The City and the City Literary Elements

New Weird Fiction/Police procedural

Besźel and Ul Qoma, two fictional European cities occupying the same geographic area; the fact that the border between them is an illusory construct existing only as an authoritarian legal mandate is an essential part of the concept and the plot.

First-person narrative point of view from the perspective of police inspector Tyador Borlú.

The tone is straightforward and factual while the mood is pervasively dark, ironic and paranoid.

Protagonist: Inspector Tyador Borlú and, to a much lesser degree, Detective Qussim Dhatt. Antagonist: Dr. David Bowden.

The conflict of the plot is driven by the discovery of the dead body of Mahalia Geary in Besźel and the later realization that she was a citizen of Ul Qoma.

The story’s climax coincides with Inspector Borlú’s shooting death of a person of interest related to the murder of Mahalia and the subsequent events which occur as a result of his committing the illegal act of breaching as a direct result of that shooting.

N/A

N/A

Copula Hall is the official border checkpoint at which residents of both cities can legal cross from one city into the other. The concept alludes very strongly to famous real life historical border crossing points such as those along the U.S./Mexican border and, more to the point, the Berlin Wall.

The imagery of Copula Hall’s architectural design is also an example of thematically metaphoric language: “Copula Hall like the waist of an hourglass, the point of ingress and egress, the navel between the cities. The whole edifice a funnel, letting visitors from one city into the other, and the other into the one.”

Copula Hall is also a place in which the description of passage back and forth across the imaginary border demonstrates the fundamental underlying paradox of the two cities sharing the same space: “But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Besźel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before”

The sudden revelation of what the breach provides an example of parallel construction which reflects the parallel construction of the entire novel’s concept: “THE BREACH WAS NOTHING. It is nothing. This is a commonplace; this is simple stuff. The Breach has no embassies, no army, no sights to see.”

The Breach is an invented metonym. Its status as a metonymic device arrives courtesy of the fact that while it describes a very simple physical act, its meaning overflows with conceptual connotations extending far beyond that the actual act of breaking the law.

“The buildings in Besźel were brick and plaster, each surmounted with one of the household Lares staring at me, a little manlike grotesque, and bearded with that weed.”