Borders + Trespasses

"Victims of breach always breach"

What do you see when you go outside your door? What do you ignore because it’s familiar, and what do you ignore because it doesn’t belong? Do you live in the same place as a neighbor who pays attention to different things on your street?

China Miéville’s The City & The City is a cosmic mystery in which the border between the seen and the unseen is not a metaphysical one, but a social one. It begins in a deliberately conventional way: Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad is called to investigate the murder of an unknown woman. As Borlú works to uncover her name, it becomes clear that this investigation is entwined with the ways his city, Besźel, flirts with the cosmic.

Many cosmic mysteries wait until the second or third act to make the reader question the story’s reality, but here it starts immediately. When Borlú leaves the crime scene at the end of the first chapter, he encounters a woman on the street. He looks at her clothes, her mannerisms, and thinks—he shouldn’t have seen her. He ‘unnotices’ her ‘in her foreign street.’ She’s not a ghost, but a resident of another city that shares the same streets, Ul Qoma.

To say that Besźel and Ul Qoma are neighboring cities and countries understates it, They have a border, but it’s a complicated one. On a map, the border between Besźel and Ul Qoma would look less like a line and more like a bird’s nest. An uneducated foreigner would look at this map and think, ‘This is the same city.’

Because it’s impossible to police such borders and social-legal conventions like ‘unseeing’ in a traditional way, those who break these physical and psychological laws fall under the authority of Breach, a mysterious “power” (to use Borlú’s term) only beholden to the extremely specific parameters of their own authority.

For as long as there have been two cities, Breach has enforced the border. And as long as there have been two cities, there have been fairy tales updated into urban legends updated into conspiracy theories about a third city that pulls the strings. Orciny—perhaps the necessary social counterweight to the complicated feelings of fear and awe that Breach invokes in Ul Qoma and Besźel’s citizens.

It’s hard to talk about the two cities without the words Miéville invented or redefined to clarify (and obfuscate) their relationship. Areas that only belong to one city are ‘total’, shared are ‘crosshatched’. The word ‘grosstopical’ refers to the same geographical area, regardless of city.

The establishment of Besźel and Ul Qoma is called ‘the Cleavage’, a Janus word that means both to separate and to join. Borlú describes it as a sort of historical whiteout in which something surely happened, probably. The Cleavage is only further mystified by archaeological evidence of a ‘Precursor’ civilization that, supposedly, had technology that surpasses ours.

Ahead lies the cosmic. To talk about it, particularly as it affects Inspector Borlú, the victim, and the murderer, I’m going to spoil The City & The City. I’m also going to keep close to the details of the text, which I don’t plan on always doing, but I think this month calls for it.

Inspector Borlú, aided by constable Corwi, receives a tip about the identity of the murdered woman from a unificationist caller in Ul Qoma who recognized her from the poster—which was posted in Besźel. Having taken the illicit call, Borlú is now an odd victim/accomplice of Breach. He is convinced that the victim, named Mahalia Geary, is too. He attempts to hand the case over to Breach but is rejected.

He travels to Ul Qoma, where, alongside Senior Detective Dhatt (his counterpart across the border), he digs into Geary’s life as a foreign archaeology student working at a dig that yields Precursor artifacts. Borlú meets with a foreign scholar named David Bowden, who wrote the text that fueled Geary’s obsession with Orciny. Whether or not Orciny exists, people are being killed over it. Borlú eventually breaches while trying to protect one of Geary’s friends. He is taken into the shadowy, bureaucratic between-world of Breach. There he is allowed to continue the investigation under the auspices of Breach, though Breach insists that the crime he is now investigating is his own.

Borlú and his Breach partner, Ashil, uncover the conspiracy that killed Geary. She was approached by someone pretending to represent Orciny, who asked her to smuggle Precursor artifacts out of the dig. Geary accepted, thrilled at the implied existence of Orciny, and the fact that such a mysterious power needed her help.

This instance of Orciny, however, was concocted by Bowden, to help an American tech corporation obtain Precursor artifacts for potential research and development (aided by a Besź politician and a supporting cell of swindled Besź nationalists). Unfortunately, when Geary saw through the ruse, she warned Bowden that he was being lied to, as well. Enraged that Geary had seen through his fabrication, he murdered her.

