On China Mieville's "The City and The City"

 

Today I'm looking at the City and the City by China Mieville. This is a science fiction book that came out a little over a decade ago. I want to like this author's works mainly because he's a comrade. I first read him a couple of years back when he did that version of the Russian Revolution called October. It was a historical novel that was like Ten Days that Shook the world but was better than Ten Days that Shook the World. Since then, I've read a couple of his books, This Census Taker and Three Moments of an explosion and Neither were particularly memorable.

 

 This book is a New York Times bestseller and one that you go to and it's supposed to be one of his better ones. If you read the blurbs and just try to get a sense of what's that about you really might not know. The basic premise is that there are two cities that exist independently but in the same geographical space. The people who live in those cities are trained from their youth to ignore what's going on right next to him if they get the signals and the cues that it is from one of them the other City. The thing is that it just didn't really work for me. It was about page 74 and I realized that I was getting most of the World building for this aspect that I was going to get as a reader. I just said I don't believe it. Now here's the thing, everything else is good enough that despite me not believing the world building and the central premise I still want to keep reading. 

 

There's a murder mystery and that very Central thing plays huge role in it. What it really got me thinking was what this two-city thing really represented. Was it some geographical political commentary, which I think is a reading that is the end of the easiest to do because it seems like it's right there for analysis? There's also the possibility that isn't there a bigger metaphysical thing. I kept asking myself  are these people already dead are they in purgatory I don't know. The problem with that is there are  people that come in from outside and visit the cities. And then they leave again so that might not be the best reading. Overall, I did read it and I enjoyed it, but I just tried really had to not think about that central thing of the setting because the minute I started thinking of the central premise it didn't work so just kind of was that thing if you ignore the man behind the curtain it's okay but like that curtain just really lamp shaded.