The City & the City by China Miéville

The City & the City is, aptly, two things. It is a crime noir pastiche, which I am all for (I have my own abandoned manuscript for one), and it is a multi-layered metaphorical text about two cities that share the same geographic area.

Beszel and Ul Qoma, two city-states near Turkey, take up the same space. A building in one may be directly next to a buil…