Despite its surreal, fantastical elements, The City and the City is primarily a detective novel that explores the distinctions between different types of crime and their corresponding punishments. The novel’s narrator and hero, Tyador Borlú, is a detective with the Besźel Extreme Crimes Unit, and he is devoted to the pursuit of justice. Yet Borlú’s strong principles end up clashing with the legal norms of the world in which he lives, which end up obstructing his investigation of the murder of Mahalia Geary. Indeed, the novel makes a distinction between moral violations (such as murder) and illegal acts that don’t harm anyone (such as breach). The fact that the laws governing the divide between Besźel and Ul Qoma are treated with more seriousness than the laws around moral violations indicates that the legal system of the two cities is seriously corrupt. Despite the fact that he is himself a police officer, Borlú learns that breaking certain laws can actually be a necessary part of the pursuit of justice.
The opening of the novel, which is conventionally faithful to the genre of detective fiction, establishes a deceptively simple account of morality, crime, and punishment—an account that unravels over the course of the novel. When Borlú and his team investigate the scene of the murder of a young woman (later revealed to be Mahalia Geary), they assume that the crime is relatively straightforward. Because of Mahalia’s age and the seedy area in which her body is found, Borlú guesses that she might be a sex worker who was killed by a john or a pimp. This is the kind of crime that Borlú encounters regularly, and he therefore feels confident that he will know how to solve it. It is also straightforward in a moral sense; the murder is clearly both a legal and a moral violation, and Borlú’s job would simply be to find the perpetrator in order to make them face an appropriate punishment.
However, as the narrative goes on, the law surrounding the divide between Besźel and Ul Qoma becomes a more and more prominent aspect of the case, and this prohibits Borlú from being able to carry out his investigation. He comes to realize that Mahalia had some involvement with dissident unificationists and nationalists, but he has trouble investigating these connections because these groups are so paranoid about the “wrathful” surveillance of Breach: “That terrible presence [Breach] might appear and disappear a unificationist for even a somatic breach, a startled jump at a misfiring Ul Qoma car.” The fact that Breach persecutes dissidents for instinctive bodily reactions shows that its authority is excessive, punishing those who have not even chosen to do anything wrong. Furthermore, the fact that this excessive punishment obstructs Borlú’s investigation shows that Breach’s disproportionate power can actually stop those who have committed serious moral violations (like murder) from being brought to justice.
The idea that the excessive focus on breach above other forms of crime actually exacerbates moral violations is further emphasized by Borlú’s description of how the border between the cities enables petty crime to take place. Borlú recalls that when he was growing up, he was told to ignore Ul Qoman pickpockets and muggers because “breach is a worse transgression than theirs.” The fact that breach is elevated as a crime worse than any other effectively leaves citizens defenseless against criminals from the other city. Borlú himself becomes a victim of this dynamic when he shoots the man (Yorjavic) who kills Mahalia’s best friend Yolanda Rodriguez, thereby inadvertently committing breach because Yorjavic is in Besźel, and Borlú himself is in Ul Qoma. The fact that Borlú is a police officer who apprehended a murderer doesn’t exonerate him, and he ends up being punished for breaching, which further obstructs his ability to solve the crime of Mahalia’s murder. When he tries to argue with the anonymous Breach officers and make them understand that he only breached in order to stop a murderer, they simply reply, “He never breached. You did.”
The focus on Breach is also shown to obstruct justice due to the fact that many believe that people who violate social and political norms (including the sovereignty of the two cities) deserve any bad things that happen to them. Borlú realizes this while he is investigating Mahalia’s murder and encounters more and more people who believe that, due to her obsession with the mythical third city, Orciny, Mahalia brought her fate upon herself. Borlú must struggle to push past this widely held view in order to bring Mahalia’s killer to justice. This struggle conveys how people can be treated as disposable because they violate norms and laws on political grounds, even if they don’t actually harm anyone in doing so.
