” by that. I don’t think any book can be so solved.

  RHRC: Of course, you go much further than simple cross-hatching and actually enter into the spaces between Beszel and Ul Qoma, as well as the spaces disputed by them, into what I’m going to call “territories of superposition,” after the principle of quantum superposition. Here we’re in the realm of the Breach and also of the invisible city of Orciny, which may or may not be a myth. Were the Breach and Orciny always part of the novel, or did you only become aware of their existence, so to speak, through circumstantial evidence as you were writing about the two “visible” cities?

  CM: Breach was always part of it, because the two main cities presumed their borders, which presumed the policing. Orciny sort of emerged later. There was no reason to stop there. Once you’ve realized you can do a shtick about more and more hidden cities in more and more interstices, you’re into a potential mise-en-abyme, and I could have had fourth, fifth, sixth rumored cities, etc., at ever-decreasing scales.