The city is Beszel, a rundown metropolis on the eastern edge of Europe. The other
city is Ul Qoma, a modern Eastern European boomtown, despite being a bit of an
international pariah. What the two cities share, and what they don't, is the
deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mieville's The City & The
City. Mieville is well known as a modern fantasist (and urbanist), but from book
to book he's tried on different genres, and here he's fully hard-boiled, stripping
down to a seen-it-all detective's voice that's wonderfully appropriate for this
story of seen and unseen. His detective is Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Beszel
whose investigation of the murder of a young foreign woman takes him back and forth
across the highly policed border to Ul Qoma to uncover a crime that threatens the
delicate balance between the cities and, perhaps more so, Borlu's own dissolving
sense of identity. In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic
and unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries don't end with the solution of a murder.
--Tom Nissley

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