Most democratic elections are about competing views of the world. But in the United States in recent years, that divide seems to have evolved, moving from differences of opinion about what the nation could be to differences of opinion about what the nation is. In an October op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Geoffrey Cohen and Michael Schwalbe described a phenomenon they called “party-over-reality bias.”
Article continues after advertisement
Earlier in the year, political correspondent Olivia Nuzzi traveled to Arizona and described rival Senate candidates as “proxies for two oppositional realities competing for supremacy.” A March 2024 article published by the Brookings Institution argued that there were “two very different worldviews competing for dominance in today’s America.”
Reading these words, I thought about the state of American politics, and then I thought about the politics of a fictional European nation. Two fictional European nations, as a matter of fact: Besźel and Ul Qoma, the nations that provide the setting of China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City & The City.
The City & The City is arguably Miéville’s least fantastical novel, but that doesn’t mean it lacks a high concept. And it’s an all-time great one: those two micronations, Besźel and Ul Qoma? They occupy the same space, with the residents of each taught to simply ignore the buildings and residents of their neighbors. Our narrator and protagonist is Tyador Borlú, an investigator in Besźel tasked with solving the murder of a US national; as tends to happen in detective fiction, the murder case turns out to reveal hidden layers of complexity and buried secrets within the proverbial corridors of power.
Because this is told from the perspective of a resident of one of these nations, The City & The City illustrates precisely how Borlú interacts with his environment. The word “unsaw” shows up in the second chapter to refer to the practice of, essentially, selectively editing one’s own perceptions to filter out the nation next door. (It also feels significant that “unsaw” has a distinctive air of Newspeak about it.) As the novel progresses, we’ll also learn more about what travel between the cities is like—and of the mysterious agency known as Breach that protects the integrity of the boundaries between city and city.
To say that this is metaphorically rich understates things somewhat. Miéville makes at least one set of real-world reference points clear when Borlú recalls a trip to Germany years earlier: “I was young. It was a conference. ‘Policing Split Cities.’ They had sessions on Budapest and Jerusalem and Berlin, and Besźel and Ul Qoma.” In the 15 years since this novel’s publication, though, it isn’t hard to see a place for US politics on that list as well.
The City & The City is not, ultimately, a didactic novel; much as its two nations don’t neatly correspond to any places that exist on maps, so too does it not have a clear-cut moral to its readers.
I’m not alone in seeing the similarities between Miéville’s fictional cities and the current reality of living the US. Naomi Klein references The City & The City in her 2023 book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, at one point referencing its status as an allegory for the relationship between Israel and Palestine. As Klein writes:
In interviews, Miéville expresses discomfort with the idea of his book as an allegory, saying that such a reading is too literal and that the novel explores the arbitrary logic of borders more generally, between nations and even inside them.
It isn’t hard to imagine a version of The City & The City where Besźel and Ul Qoma were much clearer stand-ins for real-world locations. That isn’t what Miéville does here, however. Instead, the specificity of both fictional nations makes the thematic underpinnings of this book that much richer. There’s a brief mention about a third of the way through that the United States is engaged in an economic boycott against Ul Qoma, while Canada has forged broader ties with the small nation. There are certainly echoes of US-Cuban politics here, but they come as echoes and resonances rather than outright references. See also: the tidbit, revealed later in the novel, that a revered Ul Qoman leader often had his portrait displayed alongside those of Atatürk and Tito (and once Mao, but no longer).
There’s a sense of both surrealism and menace to the way that people who blur the borders between the two nations are targeted by the all-seeing, all-powerful Breach. Here’s Borlú describing the fate of a murderer on the run:
[I]n stupid terror he breached—stepped into a shop in Besźel, changed his clothes, and emerged into Ul Qoma. He was by chance not apprehended in that instance, but we quickly realized what had happened. In his frantic liminality neither we nor our Ul Qoman colleagues would touch him, though we and they knew where he went, hiding in Ul Qoman lodgings. Breach took him and he was gone too.
The solution to the mystery at the center of The City & The City turns out to involve these very indistinct spaces, and the advantages that can be had by someone who seeks to capitalize on the liminal spaces between them. It borders on absurdly funny: all you have to do to escape the law in one nation is to change your clothes and walk into a different building; there, it’s an entirely different country.
And yet there’s also something unsettlingly of the moment about that. Earlier this year, Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell denied Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s request to extradite a suspect in a murder case. “Having observed the treatment of violent criminals in the New York area by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, I think it’s safer to keep him here and keep him in custody so that he cannot be out there doing this to individuals either in our state, county, or anywhere in the United States,” Mitchell said, according to the Associated Press. Experts cited in the AP’s reporting observed that this was relatively unheard-of; and yet, this does feel not unlike a resident of one city denying the very existence of the city next door.
There are other aspects of The City & The City that also map uneasily onto the current divided state of the US. The residents of the novel’s two cities have distinct ways of dressing, which their opposite numbers have learned to blot out from their field of vision. Cultural and political signifiers can be no less distinct here; still, it’s all too easy to learn to ignore something that doesn’t mesh with a given worldview rather than engaging with it. In the waning months of the election, I’ve seen people sharing an image of a Kamala Harris hat designed in the style of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” Besides the name of the Democratic presidential, it features the line “Made you look.” Here, too, there’s an echo of Miévile’s novel: the way that certain characters effectively hacked the border between the two states to manipulate it for their own purposes.
The City & The City is not, ultimately, a didactic novel; much as its two nations don’t neatly correspond to any places that exist on maps, so too does it not have a clear-cut moral to its readers. But Miéville does get in a few observations about the ill effects of living in a society that forces these kinds of perspective shifts on its residents. “Having to unsee acquaintances or friends is a rare and notoriously uncomfortable circumstance,” Borlú admits at one point. And it is telling that our hero isn’t able to explore these cities in full without finally taking in both at the same time.
“My sight seemed to untether as with a lurching Hitchcock shot, some trickery of dolly and depth of field, so that the street lengthened and its focus changed. Everything I had been unseeing now jostled into sudden close-up.”
George Orwell famously wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” The City & The City takes that principle and extends it a step further: the constant struggle is necessary, even if what is in front of one’s nose is in another country. In telling a story set in a literally fragmented society, China Miéville has plenty to say about our own society’s atomization.
2024-12-10 09:56:38
