The City & the City by China Miéville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

O Happy Fault

I have never underestimated China Mieville’s writing talent. But until recently I also hadn’t realized the depths of his thought. The City & the City is not merely a cleverly structured detective novel, it is also a rather profound anthropological analysis.

The premise of the book is that the City in question is divided in two by a sort of psychological Iron Curtain, sometimes at the level of individual dwellings. The two parts of the City intertwine physically, but the residents of each half are not permitted to see, hear, smell, touch, or otherwise interact with the residents of the other half. Each population is restricted to its designated spaces in which everyone lives apparently normal lives but with no awareness of the others who live among them.

Residents from each half may visit the other half by transferring through a sort of border tunnel in the middle of the City. Having crossed from one half to the other, the visitor is required to participate fully in its life. He or she must ‘unsee’ everything with which he is intimately familiar from his half. Any lapse in this protocol is considered a Breach and is dealt with harshly as a matter of law.

There are certainly a variety of ways in which Mieville’s imagination can be interpreted: for example, as a representation of the human psychological ability to simply ignore what it does not wish to see; or as the regrettable compartmentalization of modern life in which certain moral behaviors are permissible in one ‘box’ but anathema in another; or as a critique of the economic, social, and racial ghettoization of not just cities but also of whole societies.

My first reading resulted in an interpretation of the City as wallowing in an unfortunate fate, implicitly waiting and hoping for some sort of redemptive unification of the City. The separation of the two parts of the City was the result of an obscure historical act equivalent to Original Sin. No one remembers what the act was or when it was committed but its effects persist in the rigid and unnecessary conventions that dominate the City’s life.

Upon reflection, I have come to a very different interpretation of the book thanks to the influence of an unexpected source, a discussion of so-called ‘religious aesthetics’ by a theologian named Frank Burch Brown [see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...]. Brown’s analysis opens up a very different possibility for understanding Mieville’s idea of parallel worlds occupying the same geographical space but alien to one another.

This alternative explanation is based on some rather interesting observations on aesthetics, the study of choosing the filters by which we allow ourselves to perceive the world. Generalizing his conception a bit, what Brown suggests is that Mieville’s type of split world is not a flaw or distortion but a necessary condition for human beings to avoid falling into the trap of their own hubris.

Each world in fact helps to make the other visible. The unique social conventions, mores, architecture, literature, cuisine, and routines of one can never be taken entirely for granted because there is another set of these cultural conditions, literally just around the corner. This fact ensures that neither half of the City can ever turn itself, its particular concerns, aims, and prejudices into idols because ‘This is the way the world really is.’ They are forced in daily life to recognize the existence of the ‘other’ precisely through the persistent demand to not notice it. Brilliant.

So the ‘split personality’ of The City & the City is not a flaw resulting from some horrible primordial mistake, but a well-conceived design executed by some wise folk to to keep the residents from that most dreadful mortal sin of believing one’s own press.

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