A Tale of Two Cities
Although the story going on here is a murder investigation to the point that this novel is often categorized outright as an example of a police procedural, it is really the background that is most fascinating. The idea of two cities occupying the same space is quite spectacular. How it works is given a boost here through imagery:
“How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border.”
Detective Work
But, of course, it is at heart, after all, a detective story. It is a police investigation that begins on the opening pages with the discovery of the naked body of a victim. Easily accessible and visceral imagery of the dirty little secret of police investigative work makes clear that our suspicions about how crimes ever get solved have been warranted:
“We would never call inexplicable little insights `hunches,’ for fear of drawing the universe’s attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.”
The Weirdness of Breaching
Breaching is the act of passing across the imaginary border separating the two cities. It requires an act of will to not breach which is, of course, a paradox unto itself that also happens to be very foundation of the undercarriage of the plot. Even the strongest will cannot be maintained every single second of every waking moment, however. Things happen: the trick is to “unsee” as quickly as possible:
“These kind of rare situations were when one might glimpse Breach, performing what they did. Accidents and border-perforating catastrophes. The 1926 Earthquake, a grand fire. (There had once been a fire grosstopically close to my apartment. It had been contained in one house, but a house not in Besźel, that I had unseen. So I had watched footage of it piped in from Ul Qoma, on my local TV, while my living room windows had been lit by the fluttering red glow of it.)”
The Breach
Inevitably, of course, the mechanics of plotting lead to the protagonist breaching. And so, at least, the reader gets what most have likely been waiting for the whole time: an up and close and personal look at what happens when dares to violate the agreement to sustain an illusory border simply by refusing to admit it does not actually exist. The result is something like a haunted house attraction: kind of fun, kind of scary, and existing in a strange netherworld between the real and the not-quite-real:
“Someone stood in the doorway. Light behind him, he was a cutout of darkness, a lack. When he stepped forward he was a man fifteen or twenty years my senior. Tough and squat, in clothes as vague as my own. There were others behind him: a woman my age, another man a little older. Their faces were without anything approaching expressions. They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.”
