Present: Jane (drinks only); Carl, Nic, Alex, Nathalie, Jen, Mark, Doris, Shubha
A great turnout for an evening where the book could very easily have been overshadowed by the venue, which produced several courses of perfectly decent food served by utterly disinterested staff followed by a bill which made our eyes water. It took us a surprisingly long time, encompassing varied mathematical intricacies, before we realised they were seeking to charge us for fourteen two-course and two three-course meals - sixteen courses between eight people!
Anyway, back to the book and what a remarkable book it is. This is the first book of 2011 but it is almost certain, unless 2011 is a truly remarkable year, to be on my shortlist for book of the year come the vote next Christmas. Whilst we mostly agreed on this book, I am not going to represent all opinions. This is mine:
On its face, this is a simple murder mystery, a police drama set in a familiar city scape but, from the beginning, there is something intriguing in the language; something that hints at a deeper and stranger reality than the one we know. Initially one wonders why one has never heard of the place in which the tale is set: the place feels real, the character and street names utterly convincing but, slowly, one realises that this is no ordinary city. Beszel shares the same geotopical space as its neighbouring city Ul Qoma. The buildings of these two cities are strikingly different but occupy the same land. The cities have different currencies and different laws (perhaps one flaw we never discussed is how this book isn't called The Country and the Country or The City State and the City State). The citizens of these two cities walk the same pavements and drive the same roads; they could see each other, if it weren't for a law forbidding the seeing and requiring that they unsee each other, a skill they have to acquire early in life as the penalties for seeing that which should be unseen are severe. And so they share a space and navigate their way around each other without ever really seeing each other. To travel from one city to the other, to unsee your city and see the other, requires that you transit through the border, only to reappear in the same space but seeing and unseeing the opposite things.
In creating this complex fiction, the author does not stumble: his invention is tight and complete, thoughtfully crafted and beguilingly realised. It may not be unfair to suggest that this conceit can be so compelling as to district from an otherwise mundane murder mystery but the distraction is more than sufficient and the extraordinary invention creates some wonderful vignettes.
It is easy to wonder what this book is "about" beyond the obvious tale of the investigation. Is it about the Middle East conflict, about the battle for Jerusalem between Israel and Palestine? Is it a commentary on the caste system in India or an examination of the effects of foreign investment into and withdrawal from smaller economies? For me, the cities Mieville created are every city. We live in a world of cities where people see and unsee their fellow inhabitants in an automatic and unconscious manner that is drilled into them from childhood: don't look at this; don't mention that; don't stare at the disabled person; ignore that drunk; he's not like us. It's about the fact that we ignore things that are complicated or painful or embarrassing; the way the inhabitants of Beszel and Ul Qoma navigate each other is the way we avoid a homeless person in the street, aware of them but unseeing or the way we try to speak to someone with a deformity whilst assiduously not seeing the deformity. It's the way the underclass don't raise their eyes to the rich, the way the rich look away from the poor, the way most people exist in the gulf between the two. It's about how we exist within our social strata and barely exist to those outside it.
This is a decent but unexceptional murder mystery contained within a great and exceptional novel.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Saturday, 1 January 2011
Books we are not reading
A few photos carried over from Facebook to remind us why we're here. Copyright Mark and Carl (unless Waterstones and Smiths have other ideas).
