The City & The City by China Mieville
Absolutely Engrossing.
Amazon Best of the Month, June 2009: 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 dont, is the
deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mievilles The City &
The City. Mieville is well known as a modern fantasist (and urbanist), but
from book to book hes tried on different genres, and here hes fully hard-
boiled, stripping down to a seen-it-all detectives voice thats 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, Borlus own dissolving sense of
identity. In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic and
unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries dont end with the solution of a
murder. --Tom Nissley

Personal Review: The City & The City by China Mieville
I was absorbed by the novel from the moment I picked it up. The concept
of the intertwined cities of Beszel and Ul Quoma intrigued me from the
beginning -- the cities occupy the same space, and the occupants of each
city are trained to "unsee" the occupants of the other. "Seeing" the other
city, or worse, stepping into it, puts them in Breach. And no one who has
been put in Breach has ever returned.
Beszel's Detective Tyador Borlu finds a body in Beszel that appears to
have been murdered in Ul Quoma, and his investigation leads him to those
mysterious places where the cities intersect.
This novel is a gritty detective novel in which Beszel and Ul Quoma are
characters just as much as Borlu and his colleagues and suspects. Each
city has its own character, reflected in its cuisine, customs, and attire.
There's not a great deal of action, but Mieville gives his readers plenty to
think about. Borlu is a sympathetic character that the audience can
identify with, and I really felt for him as he tried to find justice for the victim
while trying to navigate the tenuous streets of The City and The City.
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