Borlú attempts to apprehend all parties, but only succeeds in capturing Bowden, after which Borlú becomes Tye, an agent of Breach.

At one point, Ashil remarks that “victims of breach always breach.” Breach usually feels like a verb and a noun at the same time. A danger, an identity, a fate. Once the phone call exposes Borlú to breach, he cannot keep himself from breaching further. He looks at people on trains in Ul Qoma, talks with Dhatt about the differences between cars on their shared roads. He even visits his own home while standing, technically, in Ul Qoma.

 “I was able to stop grosstopically, physically close to my own front door, and unsee it of course, but equally of course not quite, with an emotion the name of which I have no idea.”

Breach isn’t about seeing into a world previously unseen. It’s about seeing a world you’ve always seen, and made yourself unsee. When Borlú prepared to travel from Besźel to Ul Qoma, he received special simulated re-seeing training. Once he’s breached, though, he receives no such pampering. Ashil just tells him to look.

“My sight seemed to untether as with a lurching Hitchcock shot, some trickery of dolly and depth of field, so the street lengthened and its focus changed. Everything I had been unseeing now jostled into sudden close-up.”

The man who lives in this unique city has no vocabulary to describe the experience of seeing both cities at once. Borlú can only articulate this feeling by comparing it to Hitchcock—film, foreign, fiction. He has gone from citizen, to visitor, to breacher, to something I don’t have a word for, all while walking the same (grosstopical) streets.

This isn’t how foreigners see the streets of Ul Qoma and Besźel. They see ‘everything’. But is it because they haven’t successfully immersed themselves in the semiotics of seeing and unseeing, the mass delusion the cities’ citizens share? Or is it because they aren’t seeing the city as it really is?

Essential to the investigation is Geary’s copy of David Bowden’s work, Between The City and The City. Her edition is infamous, with a ‘doors-of-perception’ style psychedelic cover. Borlú gives us an impression of the book’s vibe. “There are secrets in Besźel and in Ul Qoma,” he summarizes, “secrets everyone knows about: it was unnecessary to posit secret secets.”

The book is mildly illegal in Besźel, but everyone’s read it. Apparently it makes a clever argument that’s convincing when you’re young and eager to learn the unkind truths of the world around you, but also long for the fantastical—a longing for some feeling that’s a cousin of cosmic dissonance, that sense that you perceive only a fraction of the world’s true nature.

Incidentally, a fair amount of the cosmic mysteries I’ve so far encountered have involved a fictional book, movie, some work of art. What is it about media about media, that is so well-suited for a cosmic mystery?

Perhaps it’s that we can’t ever be as familiar with the work as the characters. We can only experience their interest via their senses, their opinions, their subjectivity. Probably, too, the real-life creator had their own brush with some key cosmic story and felt the compulsion to keep turning it over in their mind, to create more and to reproduce the uncanny sense of experiencing it at the same time. (That’s why I’m here, at least.) Weird stories are our most readily available source of that cosmic dissonance in our own lives. Especially when those stories come with some cult status, or theories about the creator or the act of creation.

I like to ask myself, Which scene gets to the heart of the cosmic mystery? For The City and The City, I think of Borlú examining Geary’s marginalia in her copy of Bowden’s book. This is his way of listening to the dead, of charting the expanse of her belief. This is how he comes to understand the nature of her own crime, and figure out why she was murdered.

(Borlú also remarks that Geary’s notes are more interesting than the main text. I find it refreshing that for once the cosmic text isn’t worshipped by the investigator, and it’s for this reason, too, that I love this sequence of Geary falling out of love with the book.)

“I could discern phases of annotation,” he thinks, “though not in any pagewise chronology—all the notes were layered, a palimpsest of evolving interpretation. I did archaeology. …Mostly what I discerned was her anger.”

Eventually, he understands that he’s reading an argument with her past self. The fortitude it must have taken, for Geary to work herself free, even when she was being told everything she wanted to hear. Bowden hasn’t believed in Orciny in a long time, but he never achieves this freedom. He investigated the unknown and it ruined him, not because of the secrets he uncovered, but because he found nothing greater than himself.

Bowden is haunted by his own dead belief in Orciny. What words do we have for the things we no longer believe in? How can we communicate the familiar discomfort with which they sit inside us—that unwillingness or inability to purge them from our minds?

