Mieville

A boy ran down a hill path screaming. The boy was I. He held his hands up and out in front of him as if he’d dipped them in paint and was coming to make a picture, to press them down to paper, but all there was on him was dirt. There was no blood on his palms.

So opens This Census-Taker (2016) by China Miéville, a strange little novella set in an uncertain place and uncertain time. Those first couple of short sentences are representative of what the narrator does throughout – sometimes he is in the first person, sometimes the third person when he wants to distance himself from the memory, and sometimes even the second person. It’s all part of what makes This Census-Taker unsettling and unsure. You never know where you are, literally and metaphorically.

As he runs down the hill, he has a message to shout to people who live at the bottom of the hill. They are technically in the same town, but they are worlds apart. The people at the bottom of the hill think of those further up as savages living in some sort of wilderness, peopled by monsters. And the boy’s shout is unlikely to dispel that idea – “My mother killed my father!”

But as soon as he says this, he is unsure. Is that what he saw? Or did he see someone else being killed? Or was nobody killed at all? Nothing is clear or still.

The novella has a lot of moments of death. The boy’s father is given to killing – a stray dog, a goat, anything that gets him into the silent, taut rage that sometimes comes across his face. He throws the bodies into a seemingly bottomless pit in a cave. The boy believes that there are some humans in there too. But is he right?

The actual census taker of the title doesn’t turn up to take a census until p.110 of 138 pages, and it is a sort of climax that doesn’t do a lot to make things less ambiguous. The whole novella swirls in menace and mystery, and there’s never really a sense that anything will resolve.

I did find This Census-Taker compelling and interesting, though preferred the much-longer The City and the City, which has an equally strange premise though more resolution. In this novella, I thought Miéville was brilliant at moments of high tension, but that his sentences were a bit meandering and overwritten at other times. It’s certainly a successful exercise in creating an atmosphere, but I’m not sure exactly what else I’m meant to take from the book.

You know those books that are always on the cusp of being read? Like a word on the tip of your tongue, you’ve constantly been ‘about to read it’, even if always remains fourth or fifth or fifteenth in the mental queue. Well, I got The City and The City (2009) by China Miéville for my birthday in 2010, and finally I’ve read it – I originally wanted to read it after reading a review by Sakura, who used to blog at Chasing Bawa.

The concept is what fascinated me. The narrator is Inspector Borlu, who lives in Beszel – those words should have an accent on the u and z respectively; please imagine them there. Beszel is a slightly run-down city somewhere in Eastern Europe – it also occupies the same space as the city Ul Qoma.

This isn’t fantasy, though. Rather, it’s a development of the sort of tension between cities that happened with East and West Berlin – taken to a logical extreme. Certain parts of the ‘glossotopia’ are Ul Qoma and certain parts of Beszel, but there is also a substantial ‘cross-hatched’ region, where the cities co-exist. And it is not an amicable coexistence.

Neighbouring houses might be in different cities. Pedestrians on the same street are citizens of different places. And acknowledging the other city in any way is illegal – and will get you taken away by Breach, a sort of secret police. Citizens of each city train themselves to ‘unsee’ the buildings and people of the other city – recognising, in a glimpse, an architecture or a style of dress that marks somebody as unseeable. Here is Borlu at the checkpoint between the cities:

Pedestrians and vehicles came and went. Cars and vans drove into it near us, to wait at the easternmost point, where passports and papers were checked and motorists were given permission – or sometimes refused it – to leave Beszel. A steady current. More metres, through the inter-checkpoint interstice under the hall’s arc, another wait at the buildings’ western gates, for entry into Ul Qoma. A reversed process in the other lanes.

Then the vehicles with their stamped permissions-to-cross emerged at the opposite end from where they entered, and drove into a foreign city. Often they doubled back, on the cross-hatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm.

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besz dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.

But a book can’t just be its setting, of course. The story is about a horrific murder, of a Besz woman who had been an academic. Her particular area of interest was controversial: a rumoured third city, hidden between the other two and not known by either… Her parents come to the city/cities to try to find their daughter’s murderer, and naturally do not understand the divisions they must respect.

Police procedurals are not usually my cup of tea, and I did have to skim over some of the more graphic passages, but there aren’t many of those. Borlu is a good protagonist for this set up – obeying the rules of the city and its ‘hidden’ counterpart, while mentally thinking them absurd. He is not quite Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and he has no dawning revelation or rebellion against a corrupt and bizarre system. Instead, he has to work within the confines of this curious world, determined to find the killer. The quest for justice gets increasingly dangerous as fraught secrets threaten to become discovered…

The City and the City isn’t a novel I’d look twice at if it were just a modern crime novel, and the plot didn’t overwhelm me. But what kept me captivated was that brilliant concept. Somehow, Miéville kept it original and enthralling. I did wonder if it would be the same idea repeated over and over, burning out after a flare of novelty. but it’s not. Dealing with the nuances of simultaneous cities complicates the plot, but I could honestly have read Miéville’s descriptions of them and their inhabitants as much as he cared to write. A brilliant idea is fully realised.

Part of me wishes this idea was used for something other than a crime novel – but the two are really inseparable in the way the novel develops. Not my usual fare, but recommended for the extraordinary and sustained cleverness of the concept.