The City & the City

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This is not really "fantasy" fantasy. And for sure it's not science fiction either. Some label this book as near-future, but it is most definitely not. The City & The City is simply speculative fiction. The novel is set in the timeframe of its publication: the very beginning of the 21st century, on our very own planet Earth, in a fictional Eastern European city that is a kind of double city. Two cities exist in and on the space of one, interweaving, but separate -- Iron Curtain kind of separate. This is not to be taken as something magical, metaphysical, hallucinatory or fantastical. Both Beszel and Ul Quma are very, very real. While there is a sense of wonder for the reader, discovering both cities' interwoven workings, it is all perfectly possible & explainable. It's not New Weird fiction either -- a genre tagged to some of Miéville's other novels. There's actually nothing weird about this double city, other than that it doesn't exist in our reality. It could exist though, and that fact is one of the strengths of the book.

Something else it is not, is Kafka. It starts Kafkaesque though, and Miéville explicitly acknowledges Franz Kafka's influence in the preface. But, as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the political, bureaucratic stuff is more part of the setting, rather than one of the themes. Another crucial difference with Kafka is that The City & The City isn't an existential book. Stories as The Trial and The Metamorphosis are very much about loneliness and the individual that is unable to connect with the mysteries of existence, nor with the absurdity of the world, nor with other individuals. In The Trial that oppressiveness of existence is transformed into its famous main narrative metaphor of judicial bureaucracy. The City & The City is not about the individual. It is about groupings of individuals, societies and opposing societies. The political bureaucracy in Miéville's novel is not about the oppressiveness of existence, but about the oppressiveness of decorum. Yes, both Kafka as The City & The City are about the human condition, but about very different facets of that condition nonetheless.

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