“It was because you missed Orciny,” Borlú says to Bowden. “A way to have it both ways. Yes, sure you were wrong about Orciny, but you could make it so you were right, too.”

Due to unrest in the two cities, no one knows which city Bowden is in when he flees in plain sight, and no one wants to risk breach.

“That gait. Strange, impossible. …to anyone used to the physical vernaculars of Besźel and Ul Qoma, it was rootless and untethered.” With a studious outsider’s eye, Bowden has “mediate[d] those million unnoticed mannerisms that marked out civic specificity” and exceeded even those myths of Orciny. No one assumes he is here, or there. He is the only one who knows where he is.

What follows is one of the most maddening ‘chases’ I’ve encountered in fiction. Borlú, in the ‘nowhere-both’ of Breach, walks up to Bowden in broad daylight, alongside Corwi in Besźel and Dhatt in Ul Qoma, and talks to him to get him to do something—anything—to signify that he might be in either city.

Everyone’s wound up internally screaming at some character to break the rules, go against their code, just this once, can’t you see this is more important? You’ve already breached, Borlú, what’s left? Bowden even says, in a convoluted taunt, “No one in this place, and that includes Breach, obeys the rules.” 

If any of them touched Bowden now, they would create an entirely new kind of breach. It would need a name all its own, a new scaffold of urban legend and fear. So now, when I read this ‘chase’ and I already know how it ends, and I still find myself screaming for Borlú to just grab the guy, I think—do I want Borlú to cast aside all pretense of authority, or do I want him to break ground on some new, between-the-between territory?

Their conversation turns into a stand-off of belief when Bowden draws a Precursor artifact on Borlú as if it is a gun. It is the weapon with which Bowden had killed Geary, the subject of the rumors of ‘strange physics’, the object of American corporate interest.

Up until this moment, Borlú has been the solitary inhabitant of his own space, wearing jurisdictional camouflage that signals Breach, while a representative of Besź law. This is when Borlú becomes an agent of Breach. “Orciny is bullshit,” he tells Bowden. “Do you want to see what’s really in between?”

Of course Bowden does. Why else is he performing this unplaceable walk instead of just making a break for it? So long as he believes that the others believe in Breach, he’s safe. And he breaches, willingly, to give Borlú the power to take him somewhere unseen—and real.

If Bowden was ever afraid of Breach, that fear has transformed into the thrill of standing at the maw of something that wants to devour you. (Is this the way Orciny used to make him feel?) And because we’ve seen the limits of Breach—its dingy offices, its small numbers—we are, oddly, less able to fathom what will happen to Bowden than when we imagined Breach as this slick, impenetrable apparatus.

Borlú, or Tye, as an agent of Breach, never learns Bowden’s fate, or if the Precursor artifact was worth all this trouble. Like in a lot of cosmic mysteries, we get a solution to the human question while the cosmic questions are left unresolved.

In Borlú’s final conversation with Bowden, Borlú acknowledges a version of the crime that wouldn’t have involved Borlú, or Geary, or Bowden—the American corporation could have just conducted the same kind of profit-motivated cultural theft they might have in any other country. They could have arranged to steal the artifacts from Ul Qoma and taken them directly out of the country. (A crime, but not Breach!)

The existence of this possibility doesn’t diminish the speculative tone of the investigation. Sure, there’s some ‘the real cosmic force was capitalism all along’, but I think it’s telling that the case ends not with the American corporate rep flying away, but with Borlú tempting Bowden with a glimpse of Breach.

The City & The City is a well-awarded work of speculative fiction. In an interview included with my edition, Miéville supposes it could be considered a work of ‘anti-fantasy’. I already have one weird genre to deal with, so I’ll just say that I define ‘anti-fantasy’ as a work written with the sensibilities of fantasy, but with other priorities. In this case, the constant re-evaluation of what is fantasy and what is reality.

This probably isn’t Miéville’s last appearance at the Cosmic Mystery Club. Kraken features (aside from one of my favorite chapters in fiction) an investigation which tumbles into that kind of Neverwhere-esque jaunt that wears its cosmic on its sleeve.

Next month we’re hunkering down in Białowieża Forest with a group of translators missing their author in The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft. A real A24 movie of a book, grounding eco-horror surreality in a deliriously petty beef between two translators with different ideas of faithfulness, and what is owed to the author, and to the audience. See you then.