The City & The City - China Mieville

There are two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma. They are beside each other, and also overlap. The latter is something inhabitants of both lands, and any visitors to either, are supposed to ignore. See that person down the street, whose clothes and gait don't match everyone else? No you don't, or at least, you better not. Or else you're in breach and soon you'll vanish into Breach.

The specifics of how that circumstance came to be, Mieville doesn't really investigate. None of the characters in this book know, or if they do, they're aren't telling or even thinking it where any narrator can notice. It's just a part of their surroundings they accept and attempt to navigate with their investigation of a murdered archaeology student.

Tyador Borlu is the Beszel detective assigned the case, and he's a fairly typical fictional cop. Overloaded with cases and outwardly willing to find an excuse to dump this on someone else. Yet also dogged enough to keep digging even when it looks as though he'll get what he wants and the case will be declared breach and taken out of his hands. He annoys people in power by asking questions they don't like, he frustrates his colleagues and partners (and he ends up with those in both cities and more before it's over) by keeping his thoughts to himself and pursuing hunches alone, leaving them to deal with the fallout.

I didn't have any sense of the answer to whodunit, but I'm not sure if that was because Mieville did an excellent job masking it, or because it felt like the whole thing about the nature of the two cities, plus Breach, overshadowed it. Because everything about the investigation, every careful step Borlu has to take, is dictated by those circumstances. So the question of why things are like that, or how they got that way, feel important. But, you know, Mieville doesn't really answer that, not directly.

I did, however, see Borlu's fate coming from a fair distance off. Pretty much from the moment he was apprehended, I knew how things were going to end for him. I don't know if that's a good thing or not.

Reading this was a strange experience. I wasn't invested in the actual murder mystery, which seems bad, nor did Mieville answer the questions I did have, which seems unsatisfying. Yet I read through it quickly and easily, without any hesitation or question of whether I wanted to finish. So it must have done something right.

'The theft of the van and the dumping of the body in Beszel were illegal. The murder in Ul Qoma was horribly so. But what we had assumed was the particular transgressive connection between the events had never taken place. All passage had appeared scrupulously legal, effected through official channels, paperwork in place. Even if the permits were faked, the travel through the borders in Copula Hall made it a question of illegal entry, not of breach. That is a crime you might have in any country. There had been no breach.'

Perdido Street Station - China Mieville

A scientist's attempt to help a birdperson take to the air again results in a quintet of horrible, mind-eating giant moths being released upon the city of New Crobuzon. While the city government flails about, teaming up with gangsters to try and kill the moths, the scientist and his odd little band make their own attempts to deal with the problem, when they aren't preoccupied with running for their lives from the government, the mobsters, the moths, a massive machine intelligence, or whatever else takes aim at them.

All the different elements come together fairly well. The mobster requesting a sculpture, the whole thing about flying, Isaac's interest in the crisis energy. I was very confused how the laboratory cleaning bot getting infected with a virus was going to factor in, but it worked.  

I was disappointed we never do get to see Isaac finish a device to allow someone to fly. Related to that, not sure how I feel about the ending. In a lot of ways. Yaghrek's fate, Lin's fate even more so. Seemed like wasted potential, the opportunity to do something with her character, thrown away. He'd established this whole thing where Lin absolutely rejects her brood mother's restrictive belief system, then later rejected the more typical mores of her people. But now she finds herself isolated in the life she's chosen, and looking back at things she rejected in a new light. Seems like it would have be interesting to see how she processed that after this whole experience.

I shouldn't have expected anything like a happy ending, but I did. I won't say Mieville doesn't earn the ending; the disastrous decisions made enough sense in the moment, it just wasn't terribly satisfying. Neither was Motley's fate, for that matter. The machine grinds people up and spits them out, and the best you can hope for is the people at the controls get marginally inconvenienced.

There's a labeled map of the city at the start of the book, but I stopped checking the relative locations of things within the first 15 pages. It's enough for me to know it's a big place with a lot of different districts, slums, neighborhoods, whatever. Some of them are more memorable than others, but that's fine. There are times some of the elements feel as though they're thrown in strictly as world-building for future books, rather than as necessary pieces of this story. That may just be Mieville' trying to give a sense of this as taking place in a world that already has plenty of history, rather than one where nothing interesting happened until this incident.

"I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars."

Kraken - China Mieville

A preserved specimen of a giant squid goes missing, somehow. All signs among the spiritually inclined point to this somehow ushering in the end of the world. Which causes a lot of chaos, because this is going to be a real end, nothing emerging from the ashes. Billy Harrow's the employee of the museum who prepared the giant squid, and this leads all concerned parties to believe that he is a figure of some importance. Which he is, but not in the way anybody seems to expect.

This is my first time reading Mieville's prose work, so I don't know if the twists and surprises are typical. Because that's a big part of this, just a seemingly constant string of misdirection and red herrings. Billy insisting there's nothing special about him, but he's wrong. But they're wrong about what's special about him. This person's dead, no they aren't. This person's behind this, no they aren't.

For the most part, it works because Mieville demonstrates that basically everyone is fumbling in the dark. They all suspect someone else is behind it, but all the assumptions keep turning out to be wrong. I think he goes to the well one time too many, though. There's a moment I thought the situation was resolved, the day had been saved, and then the story says, "Nope, not yet," and finally the true threat is revealed. But by then, I was just ready for things to be over. I wanted to exhale, and having to go through one more tense struggle was just too much.

