CM: By all means. There’s a long and honorable tradition of anti -fantasies, of which some of the most invigorating, to me, are by M. John Harrison. And yes, I think you’re absolutely right that this is part of that lineage. And I don’t even mind the term “deflating.” I think it’s fair and it was, so far as it goes, quite deliberate. Now obviously I know that won’t work for all readers, and I know, in fact, that some readers have disliked the book for precisely that point. That’s fair enough. But to me, that hankering for the opening-out, the secrets behind the everyday, can sometimes be question-begging. Of course I have it, too—I’m a fantasy reader, I love that uncanny fracture and whatever’s behind it—but surely it’s legitimate and maybe even interesting not merely to indulge that drive but to investigate it, to prod at it, and yes, maybe precisely as part of that, to frustrate it.
RHRC: Yet at the same time, you also encourage speculation in the fantastic—most notably, I think, in the archeological artifacts recovered from the Ul Qoman dig, a bizarre mix of primitive objects and what seems to be the remnants of an advanced technology.
CM: Well it’s certainly the case that the book never forecloses the possibility of any fantastic elements. The strange properties of the archeological physics, for example—it’s not proven, but nor is it falsified. I was interested not so much in the aspects of possible magic—though certainly that question mark is there—but in the question of opaque logic. There is clearly, to the investigators, a logic to this seemingly impossible coagulum of material culture; that’s why they’re investigating it. But it’s a logic that escapes them; it’s something they can’t parse. Even if you have no way into it, that seems to me importantly different from something having no logic at all.
RHRC: Your narrator and main character, Tyador Borlú, is rational, a skeptic, but also enough of a romantic to be seduced by mysteries—in other words, a familiar type from noir fiction. But he’s also very much a product of his peculiar environment. Even before this case, and his close encounter with the Breach, his life abounds in interstitiality, from his relationships with women to his preference for the wonderfully named DöplirCaffés, where Jews and Muslims sit side by side in a microcosm of the two surrounding cities. Geography really is destiny, isn’t it?
CM: A familiar type from noir, and also from a thousand other things, including the real world. Interstitiality is a tremendous buzzword, and it can be quite easy to locate it at all levels. One of the reasons for the kind of microcosmic foreshadowing of the relationship between the cities in the DöplirCaffés, etc., was precisely to undercut any seeming portent about them. Sure, they’re rather extraordinarily doubled, meaning there’ll be interstices and gray areas, etc., etc., but that’s just an unusually extrapolated version of the kind of thing that goes on all the time, at all levels. That was the idea. Interstitiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you’re going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of some of its theoretical partisans, I think.
RHRC: The Cleavage, the event that separated Beszel and Ul Qoma in a past all but lost to history, remains, like Orciny itself, shrouded in mystery. Was it a science fictional event, a catastrophic phenomenon of quantum physics that sent parts of a single ur-city into congruent and occasionally intersecting dimensions? Or is the Cleavage to be understood purely in psychological terms? Does it matter how readers interpret this aspect of the book?
CM: The event that separated Beszel and Ul Qoma or possibly joined them together. Cleave being one of those magic, camply semiotically rich words which means two exactly opposite things. And of course I’m not going to answer the question! If it even has an answer—on which I couldn’t possibly comment. I know what I think, and you’ve mentioned it before, in terms of the generic status of the book, but it would be quite unhelpful I think for me to dictate terms for the reader. All the information the story requires is there.
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 revolves around the idea of Breach—which is both a noun and a verb in the context of the book. Yet despite the unique social structure binding and separating Beszel and Ul Qoma, readers have no trouble under
standing the concepts of Breach or breaching. Why should such a fantastical notion seem so familiar to us? Are there areas in your own life—social lacunae, if you will—in which something analogous to the rules of Breach are observed? For example, do you practice “unseeing” in your daily life?
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 in vines on the museum pillars. “And you see that lizard?”
The boy peeped. He looked at the bone brontosaurus that Billy had seemed to greet. Or maybe, Billy thought, he was looking at the glyptodon beyond it. All the children had a favorite inhabitant of the Natural History Museum’s first hall, and the glyptodon, that half globe armadillo giant, had been Billy’s.
