The City & the City

by

China Miéville

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Themes and Colors
Borders and Doubles Theme Icon
Seeing vs. Unseeing Theme Icon
Crime vs. Punishment Theme Icon
Urban Life and Alienation Theme Icon
Paranoia, Conspiracy, and Illicit Knowledge Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The City & the City, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Urban Life and Alienation Theme Icon

The City and the City explores the impact of urban life on individual psychology and social relations, emphasizing how life in a city can alienate people from one another. As the novel’s depiction of seeing and unseeing illustrates, urban existence often necessitates ignoring aspects of one’s environment, including particular people and populations. Indeed, the strict codes governing the way in which Besź and Ul Qoman citizens are permitted to interact with their surroundings could be read as a metaphor for how urban life encourages people to ignore those deemed to be foreign, criminal, or disposable. Yet as the novel shows, ignoring unwanted people and aspects of the city is not only immoral—it creates space for sinister, shadowy powers to operate unnoticed. In a sense, it is the curious, observant, and “untrained” eye of migrants, visitors, and children that is held up as a more ethical way to encounter the city, a necessary counterpoint to the cynical alienation produced by urban life.

Throughout the novel, it is made clear that there is a connection between the demand that Besź and Ul Qoman citizens ignore the other city and the dismissive way they treat certain elements of their own cities. When the main character, Tyador Borlú, arrives at the murder scene at the beginning of the novel, he ignores key details due to the alienation that life in Besźel creates. Like any good Besź citizen, he ignores any parts of his surroundings that are part of Ul Qoma (something later revealed to be a mistake when Borlú learns that the victim, Mahalia, was actually a resident of Ul Qoma). He also assumes that Mahalia was a sex worker and that her murder might be drug-related, or the act of an angry pimp. All of these false assumptions originate in the way that urban life alienates a person from their surroundings (both other people and the environment).

The idea that life in Besźel and Ul Qoma creates a sense of alienation is further emphasized by the contrast between the experienced, trained perspective of citizens like Borlú and the fresh eyes of newcomers. Several times the novel mentions that Breach is more lax for refugees, new immigrants, tourists, and children. These populations are understood to have not mastered the art of ignoring the other city, and thus if they accidentally acknowledge it, they are treated with some forgiveness.

The presence of foreigners and children is shown to have a disruptive, even chaotic effect on the cities, because thanks to their lack of experience (and lack of alienation), their behavior is unpredictable. Toward the end of the novel, a breach takes place when two buses carrying refugees crash into one another. Describing the aftermath of the crash, Ashil notes that the refugees are now “out, and they haven’t been trained; they’re breaching everywhere, wandering between the cities without any idea what they’re doing.” Borlú, meanwhile, pictures the “scores of afraid, injured intruders, without intent to transgress but without choice, without language to ask for help, stumbling out of the ruined buses, weeping children in their arms and bleeding across borders […] oscillating back and forth between countries.” Refugees are usually kept under strict control in order to prevent them from disrupting the status quo of life in Besźel and Ul Qoma. When the bus crash interrupts this norm, chaos is unleashed, as a tightly controlled and suppressed population suddenly explodes from its designated place in society—simply by behaving in an ordinary, typically human way. This incident highlights how the citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma have, in a way, become less human through their deep alienation from their surroundings.

In the end, the non-alienated way of interacting with the city associated with foreigners ends up becoming vital to the pursuit of justice. In particular, it is significant that both Mahalia Geary and Yolanda Rodriguez—whose interest in the mythical third city, Orciny, leads to the revelation that Orciny is a myth designed to distract from ongoing criminal activity—are foreigners. Because these women are not actually from Ul Qoma (or Besźel) but have temporarily migrated there to complete their PhDs, they have not yet become alienated from their surroundings. They do not dismiss Orciny offhandedly as a “myth,” as Borlú and most other long-time residents of Besźel/Ul Qoma do. Instead, they remain curious and open-minded, and this allows them to access the truth that has remained concealed from others.

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Urban Life and Alienation Quotes in The City & the City

Below you will find the important quotes in The City & the City related to the theme of Urban Life and Alienation.
Chapter 2 Quotes

A common form of establishment, for much of Besźel’s history, had been the DoplirCaffé: one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, sharing a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed. Mixed groups would come, greet the two proprietors, sit together, separating on communitarian lines only long enough to order their permitted food from the relevant side, or ostentatiously from either and both in the case of freethinkers. Whether the DoplirCaffé was one establishment or two depended on who was asking: to a property tax collector, it was always one.

Related Characters: Inspector Tyador Borlú (speaker)
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Inspector Tyador Borlú (speaker)
Page Number: 36
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Inspector Tyador Borlú (speaker)
Related Symbols: Breach
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Inspector Tyador Borlú (speaker), Mahalia Geary (a.k.a. Fulana/Marya/Byela Mar) , Lizybet Corwi, Pall Drodin
Related Symbols: Breach
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Inspector Tyador Borlú (speaker)
Related Symbols: Breach
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Inspector Tyador Borlú (speaker)
Related Symbols: Breach, Copula Hall
Page Number: 70
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Professor Isabelle Nancy (speaker), Inspector Tyador Borlú, Mahalia Geary (a.k.a. Fulana/Marya/Byela Mar) , Dr. David Bowden
Related Symbols: Breach, Between the City and the City
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Inspector Tyador Borlú (speaker), Detective Qussim Dhatt (speaker), Dr. David Bowden, Yolanda Rodriguez
Related Symbols: Breach, Between the City and the City
Page Number: 193
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

I could imagine the panic of bystanders and passersby, let alone those innocent motorists of Besźel and Ul Qoma, having swerved desperately out of the path of the careening vehicles, of necessity in and out of the topolganger city, trying hard to regain control and pull their vehicles back to where they dwelt. Faced then with scores of afraid, injured intruders, without intent to transgress but without choice, without language to ask for help, stumbling out of the ruined buses, weeping children in their arms and bleeding across borders. Approaching people they saw, not attuned to the nuances of nationality—clothes, colours, hair, posture—oscillating back and forth between countries.

Related Characters: Inspector Tyador Borlú (speaker), Mahalia Geary (a.k.a. Fulana/Marya/Byela Mar) , Ashil
Related Symbols: Breach
Page Number: 275
Explanation and Analysis:
Coda: Chapter 29 Quotes

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?).

Related Characters: Inspector Tyador Borlú (speaker), Mahalia Geary (a.k.a. Fulana/Marya/Byela Mar) , Dr. David Bowden, Mikhel Buric, Ian Croft
Related Symbols: Breach
Page Number: 307
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Ashil (speaker), Inspector Tyador Borlú
Related Symbols: Breach
Page Number: 310
Explanation and Analysis: