Archive for the ‘China Miéville’ tag
The City and the City by China Miéville
The City and the City by China Miéville
Detective Tyador Borlú of Besźel’s Extreme Crimes Squad is assigned to what at first appears to be a fairly straightforward case: the murder of a young woman whose body was discovered dumped in a park situated on the border between Besźel and Ul Qoma.
And right away the reader realizes that, no matter how straightforward this murder mystery might be, there’ll be nothing straight about the narrative, for Besźel and Ul Qoma aren’t merely countries that happen to border one another. They are city-states in a state of intimate balkanization.
One side of a street may be in Besźel while the other is in Ul Qoma. Part of the park is in one country, while little islands of playground are in the other. The top storey of an apartment building is in Ul Qoma, the rest in Besźel. Situated in an unnamed Eastern European milieu, the conjoined cities are ill at ease with one another and, historically, occasionally at war. Like territories in the former Yugoslavia, various areas of Besźel/Ul Qoma are either disputed or not claimed by either city. Read the rest of this entry »