That said, I love the world-building. All the different sorts of magic and belief, the ways of interacting with the world, of finding little loopholes. It's very interesting, in light of the final boss and what he's actually trying to destroy, the way all these characters have found little niches, ways to survive, thrive, or make a living. A place they can operate, a thing they can do that's unique.

Sometimes he leans a little too hard into trying to make the characters unique, at least in the sense that a couple of them really irritate me. I assume the one competent cop really just being a bully, who learned magic because she liked being able to use it to humiliate people, and presumably became a cop for the same reason, is deliberate. But the main hired muscle threat has this incredibly irritating way of speaking where two-thirds of what he says is seemingly random phrases and I just hated it. And Mieville didn't really do a good job of conveying what made him so terrifying to everyone. Goss seems to be a real sadist, but that's hardly unique in the book, and other than that, he's more annoying than impressive.

Outside that, though, most of the characters are interesting in how they're all sort of harried, stressed, and responding to it in different ways. Hunkering down, freaking out, shutting down, snapping at everyone, watching with avid interest. It's a real variety, which felt like a good representation of how people would behave.

'Billy dripped in more bleach and the ink rolled. "We're not going to pour you down the sink. You don't get to dissipate painlessly with rats and turds." He held the pipette over the glass. "I will piss in you and then bleach you so you dissolve. Where is the rest of you?"

He wrote. The penmanship was ragged. FUCKERS.'

Sunday Splash Page #155

 

"There's a Void Inside Me. Outside Me, Too," in Dial H #3, by China Mieville (writer), Mateus Santolouco (artist), Tanya and Richard Horie (colorists), Steve Wands (letterer)

I wouldn't describe DC's New 52 as a success. That they abandoned it at least partially by summer of 2015 with the "DC You" branding (and then entirely with "DC Rebirth" a year after that), less than four years in, would suggest they agreed.

There were a lot of factors. DC throwing out their history and legacies, but even more half-assedly than they did after Crisis on the Infinite Earths. So Batman could still have four Robins (in 5 years, apparently), but there could only be one Batgirl (Barbara, naturally). Four Earth Green Lanterns (and Geoff Johns just kept doing the same stories he already had going), but only one Flash (Barry, naturally). 

The Jim Lee redesigned costumes, were to put it politely, too busy. To put it bluntly, they sucked. The claim that things were going to be new, but the majority of the books were helmed by guys who had been writing comics for decades didn't help. I've enjoyed Tom DeFalco's work, but he's not a writer I'd turn to for something new. Then editorial kept driving creative talent off books with heavy-handed oversight. Not much point to putting George Perez on Superman, only to piss him off in less than 6 issues.

Saying all that, it did give me 16 issues of China Mieville's Dial H series, so it wasn't a complete loss. DC canceled some titles 8 months in, and Dial H was one of the replacements. It's one of the few real examples of DC trying to get outside the box, in the sense they brought in a published, award-winning novelist with, to my knowledge, no prior comic writing experience. If you're looking for something "new" and attention-getting to be done with your characters, that's a better bet than handing them to Scott Lobdell.

Mieville dives into the concept of the dials, how they were made, how they work, how they end up where they end up. Gives them an air of body and especially psychological horror. The toll it takes on the person who uses it, to have another entire personality and memory super-imposed over their own, especially one that seems so much greater than them. One of the two main characters (Nelson) struggles to keep track of who he is and what he planned to use the powers to do when he dials, while the other (Roxie) hides whatever identity she dials behind her own mask, costume, and codename, as a way to keep her mind clear.

There was also an entire issue based around the idea some of the dialed heroes are just too culturally offensive to go out as in public unless there's no other option, which was pretty hilarious, and a fair point, given comics' questionable history when it comes to depicting races, cultural trends, sexual preferences, so on.

As far as the designs for the dialed characters, I don't know where the breakdown is between Mieville and his artists (Mateus Santolouco for issues 0-5, David Lapham for issues 6 and 7, Alberto Ponticelli for 8-15), but the designs are great. From the creepy Boy Chimney, to the ridiculous Cock-a-Hoop, to the Glimpse (who is drawn so you only ever see a small bit of him in the panels). There's an essentially sentient mass of plankton that beats the crap out of a whale. Like I said, I don't know who gets credit, but all parties involved did a great job coming up with some interesting designs and powers to go with them.

Lapham's work is probably the closest to a realistic looking, and the two issues he draws involve the least action by dialed heroes, focused more on a Canadian secret agent with powers. Who is basically a guy in a suit, so it works. Santolouco's art is heavier on shadows, characters look more shell-shocked or freaked out by what's going on. By the time Ponticelli takes over as artist, most of the characters are ones used to this dial stuff, and they just looked kind of tired. His art has a grimy texture, and everybody looks older. His linework's also busier than the other two, a lot more extra shading and scratch mark lines, to the point of overdoing it at times. 

Some of that might have been deadlines, because things clearly get rushed at the end. Mieville had a big, universe-hopping arc going, with Nelson and Roxie teaming up with a crew called The Dial Bunch to chase a dangerous "Operator". Unfortunately, DC canceled the book at issue 15, and you can tell Mieville and Ponticelli were scrambling hard to cram enough in to make some sort of a coherent ending. Which they managed, at times quite well. Mieville ends up just alluding to several worlds they've visited along the way, making it seem as though they may have been at this for years. But if they had even another five issues, it could have been so much better.

There was a post-script of sorts, when DC did a "Villains Month", called Dial E (but it was an issue of Justice League, #23.3). It was one of those jam comics, where each page is by a different artist, and it's as much a mess as those usually are. But it did provide a little bit about the fate of at least a couple of the characters.