The city the city Essay

Submitted By Sean-Niu
Words: 542
Pages: 3

Slowly panning through the streets, a camera follows the inspector silently capturing both everything within sight and also those far beyond. The rust on the barbed wire and the dust on the ground reflects nothing but a heavy shade of grey. And then, the wind starts to blow, so sluggish that it only thickens the grey even more by blowing the dust in to the gloomy air. A glare of orange silently light up the streets within its range, so still that it seems to hold itself from penetrating the sullenness. The people wanders around the orange glare apathetically, like ghouls, not seeing or ‘unseeing’ the world under the orange light. The buildings and citizens and train tracks and very rubbish in the streets seems crosshatched, interleaved.
Suddenly, the still image is broken by a horn. It is a train. The inspector turns his head to the sound. He sees the train appearing from the core of that orange glare ­­­ and this is the scene the first part of the novel renders in my head. The city and the city depict a unique city in the world, Besz. It is a city that occupies the same physical space as another city — a more prosperous city, with different architecture, different colors, different language, different laws: Ul Qoma. Citizens are trained from earliest childhood to unsee the other city — not to notice its inhabitants, its traffic accidents, its cooking smells. Crossing borders means Breach. And Breach is punishable by death. The novel follows inspector Borlu’s perspective and tracks down a murder of a woman, who was thought to be a victim of the Breach. However, the inspector later discovers that she was studying a third city, a fairy­tale city, that perhaps exists in the interstices of Besz and Ul
Qoma, and rules the other two: Orciny. The novel has an interesting premise which renders a world where different world coexists. It is like a quantum coherence situation which is described in schrodinger’s cat theory, in which there are two universes exist at the same time until the box is opened and the two universities collapsed into one. That is why in the novel you are