When I think of
The City & The City, I cant help but think of the lives (life) of
Robert Ames: CIA intelligence officer and spy who was killed during the 1983 United States embassy bombing in Beirut. Ames very much lead a split life; one half of which he spent in the domestic conservative consumerism of 1960's and 70's America, the other in an enormously tense and troubled time for the Middle East, dealing with relationships and situations of a decidedly dangerous nature. And yet, at least astronomically, these worlds exist right next to each other, though many might try to plead that they are worlds apart.
What I'm saying is that the world and people of Beszel/Ul Quoma stand firmly in the complexities of reality despite some of their fantastical circumstances. The intricacies between the two strike a chord of familiarity with me when I think of history or current events rooted in the quagmire of unsolvable yet very solvable conflicts: Palestine and Israel, the troubles of Northern Ireland, the Balkan states post USSR, or east & west Germany during the USSR. I also think of the people that many unsee on a daily basis, specifically the growing explosion of the homeless in the United States. But unlike those residents of Breach or Orciny, our own interstitial population is trapped with no power with which to escape their circumstances, and are held down in part by our culture of unseeing.
Now, is
The City & The City the best piece of police procedural or fantasy writing? Certainly not. Melville lacks the masterful prose work of someone like Le Guin in her similarly politically charged work
The Dispossessed. Nor does he make his characters as real as Delany does in many of his short works focused on human nonconformity. This is one of those novels where I have considerably more admiration for the substance of the work than the form of it.
Despite what may appear as a set of unrealistic expectations, Melville's comparatively more standard writing doesn't tarnish
The City & The City enough to seriously discredit the work as a whole. On the whole, it's entertaining, focused, and narratively exciting: most novels like this capture my attention whether the material is particularly interesting or personally poignant. If the self-imposed boarders and taboos that exist between and within Earth's many cultures and beliefs have any interest to you (as they do for me), I'd recommend it with one and a half appropriately raised thumbs.
BigEnk
