Chamber Four

Author: China Miéville

Del Rey, 2009

Best ebook deal: Sony’s eBook Store

Filed under: Fantasy, Mystery

On the one hand, The City & The City is a straightforward mystery about a murder that has (of course) ties to larger forces at work. On the other hand, it presents the mystery of the world in which it takes place. This second mystery has the potential to be philosophical, allegorical, and richly entertaining in the grand tradition of the best magical realists. Unfortunately, Miéville barely scratches its surface, and so the whole novel feels unsatisfying and frustratingly unrealized.

The two cities of the title are Besźel and Ul Qoma, city-state neighbors roughly somewhere near Eastern Europe in an alternate history version of the approximate present. At some point, evidently, something happened, and now there’s a stringent set of absurd fascist laws that make life tricky to say the least.

I’m not saying more because it feels like I’m giving too much away―and that’s not good. Evidently, Miéville requested that reviewers not spoil the “twist” of the novel; the problem is that that twist is actually the premise, and once you figure out what’s going on, there’s nowhere else to go, nothing further happens.

The real mystery of this world should be how these circumstances were established in the first place, and why the citizenry puts up with such an admittedly ridiculous way of life. Those are questions that Miéville doesn’t have answers for. If he had made the psychology of these people intrinsic to the murder mystery, this book could have been brilliant.

Unfortunately, the mystery doesn’t rely on or care why this odd relationship between the cities formed, only that it formed. The result is a Jerry Bruckheimer-ish novel: an interesting world wasted as merely a backdrop for a formulaic story.

The hero of The City & The City is Inspector Tyador Borlú, of Besźel’s Extreme Crime Squad. As you might sense just from that sentence, Miéville relies a lot on bizarre nomenclature and weird-looking names to convey that this is a different world. That’s another symptom of too much care paid to the surface of things.

Inspector Borlú is a bland, humorless man, who seems to be the only half-competent, half-caring detective in a sea of hapless, vicious cops. He occasionally deigns to crack a joke, but then often seems to regret it, such as this passage where Borlú, speaking first, briefs a subordinate and then ruminates on his own words:

“She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.”

“You have no idea what you’re saying, do you, boss?”

“None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.” Perhaps one day we would be finished with I-don’t-understand-the-internet jokes.

In this way, Borlú continually sours any fun we might have watching him work.

Also in play is Miéville’s or Borlú’s bad tendency to put expository notes between em dashes in the middle of sentences, notes which make it―because they often come smack in the middle of phrases, and are quite long and overly detailed, and actually refer to clauses in the second half of the sentence, the section after the note itself―difficult to read a lot of those sentences on the first try.

All this makes it a chore to get through the first third of this book. It picks up from there, and from about page 100 to page 280 (before a quite lackluster ending), there’s a pretty good murder mystery, with a few pretty good twists and kinks, thanks to the weird intertwining of Besźel and Ul Qoma.

The entire novel, though, has a dark specter hanging over its head.

Borlú, like many of the characters in City, is unthoughtful and almost robotic in his acceptance of living conditions in Besźel. Most people in these cities not only fail to question the ridiculous laws, they rigidly obey them, despite the fact that the fascist shadow government rarely actually prosecutes citizens for most transgressions.

The problem of rationale is not solved as City goes along, but rather exacerbated. At the end of the novel, there’s even less reason for the status quo and even more questions of motivation. It’s a story of surfaces and facades: if you look for foundation, you’ll be disappointed.

I suppose City could be charitably interpreted as a story of fascism told not from the perspective of the freedom fighters or the overlords, but from middle management, from the cogs in the fascist system that don’t question or resist but simply, meekly obey. That’s interesting as an idea, but in practice, it’s not all that compelling.

If you’re a big Miéville fan, or you don’t mind a plot full of holes, there’s a decent mystery here, despite the lack of character. But don’t expect the earth-shattering genre-bending masterpiece that City is widely purported to be. Most of its power lies in Miéville simply withholding information from the reader (and requesting interviewers do the same), and that’s not a very pleasant gimmick to be on the receiving end of.

Similar books: Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon; and, though I’ve never read the book, I was reminded of the movie Children of Men—here’s a link to the book, it sounds quite different