There is a moment in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending when Marshall, an apparently dimwitted student, is asked by his history teacher, “How would you describe Henry the Eighth’s reign?” Marshall, Barnes writes, “searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response. And it is true that perspective can provide a dulling comfort. If the traditional life cycle of commentary holds, the next stage will urge a long view of history. “2022 Is the Year America Falls Off a Cliff” ( Globe and Mail ). “America Is Falling Apart at the Seams” ( The New York Times). The moment-my zeitgeist companion-was one of deepening and well-founded worry over the cohesion of American society. When I reread the book a few weeks ago, the fun was gone. The novel was always a parable, but it could be enjoyed simply as a clever, at times mind-bending fantasy, and as a fantasy it earned many awards. I first read The City & the City during the time of Obama. Part of the thrill was realizing that she knew me and understood I would like it. My mother took me to see Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when it opened in New York in the late 1960s-her idea. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man might as well be scripture if you’re 18. John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud is a knife to the heart of any parent. When you engage with a book, personal circumstance is always your companion. The names of the overlapping cities are Besźel and Ul Qoma.
A crime needs to be solved in a society where two different cities-two separate polities, with separate populations, customs, alphabets, religions, and outlooks-coexist within the same small patch of geography. It is a police procedural novel with a background environment that recalls Philip K.
And then I came across a book that made me stop and reread: The City & the City(2009), by the British writer China Miéville. I lack his wisdom and maturity, and rather than editing as I sorted, I instead paused to thumb through and scan. He was no longer collecting he was deaccessioning. My friend was not yet of a certain age, but he had, he confessed, crossed a line: He had made a transition from the curating stage of life to the editing stage. A few weeks ago, a long-ago conversation with a friend came to mind as I tried to bring some order to my bookshelves.
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