The City and the City by China Miéville (2009)

The City and the City recently won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel of 2010. Never having followed contemporary fantasy, I decided to start with a writer I'd heard much about over the years but never considered reading before. While The City and the City doesn't strike me as more fantasy than science fiction, I think the many distinctions between genres are often harmful and confine writers and readers in the scope of their imaginative abilities. In fact, part of our aim here at The Bent Spine, is to liberate genre fiction from its dearth of critical attention. While Miéville doesn't provide us with ghouls and goblins, dragons and warriors, he does embed a thought-provoking concept in a highly readable detective story that borders on the high political intrigue of John le Carré at his strongest. While I don't have much to compare it with, The City and the City deftly avoids the pitfalls of many science fiction and fantasy cliches. Miéville's vision is gritty and uncompromising in its ambiguity.

Inspector Borlu is investigating a crime in his dystopian home city-state of Beszel, when he becomes embroiled in a cross border conspiracy involving a secret power lying in the shadows between Beszel and its sister city Ul Qoma. Beszel and Ul Qoma, for the most part, occupy the same topography. They literally inhabit the same physical space. But through an amazing feat of mass self-hypnotism the citizens of either city do not see of interact with the citizens of the other. Only at the border gate of Copula Hall can one look from one city into another without fear of committing breach, the greatest crime possibly, and attracting the wrath of a shadowy authority called, you guessed it, Breach. Borlu examines the multifarious political factions of each city, the differences in culture, police procedure, respect for antiquity and taste in hot beverages. The only thing these two cities share, other than geography, is an intense fear of Breach. Miéville places his cities in a realistic Eastern European locale and makes many references to a geopolitical situation much like our own. This not an alien landscape, but a parable for a Jerusalem transplanted to Europe, where there are no physical barriers between the Israelis and Palestinians other than an odd self-imposed blindness.

Miéville works in a long tradition of political science fiction, the sort of metaphorical story found in the best Philip K. Dick novels and Aldous Huxley. However, he never makes a completely clear political statement, and this saves The City and the City from becoming strictly a novel of ideas. He writes with a keen simplicity that at first seems rigid, but gradually flows into the staccato rhythms of Raymond Chandler. His imagery is always dark. There are no rays of light to be found here. As John Carpenter did in Escape from New York, China Miéville has created a dystopia both believable and entertaining. Though I can't say this is the best contemporary fantasy and science fiction have to offer, The City and the City shows the scene to be thriving with intriguing new work.

Check out this old, but interesting interview with Miéville at The Believer.

Sacrament by Clive Barker (1996)

I’ll start this by saying that I am aware that Clive Barker is not strictly a horror author. I’m sure it’s been somewhat frustrating to him over his career to have carried this label years after writing his last true piece of horror fiction, Cabal, in 1988 (a case could be made, however, for Cold Heart Canyon [2001] or Mister B. Gone [2008], being horror). But his style of fantasy, even his children’s novels such The Thief of Always (1992) and the Abarat series (2002 and 2004), are so dark, and contain so many elements of horror fiction, that it isn’t difficult to see why he still gets pegged as a horror author. And, I’m sure his involvement in mainstream horror film series (Hellraiser, Candyman) helped contribute as well.

Anyway, I’m now going to discuss his 1996 novel, Sacrament, which is a fantasy, a parable of sorts, and is not a horror novel, but does, as I said above, contain plenty of horror content, like his other fantasy novels, and thus is suitable for discussion on this blog.

The scope of this novel is not nearly as large as some of his other works. A recurring theme of Barker’s stories is that of a world hidden within our own world; or a doorway from our world leading into another. In Imajica (1991), the heroes of the story travel through Four Dominions, other planes of existence linked to Earth, the Fifth Dominion; the characters in The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Everville (1994) travel across a mystical dream sea known as Quiddity, to explore the unknown areas lying on the other side. Sacrament, on the other hand, involves a man, Will Rabjohns’, journey across the Arctic, through his hometown in England, and to his new residence in San Francisco. The vivid and fantastic descriptions this time around are focused not on otherworldy places, but right here in our own fantastical world.

One thing Barker does so well in this book is show an enormous appreciation of nature and our planet in general. It isn’t a preachy story, but one doesn’t have to look hard to find an environmental message of sorts. Rabjohns has made a career as a photographer snapping pictures of wildlife in its last throes, species on the verge of extinction. When a polar bear knocks him into a coma, he is taken back through his memories to his childhood, when he came into contact with two bizarre, powerful beings disguised as humans, Steep and Rosa. He finds that it was Steep who, when he was a child, gave him his first taste of death and provided him with his lifelong interest in the end of life, particularly with the extinction of entire species.

Will Rabjohns is the first gay lead in a Clive Barker novel, and sections of the book deal with Rabjohns’ and his friends’ coping with, and understanding of, “the plague,” Barker’s word for AIDS (he also referred to the disease by this name, and this name alone, in Imajica). Indeed there are parallels drawn between the AIDS epidemic, and also the gay lifestyle, and Rabjohns’ and Steep’s respective places in the world. Steep is a man who has lived for hundreds of years and is continuously vexed by the fact that he does not know what he is or where he came from; his entire life is an attempt to reconcile this, to hopefully figure out what he is. He has transformed Rabjohns, in a way, or rather, set his life on a course he otherwise wouldn’t have intended; and because of this, Rabjohns has doubts and questions about his career and motivations. But his identity, who he is as a person, as a gay man and artist, are never unclear to him. His security in himself is in sharp contrast to the murderous Steep, who can never be fully satisfied due to his lack of understanding of himself.

Like Barker’s other novels intended for adults, Sacrament contains some fairly bizarre violent and sexual content, mixed in with scenes of great beauty and some philosophy. He’s stated that this is his lowest-selling novel (I don’t know if that’s still the case). Too bad, because it’s an excellent story, told through flashbacks, with a great pace, startling moments of horror, and is certainly worth reading for fans of dark fantasy, fantastique, fables, or however you’d like to call it.