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Welcome to Culturology's second summer of bookloving bookclub action! (And you know who knows what we bookclubbed last summer? The Onion A.V. Club, who're wasting their time with A Scanner Darkly right now, which we all know is soooooooo 2009.)

China Miéville's The City & The City

We're starting things off with a pretty awesome book this summer, I think. The City & The City came to me as a recommendation from a fiction-writing friend of mine, as a book which is blurbed as if it's a mash-up of Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, and actually manages to do so. And that's really what it does! I found it to be a very engrossing read (perhaps more like Chandler in this way than Kafka), the sort of novel which just thrives within its genre--a detective story--to keep the plot moving, but then contains such interesting scenery. I reckon that Neal will agree about this too, since it seems like it took him all of two days to read this one. There's, I think, a fairly large number of things to discuss out of this book, so I think I'm, as a start, going to just focus on one aspect for now, and see what comes up from there: genre.

Though this book is definitely a police story at heart, it straddles this fascinating line between fantasy and sci-fi as well. Put as simply as I can, the story takes place in a city, or rather, two cities which overlap each other, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which is/are somewhere past the Balkans. Although the two cities are separate city-states, they occupy the same geographic location, they are "grosstopically" right on top of each other. Some districts are all one city or the other, but many areas "crosshatch," where the two cities co-exist, their citizens being well-trained from childhood to ignore ("unsee") the other city. The origin of this is referred to as "the Cleaving," an excellent usage of language by Miéville, as "to cleave," awesomely, means both to split, and from a separate origin, to come together (this polysemy was also beautifully utilized by the poet Li-Young Lee in his amazing poem "The Cleaving"). Monitoring transgressions by either set of citizens across these invisible borders is the mysterious force of Breach.

Breach is the more obviously sci-fi element of the story, as they wield powers which are above and beyond those held by either individual city. They're revealed to be human, in many ways, by the end of the story, but even then their technologies and observation abilities are one of the points that stretches C & C beyond just being rather realistic fantasy. The other main source for fantasy-esque elements is the possible third city of Orciny, which according to legend, exists in the cracks between the two cities, and the never-satisfyingly-explained archaeological dig in Ul Qoma that produces a mish-mash of artifacts reminiscent of an ancient culture right out of H.P. Lovecraft (though the Lovecraftian elements fizzle away very satisfyingly before any real horror elements enter the novel).

There's been a recent spate, in the last couple of years, of authors mashing genres up with detective stories, to rather satisfying results (e.g. The Big Lebowski, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (not surprisingly also, apparently, in development as a movie by the Coen brothers), Inherent Vice). I think why it works so well, and this is certainly true of The City & The City, is that the detective novel allows for both a brisk, exciting, pulpy plot but also extensive world building. The cop, Inspector Borlú, needs a city to move around in, and since he observes with such a careful eye, the reader gets a very acute observation of the alternative reality he lives in. Here I see where both this book and a lot of these genre-benders owe a lot to the rise of respect within literary circles for comics and graphic novels in the last 20-30 years.

Certainly, world-building as a concept has been around since the novel came to being (Eliot's Middlemarch, for instance, is an amazing microcosmic work), but in (traditional) novels, the impetus has been one of realism, where the world represented is supposed to match the actual world within which it is written (Middlemarch, seems to me, is pretty much exactly what life must have been like for people like that in a time and place like that). But the kind of world/universe building in comics, which seeks to create self-consistent alternate realities that don't necessarily need to have anything to do with the actual world (this is why I think The Dark Knight was such a step backwards for comic book movies, its whole Gotham-is-Chicago method takes a massive step backwards in terms of world-building, since it hinges on actualism instead of self-consistent realism (though perhaps it needed to, since Schumacher took Gotham to such campy places in his movies)).

But The City & The City succeeds so well as a novel, that although at various points I did find myself thinking that it could be really well done as either a movie or a graphic novel, I think, in the end, that it's better off without any visual representation. This way, it's up to the reader to build and interpret the wild cross-hatching streets and the two city's different architectures, fashions, and mores. There would definitely be fun ways to show and hide the two cities depending on where Borlú is, but the book itself keeps you from seeing too much, which is part of what makes the book so engrossing. The first 60 or so pages were just fun reading to me, as the police procedural took its time getting out of the gates in order to slowly sneak in exposition of the circumstances of these two cities.

And once the book really gets going, though it never loses track of its police story roots, Miéville keeps enough turns coming that it never gets stale, so that even as plot points are revealed and mysteries both pertinent to the case and cultural-historical, it still feels like there's something at stake for Borlú up through the end. Though part of me was let down by there not being a bit more Lovecraft in there, overall I came away very impressed with both the concept and execution of this one. And we're off to the races!

I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Schedule:

July 9th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden

July 16th: TBD

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese