Urban layering and international crime
Sep. 21st, 2014 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileMany people have recommended China Miéville to me, generally with no explanation of what sort of stuff he writes or why I would be interested in it, and usually recommending Perdido Street Station specifically, which is about I have no idea whatsoever. But when one of my book clubs decided to read The City & The City, I figured I'd read it, both to see what it was all about and because I'd missed the last few of that book club.
The book club meeting was last Thursday, and I finished the book tonight, so it turns out I missed that book club meeting too. Oh well.
The reason this book took me goddamn forever to read is 100% due to crazy life hecticness that leaves me no time for reading, and not at all due to the book being not good. I know some people think it starts off slow, but I think it starts off a good kind of slow that I love in procedurals/mysteries/that sort of thing... jumping right into everything being totally batshit and continuing that way is good sometimes, but in a book where the worldbuilding is such a huge part of how the crime is put together, I like the sort of slow frustrated poking around in the beginning. It really picked up a lot at the end, and honestly, I thought the end was maybe even too rushed, so apparently I like slower-paced mysteries than the people in book club who were posting about it.
Our protagonist is a middle-aged homicide detective dude named Tyador Borlú, of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. Beszel is a vaguely Eastern European post-Soviet sort of city, located in the exact same spot as another city, called Ul Qoma. These cities operate simultaneously by splitting up the area, by street and patch of grass, and in some places "crosshatched," using a variety of colors and mannerisms and all sorts of little signifiers to keep them separate and different. Being in one city but crossing into, or even acknowledging stuff going on, in the other is called breaching, and will bring down a shadowy authority called Breach upon you, and then you may get disappeared. The plot happens when Borlú is called to investigate the murder of an unknown woman, and they finally figure out that she was actually from Ul Qoma. This leads first Borlú and his junior cop buddy, Corwi, and later Borlú and his Ul Qoman inspector partner, Dhatt, into a series of increasingly bizarre conspiracies involving political extremists of both the nationalist and unificationist varieties, a lot of confused archaeologists, and a discredited archaeological theory about a secret third city called Orciny.
As far as police procedurals go, this is SUPER POLICE PROCEDURAL-Y. There is lots of swearing and drinking coffee and complaining about paperwork, and everyone generally being gruff and hard-boiled and cranky. Female representation is fairly low, although not that bad by hard-boiled-detective-story standards--Corwi, the junior cop, is pretty badass when she's around, and never develops any tiresome romantic or sexual tension with Borlú, although she does get relegated to the background in the second half of the book when he goes over to Ul Qoma. The dead girl, obviously, is dead before the story even starts, but even so, she ends up being a pretty fascinating character. The other girl mixed up in this conspiracy also winds up dead, unfortunately. Borlú has two girlfriends, because of course he does, although they both very sensibly stay off-page for most of the book, which I am actually pretty OK with as it means the book features exactly zero sex scenes, which is something I think more non-children's-books should do. Overall it is still a pretty dude-heavy book. That is probably my biggest complaint about it, although it is a half-hearted complaint considering the number of dudely crime books where the women who are there are all terrible and oversexualized. So this is a non-gross dudely crime book, stuffed full of all the fun bits of crime-bookiness, like sharp punchy sentence fragments and always leaving it to the next chapter to tell you what it is that the narrator just figured out that is super important.
If you like police procedurals and noir and all that gritty shit, The City & the City is a fantastic addition to that genre, lovingly squishing in everything that makes a good police mystery a good police mystery into the weird knots and cracks of really fascinating "new weird" worldbuilding. If cranky foulmouthed homicide detectives aren't really your thing, though, I would probably not recommend it unless you're SUPER into urban worldbuilding to make up for it.
The book club meeting was last Thursday, and I finished the book tonight, so it turns out I missed that book club meeting too. Oh well.
The reason this book took me goddamn forever to read is 100% due to crazy life hecticness that leaves me no time for reading, and not at all due to the book being not good. I know some people think it starts off slow, but I think it starts off a good kind of slow that I love in procedurals/mysteries/that sort of thing... jumping right into everything being totally batshit and continuing that way is good sometimes, but in a book where the worldbuilding is such a huge part of how the crime is put together, I like the sort of slow frustrated poking around in the beginning. It really picked up a lot at the end, and honestly, I thought the end was maybe even too rushed, so apparently I like slower-paced mysteries than the people in book club who were posting about it.
Our protagonist is a middle-aged homicide detective dude named Tyador Borlú, of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. Beszel is a vaguely Eastern European post-Soviet sort of city, located in the exact same spot as another city, called Ul Qoma. These cities operate simultaneously by splitting up the area, by street and patch of grass, and in some places "crosshatched," using a variety of colors and mannerisms and all sorts of little signifiers to keep them separate and different. Being in one city but crossing into, or even acknowledging stuff going on, in the other is called breaching, and will bring down a shadowy authority called Breach upon you, and then you may get disappeared. The plot happens when Borlú is called to investigate the murder of an unknown woman, and they finally figure out that she was actually from Ul Qoma. This leads first Borlú and his junior cop buddy, Corwi, and later Borlú and his Ul Qoman inspector partner, Dhatt, into a series of increasingly bizarre conspiracies involving political extremists of both the nationalist and unificationist varieties, a lot of confused archaeologists, and a discredited archaeological theory about a secret third city called Orciny.
As far as police procedurals go, this is SUPER POLICE PROCEDURAL-Y. There is lots of swearing and drinking coffee and complaining about paperwork, and everyone generally being gruff and hard-boiled and cranky. Female representation is fairly low, although not that bad by hard-boiled-detective-story standards--Corwi, the junior cop, is pretty badass when she's around, and never develops any tiresome romantic or sexual tension with Borlú, although she does get relegated to the background in the second half of the book when he goes over to Ul Qoma. The dead girl, obviously, is dead before the story even starts, but even so, she ends up being a pretty fascinating character. The other girl mixed up in this conspiracy also winds up dead, unfortunately. Borlú has two girlfriends, because of course he does, although they both very sensibly stay off-page for most of the book, which I am actually pretty OK with as it means the book features exactly zero sex scenes, which is something I think more non-children's-books should do. Overall it is still a pretty dude-heavy book. That is probably my biggest complaint about it, although it is a half-hearted complaint considering the number of dudely crime books where the women who are there are all terrible and oversexualized. So this is a non-gross dudely crime book, stuffed full of all the fun bits of crime-bookiness, like sharp punchy sentence fragments and always leaving it to the next chapter to tell you what it is that the narrator just figured out that is super important.
If you like police procedurals and noir and all that gritty shit, The City & the City is a fantastic addition to that genre, lovingly squishing in everything that makes a good police mystery a good police mystery into the weird knots and cracks of really fascinating "new weird" worldbuilding. If cranky foulmouthed homicide detectives aren't really your thing, though, I would probably not recommend it unless you're SUPER into urban worldbuilding to make up for it.
