The City & the City
“I spoke to Corwi again that night—she made a joke about hoping this was a secure line—but we were unable to say anything useful to each other.Professor Nancy had sent a printout of Mahalia’s chapters to the hotel. There were two more or less finished, two somewhat sketchy. I stopped reading them after not very long, looked instead at the photocopies of her annotated textbooks. There was a vivid disparity between the sedate, somewhat dull tone of the former, and the exclamation points and scribbled interjections of the latter, Mahalia arguing with her earlier selves and with the main text. The marginalia were incomparably the more interesting, to the extent that you could make any sense of them. I put them down eventually for Bowden’s book.Between the City and the City was tendentious. You could see it. There are secrets in Besźel and in Ul Qoma, secrets everyone knows about: it was unnecessary to posit secret secrets. Still, the old stories, the mosaics and bas-reliefs, the artefacts ...the book referred to were in some cases astonishing—beautiful and startling.MoreLess
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