In the authoritarian world of The City and the City, knowledge is subject to strict control. As a detective, protagonist Tyador Borlú’s job is to discover the truth in order to solve crimes, yet in the case of Mahalia Geary’s murder, this duty ends up coming into conflict with Borlú’s duty as a Besź citizen to stick to the official version of the truth. The result is that Borlú feels gripped by paranoia and conspiratorial thinking, leading others around him to doubt him and even making him doubt himself at times. However, the novel ultimately shows that paranoia and conspiratorial thinking are often signs that one is actually accessing the truth—particularly in an environment where powerful authorities control knowledge.
Over the course of the novel, Borlú realizes that conventional ways of thinking will not help him solve the case of Mahalia’s murder, and that what he originally dismissed as paranoid thinking is actually necessary to access the truth. Because he is an experienced detective, Borlú is initially confident that he will be able to solve Mahalia’s murder through his existing knowledge, sources, and assumptions. Yet this is all upended when each of these sources and assumptions turns up nothing, and it is eventually revealed that Mahalia was not even a resident of Besźel, but rather of Ul Qoma. Even this fact is illicit in the sense that solving the crime suddenly involves thinking about Ul Qoma, which counts as Breach and is thus illegal. As a result, Borlú must learn to embrace illicit, dissident, and conspiratorial sources of knowledge in order to effectively access the truth.
Borlú’s initial confidence in approaching Mahalia’s murder corresponds to the role he plays in explaining Besźel/Ul Qoma and their history to the reader. In the beginning of the novel, Borlú positions himself as an authority and dismisses the conspiracies that dissidents such as the unificationists favor. For example, when he learns that Mahalia frequented the Besź unificationists’ library in order to read about the mythical third city of Orciny, he comments dismissively: “Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing.” Yet as time goes on and it becomes more and more clear that people with knowledge about Orciny are in danger, Borlú is forced to challenge his own assumptions about the world in which he lives. His authority is undermined as it is revealed that he actually knows far less about the cities than he originally thought.
The character most closely associated with paranoia, conspiracy, and illicit knowledge is Mahalia herself, who shows the importance of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake—even if that pursuit comes at great personal risk. Unlike many other characters in the novel, Mahalia was not gathering knowledge for a particular purpose, but rather as an end in itself. This provokes the ire of a large variety of people, from Besź and Ul Qoman nationalists to unificationists. All of these different groups are united by the fact that they choose to pursue knowledge in order to advance their own causes. While causes like theirs can provide an impetus to gather information (an idea Borlú expresses when he observes of the Besź unificationists: “Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists”), this information is inherently limited by the fact that it is designed to serve a certain political purpose. Such political bias limits the pursuit of knowledge as it leads people to disregard knowledge that doesn’t suit their aims.
In contrast, Mahalia’s desire to learn the truth regardless of what that truth is proves effective: thanks to her relentless research and willingness to embrace seemingly conspiratorial ideas, she discovers the sinister reality behind the myth of Orciny. The danger of illicit knowledge is underlined by the fact that Mahalia is killed for knowing this information. Yet at the same time, the novel also shows that truth itself cannot die so easily. Mahalia’s death sets off a chain of events that in turn allows Borlú to discover the truth for himself.
Because the corporation behind the Orciny myth is never properly brought to justice, it might be tempting to interpret the end of the novel as indicating that the pursuit of illicit knowledge is not worth it: Mahalia and Yolanda end up dead, and the sinister powers that killed them remain in operation. Yet the novel also indicates that the illicit knowledge Mahalia accessed has had an impact on the world, the ultimate effect of which remains unclear. Although both Besźel and Ul Qoma rush to return to the status quo and hide the evidence of the rupture that Mahalia’s revelations caused, the novel ends with an ambiguous feeling of potential change. Indeed, Ashil himself expresses this when he observes to Borlú, “Times are changing.” This ambivalent ending confirms the idea that the genuine pursuit of knowledge cannot be done in service of a particular goal, but rather must be done for its own sake. The ultimate consequences of revealing concealed truths will always be impossible to predict or control, but pursuing the truth will inevitably alter the world in some way, and this makes it worth it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Paranoia, Conspiracy, and Illicit Knowledge ThemeTracker
Paranoia, Conspiracy, and Illicit Knowledge Quotes in The City & the City
It was, not surprisingly that day perhaps, hard to observe borders, to see and unsee only what I should, on my way home. I was hemmed in by people not in my city, walking slowly through areas crowded but not crowded in Besźel. I focused on the stones really around me—cathedrals, bars, the brick flourishes of what had been a school—that I had grown up with. I ignored the rest or tried.
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.
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.
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.
