The City & the City Themes

The City and the City is set in two city-states—Besźel and Ul Qoma—that occupy a single geographic space. The two cities are doubles, each with its own police force, university, fashion, language, and cuisine, although acknowledging these doubles is usually a serious crime, as this involves disrespecting the border that separates the cities. Simply acknowledging the other city, a crime known as breach, is the most serious offense that a citizen of Besźel or…

The City and the City explores people’s sensory perception of the world, mostly focusing on a single sense: sight. Through depicting a world in which people’s perception is strictly policed, the novel shows that perception of the world depends as much on active seeing as it does on selective unseeing. Not only that, but what a person sees and doesn’t see is shown to be shaped by their culture, environment, and politics. Furthermore, in…

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…

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…