Breach also illustrates the unjust and illogical nature of the law because, unlike laws preventing theft or murder, it doesn’t have a clear purpose but seems to exist largely for its own sake. Indeed, the only point of Breach is to keep the cities separate. The uncertainty over why Breach exists, how it is so powerful, and why it is so strictly enforced emerges through the fact that Breach is the name for the crime, the punishment, and the authority charged with policing the crime. When people commit breach (the crime), Breach (the authority) takes them into the Breach (the punishment), an ambiguous zone described as a “void full of angry police.” All this serves to indicate that breach is a self-justifying crime, and one that exists purely in order to punish people for committing it. In this sense, Breach exists only to maintain a certain level of control over the population and to enhance the authority of those charged with policing it. This is clearly a contrast to the kind of crime and punishment that Borlú addresses, as his determination to solve the murder of Mahalia Geary demonstrates that he is committed to a more logical and functional perspective on law and order.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Crime vs. Punishment ThemeTracker
Crime vs. Punishment Quotes in The City & the City
My informant should not have seen the posters. They were not in his country. He should never have told me. He made me accessory. The information was an allergen in Besźel—the mere fact of it in my head was a kind of trauma. I was complicit. It was done.
Anyway whether in its original or later written form, Illitan bears no resemblance to Besź. Nor does it sound similar. But these distinctions are not as deep as they appear. Despite careful cultural differentiation, in the shape of their grammars and the relations of their phonemes (if not the base sounds themselves), the languages are closely related—they share a common ancestor, after all. It feels almost seditious to say so. Still.
A political irony. Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary between Besźel and Ul Qoma had to observe it most carefully. If I or one of my friends were to have a moment’s failure of unseeing (and who did not do that? Who failed to fail to see, sometimes?), so long as it was not flaunted or indulged in, we should not be in danger. If I were to glance a second or two on some attractive passerby in Ul Qoma, if I were to silently enjoy the skyline of the two cities together, be irritated by the noise of an Ul Qoman train, I would not be taken.
Here, though, at this building not just my colleagues but the powers of Breach were always wrathful and as Old Testament as they had the powers and right to be. That terrible presence might appear and disappear a unificationist for even a somatic breach, a startled jump at a misfiring Ul Qoma car.
Very occasionally a young Ul Qoman who does not know the area of their city that Ul Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically Ul Qoman Besźel-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected—there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm—and Breach are normally merciful.
A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.
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, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.
Okay I need to be a little bit careful here, Inspector, because honestly I never really, not really, thought he did believe it—I always thought it was kind of a game—but the book said he believed it […] A secret colony. A city between the cities, its inhabitants living in plain sight […] Unseen, like Ul Qomans to the Besź and vice versa. Walking the streets unseen but overlooking the two. Beyond the Breach. And doing what, who knows? Secret agendas. They’re still debating that, I don’t doubt, on the conspiracy theory websites.
“Of course it’s ludicrous, like you say. Secret overlords behind the scene, more powerful even than Breach, puppetmasters, hidden cities.”
“Crap.”
“Yeah, but the point is that it’s crap a bunch of people believe. And”—I opened my hands at him—“something big’s going on, and we have no idea what it is.”
“I’m getting paranoid,” I said.
“Oh no, they’re really watching you.”
“Yorjavic didn’t breach, Borlú. He shot over the border, in Copula Hall. He never breached. Lawyers might have an argument: was the crime committed in Besźel where he pulled the trigger, or Ul Qoma where the bullets hit? Or both? He held out his hands in an elegant who cares? “He never breached. You did. So you are here, now, in the Breach.”
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 has no currency. If you commit it it will envelop you. Breach is void full of angry police.
Smuggling’s not my department; take what you want. I’m not a political man—I don’t care if you mess with Ul Qoma. I’m here because you’re a murderer.
Ul Qoma’s government announced a new campaign, Vigilant Neighbours, neighbourliness referring both to the people next door (what were they doing?) and to the connected city (see how important borders are?).
It’s not just us keeping them apart. It’s everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We’re only the last ditch: it’s everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don’t blink. That’s why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn’t work.
