Crosshatching

Back in Warsaw. The festival was great, and I'll try to do a proper post about it, but only after I've gotten some sleep.

On my way back I dug deeper into China Mieville's The City and the City, and I really like what it does with my head. It starts out as a pretty straightforward noir crime novel, but as the camera pans out, you learn it's something much more complex. And you're not really given any sort of systematic backstory to all the weirdness, you have to kind of reverse-engineer the big picture from various everyday practicalities. These hints are delivered so subtly that at first I actually took them for witty turns of phrase.

An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling way. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

And with a hard start, I realized that she was not on GunterStrasz after all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent (...) after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away...

To my surprise, they turned out to be quite literal. Without giving away too much, it's the story of two cities (city-states, really), Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupying the same space, with parts belonging to just one (referred to as being "total" from one's perspective, or "alter" from the other's), and a whole patchwork of shared areas. The citizens of both are trained to only perceive their home city, or rather, to fail to perceive the other one, and its inhabitants. Openly and deliberately noticing the other entity is a very serious existential offense (again, trying not to reveal too much), and inadvertently doing so causes great unease:

I policed a music festival once, early in my career, in a crosshatched park, where the attendees got high in such numbers that there was much public fornication. My partner at the time and I had not been able to forebear amusement at the Ul Qoman passerby who tried not to see in their own iteration of the park, stepping daintly over fucking couples they assidously unsaw.

The fun part is both cities are sovereign entities and it is for example revealed that they were on opposing sides during World War II, and that to this day Ul Quoma is the target of an American embargo (think Cuba). Another neat, and I'm hoping deliberate twist is that you can't pinpoint the city's whereabouts. You are given plenty of context: ther's mention of Balkan refugees, direct flights from Budapest and Istanbul, and Beszel street names sound decidedly Hungarian... but then, the city is a sea port. So whenever you are given another scrap of origin information, you feel this low-level anxiety/frustration as the exact location keeps eluding you - which echoes the descriptions of people "unseeing" its phase-shifted streets.

I read most of the book on the train from Wroclaw to Warsaw, and when I got out of the train station, I couldn't help but look for glimpses of the city I just left - fully realizing how silly it was. I couldn't shake it even on the tram home, and kept comparing the two, noticing how empty Warsaw streets look in comparison.

Between the cities, Breach watched. None of us knew what it knew.