The City and the City

The City and the City straddles several genres at once, and in doing so, applies the tropes of those genres in liberal doses. First, the novel can be classified as speculative fiction, a broadly defined genre that can encompass many other genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and even history. The underlying element in all of these is a speculative premise, one that doesn’t exist in the real world or perhaps takes an element of realism and exaggerates and twists it for narrative effect. In The City and the City, China Miéville uses the premise of two cities, co-existing side by side and sharing the same physical space to comment on Borders as Social and Arbitrary Constructs and The Capacity to Ignore What Is Forbidden or Uncomfortable. Miéville, who is known for breaking free of strict genre confines, certainly incorporates traditional genre tropes in his novel: the shadowy and ill-defined avatars of Breach, the porous yet rigidly enforced borders, the myth of Orciny, and of course, the cities themselves. The concept of unseeing, of conditioning entire populations to not see people and places with whom they share the same space, is worthy of Kafka or Orwell. Yet, Miéville’s world is not completely divorced from the real world. The fictional city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma are referenced alongside Turkey and the Balkans; Miéville mentions Tito, Mao, and the Black Panthers alongside his fictional leaders and political movements. It can be disorienting to toggle between the real and the fictional, but Miéville seems content to let his speculative premise only drift so far.

Apart from its speculative elements, The City and the City also functions as a crime thriller. Borlú and Dhatt are archetypal hard-boiled detectives, jaded and world-weary. Miéville even acknowledges the influence of Raymond Chandler, one of the preeminent crime novelists of the 20th century. Indeed, much of the novel reads like a police procedural with Borlú, Dhatt, and Corwi hashing out theories and examining evidence. It is filled with false leads, tough interrogations, and pursuits through crowded streets. Underlying all the shared-cop lingo and camaraderie, however, is the specter of Breach. In fact, Borlú’s pursuit of Bowden as the suspect navigates the limbo between cities, daring Borlú to commit breach, perfectly blends the two genres in a single, high-stakes moment. The City and the City occupies a unique niche in the speculative/sci-fi/noir genres. It relies on elements of all three while carving out its own individual place among them.