Miéville’s novel warrants a quick attempt at a synopsis. Borlú, a detective in the fictional town of Besźel, investigates a crime when a young woman is found dead in the back of a van. However, his investigation, like everything in the world of Besźel, is complicated by the fact that the crime took place in Ul Qoma, which is a city which occupies the same territory as Besźel, but exists in a parallel dimension, so to speak. The twin cities operate literally side-by-side, but it’s illegal for a citizen of either to interact with the other city. If they are caught doing so, they are seized by a shadowy but omnipotent police force known as ‘Breach’. The act of showing an awareness of the other city is known as breaching.
This is a metaphysical concept which smacks of Borges, Calvino, modernism taken to the nth degree. It is also, with its down-at-heel detective patrolling a bizarre modernist world, reminiscent of Blade Runner. More pertinently, perhaps, it also seems to talk directly to the situation in the West Bank, a territory that has been divided up into zones of control which neither side, in theory, should cross. The novel was published in 2009, long before a more general awareness of the extreme nature of that situation became more widely known, so whether the allusion is deliberate or not is hard to tell.
It’s a curiously dry read, which strains at the leash for some kind of emotional connection with the reader. The metaphysical complications of Borlú’s investigation are contained within the simple conventions of the detective novel, which gives the book something of the feel of two cities at once: that of a high-brow metaphysical investigation into the meaning of time and space, contrasted with the cosier surroundings of an investigative narrative which any modern reader is at home with.
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