Billy smiled at the woman who dispensed tickets, and the guard behind her. “This them?” he said. “Right then everyone. Shall we do this thing?”
He cleaned his glasses and blinked while he was doing it, replicating a look and motion an ex had once told him was adorable. He was a little shy of thirty and looked younger: he had freckles, and not enough stubble to justify “Bill.” As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Di Caprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.
Billy’s black hair was tousled in a halfheartedly fashionable style. He wore a not-too-hopeless top, cheap jeans. When he had first started at the centre, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists any more.
“So you’re all here for the tour of the Darwin Centre,” he said. He was acting as if he thought they were present to investigate a whole research site, to look at the laboratories and offices, the filing, the cabinets of paperwork. Rather than to see the one and only one thing within the building.
“I’m Billy,” he said. “I’m a curator. What that means is that I do a lot of the cataloguing and preserving, stuff like that. I’ve been here awhile. When I first came here I wanted to specialise in marine molluscs—know what a mollusc is?” he asked the boy, who nodded and hid. “Snails, that’s right.” Mollusca had been the subject of his masters thesis.
“Alright folks.” He put his glasses on. “Follow me. This is a working environment, so please keep the noise down, and I beg you not to touch anything. We’ve got caustics, toxins, all manner of horrible stuff all over the place.”
One of the young men started to say, “When do we see …” Billy raised his hand.
“Can I just …” he said. “Let me explain about what’ll happen when we’re in there.” Billy had evolved his own pointless idiosuperstitions. According to one it was bad luck for anyone to speak the name of what they were all there for, before they reached it.
“I’m going to show you a bunch of the places we work,” he said lamely. “Any questions, you can ask me at the end: we’re a little bit time constrained. Let’s get the tour done first.”
No curator or researcher was obliged to perform this guide work. But many did. Billy no longer grumbled when it was his turn.
They went out and through the garden, approaching the Darwin with a building site on one side and the brick filigrees of the Natural History Museum on the other.
“No photos, please,” Billy said. He did not care if they obeyed: his obligation was to repeat the rule. “This building here opened in two thousand two,” he said. “And you can see we’re expanding. We’ll have a new building in two thousand eight. We’ve got seven floors of wet specimens in the Darwin Centre. That means stuff in formalin.”
Everyday hallways led to a stench. “Jesus,” someone muttered.
“Indeed,” said Billy. “This is called the dermestarium.” Through interior windows there were steel containers like little coffins. “This is where we clean up skeletons. Get rid of all the gunk on them. Dermestes maculatus.”
A computer screen by the boxes was showing some disgusting salty-looking fish being eaten by insect swarms. “Eeurgh,” someone said.
“There’s a camera in the box,” said Billy. “Hide beetles is their English name. They go through everything, just leave bones behind.”
The boy grinned and tugged his father’s hand. The rest of the group smiled, embarrassed. Flesh-eating bugs: sometimes life really was a B-movie.
Billy noticed one of the young men. He wore a past-it suit, a shabby-genteel outfit odd for someone so young. He wore a pin on his lapel, a design like a long-armed asterisk, two of the spokes ending in curls. The man was taking notes. He was filling the pad he carried at a great rate.
A taxo
nomiser by inclination as well as by profession, Billy had decided there were not so many kinds of people who took this tour. There were children: mostly young boys, shy and beside themselves with excitement, and vastly knowledgeable about what they saw. There were their parents. There were sheepish people in their twenties, as geeky-eager as the kids. There were their girlfriends and boyfriends, performing patience. A few tourists on an unusual byway.
And there were the obsessives.
They were the only people who knew more than the young children. Sometimes they did not speak: sometimes they would interrupt Billy’s explanations with too-loud questions, or correct him on scientific detail with exhausting fussy anxiety. He had noticed more of such visitors than usual in the last several weeks.
“It’s like late summer brings out the weirdos,” Billy had said to his friend Leon, a few nights back, as they drank at a Thames pub. “Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.”
“Fascist,” Leon had said. “Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?”
“Please,” Billy said. “That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, but you pass. You’re like, you’re in deep cover,” Leon said. “You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.”
“Mmm, tasteful.”