The City and The City is a weird book. On the one hand, it’s a hard-boiled police procedural novel, in a line that most readers would be familiar with. On the other, there is a core element of the story about perception of reality, and what we see and choose not to see, that requires the reader twist their brain some.

As with most police procedurals, this begins with a murder. Tyador Borlú is a police investigator in the fictional city-state of Beszel (there’s an accent mark in the “z” that my keyboard doesn’t like). The latest case to come across his desk is the murder of a Fulana (the Beszel version of a Jane Doe) who was dumped on the street. Only it turns out the victim was a Canadian exchange student from the neighboring city-state of Ul-Qoma – neighboring in the sense that the two city-states are physically intertwined, with residents of one mentally conditioning themselves not to see the streets and people of their neighbor.

It’s an interesting and novel concept, and one which puts a whole new spin on this particular mystery structure. It’s surreal, but not incoherent. The world feels grounded, and injects the absurdity and surreality of its premise into the story without feeling like it’s so caught up in conveying a particular metaphor that the rest of the cast feels unreal (something that is distressingly common with works that are often described as Kafka-esque – including Brazil). The act of conscious “un-seeing” feels natural and deliberate. There are very few characters going out of their way to say how “unnatural” this is, not are there characters acting in a way that is consciously unnatural.

This was an engrossing book. If there was anything that slowed my pace through the story, it was more due to the frustrating and exhausting elements of our reality making me feel too exhausted to read a gritty mystery novel at the moment. That’s not a fault of the novel’s reality, it’s a fault of real reality.

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