If you get a chance to pick up and read The City and The City by China Mieville do it! It is one of the best hard-boiled detective books I have a pleasure to read. It is also one of the best Sci-Fi books I have had the pleasure to read too. Powells.com posted an interview with China. Here is an excerpt of it.
Doug: You seem to be touching on different genres with each book. Was that intentional, or just how the muse has struck?
China Miéville: I definitely wanted to write a book that was completely faithful to the crime paradigm, that obeyed all the rules of a crime novel, that was a police procedural. So, yes, it was deliberate. I knew perfectly well what it was going to be, and I was trying to bring something to that paradigm that was something of me. It had my kind of approach, so hopefully it remains faithful to all of those tropes and ideas, but it also tries to do something new with them. I like the idea of trying my hand at lots of different genres, and crime was one I’d wanted to try. I knew this was going to be the noir sort of thing.
Doug: What was the genesis of the idea for The City and the City?
Miéville: It was a triangulation of three things. One was, as I say, this desire to write a crime novel; one was an interest in the Eastern European aesthetic of literature and film — people like Kafka, Paul Leppin, Jan Svankmajer, and Alfred Kubin; and the third was the idea for the actual cities themselves. It was just an idea I’d been chewing over for some years, trying to work out how to do it most effectively, and I just fleshed it out and it took shape from there.
Doug: How present was Kafka’s ghost for you when you were writing The City and the City?
Miéville: Kafka’s a very big, very important figure, not just for me but for loads and loads of writers of the fantastic. In my case, Bruno Schulz was actually at least as powerful a presence. Bruno Schulz’s stories in Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, The Street of Crocodiles, and so on, were very present. So, yes to Kafka, but I wouldn’t want to underestimate the power of Schulz, and various others as well. There’s no point or desire to escape these people.
Doug: Is it an overanalysis to say The City and the City is an allegorical version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” as the citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma have learned to unsee what is right before them?
Miéville: I don’t think it would be an overanalysis. I’m a bit suspicious of the term “overanalysis,” because I think it’s always legitimate to analyze things. As I’ve said many times, I don’t think writers are necessarily the people who know what’s going on in their own works. It may very well be that things I hadn’t necessarily picked up on are still going on.
But I get slightly nervous about the idea of the book as an allegory. I think any decent fantasy/fantastic/unreal/dreamlike book has metaphoric resonance, and probably has quite a lot of metaphoric resonance, because that’s the way the human mind works, by processing and creating metaphors. I’m very strongly a believer that these resonances are there. But the difference between metaphor and allegory is that metaphor begats more metaphor — metaphor is intrinsically unstable — whereas allegory is designed to have a one-to-one reading. To that extent, allegories are really only interesting to me at the point at which they break down.
Tolkien has a line that he has a cordial dislike of allegory, and on that I agree with him firmly. I think if you want to write a book that is an allegory, where the narrative is subordinated to a point you want to make, then it is unlikely to be a particularly persuasive point and it is unlikely to work well as a narrative. For that reason I don’t want to subordinate the idea of this as a crime novel, or as a description of imaginary cities, to the idea of the political allegory. None of which is to say that those readings are not legitimate — that’s what I mean about metaphor. I think these are legitimate readings. It’s a question of cause and effect; if the book doesn’t believe itself as a story, then how can it possibly get on with the job of meaning anything else?
via Powells.com Interviews – China Mieville.
