When is a metaphor no longer a metaphor? The question is not rhetorical.

In China Miévelle's consistently surprising, sometimes unsettling new novel, The City and the City, a
device that first appears to be a clever linguistic trick quickly turns into something much more, or maybe much less.

In fact, it acts as the crux to the entire story, which is all the more surprising, as it is something that does not — cannot — exist.

This all sounds more confusing than it really is. In the novel, Police inspector Tyador Borlu investigates a brutal murder of a young woman. Borlu is a citizen of Beszel, an imaginary eastern European city whose place names — GunterStrasz, BudapestStrasz — carry a Slavic whiff of the Cold War-era Communist bloc.

Beszel is the twin city of Ul Qoma, whose place names carry suggestions of a more exotic locale, perhaps Turkey, perhaps somewhere further south and east.

As Borlu investigates further into the young woman's death, it becomes apparent that there is a connection between the victim and the city of Ul Qoma. And herein lies the problem.

Ul Qoma and Beszel are 'twin cities' in more ways than one. They are not simply adjacent geographically; they are in exactly the same place geographically.

The book's clever term for this is toppelganger, suggesting twinned topographies that share the same space, but in such a way that it is possible to be in either Beszel or Ul Qoma. A street in Beszel might have run-down tenements, for example; that same street in Ul Qoma might sport glittering high rises.

They are two different places, and it is only possible to be in one or the other of them; but in terms of longitude and latitude they are the same street.

There are areas where the two cities overlap, or the barrier separating them is weak enough to look through or walk through. These areas, called crosshatchings, allow the citizens of one city to glimpse the citizens of the other, although a lifetime of training prevents them from doing so. Some crosshatched streets even share traffic from the two cities, although drivers have to 'unsee' traffic from the other side.

Occasionally, someone passes from one city to the other, either intentionally or not; this crime is called breach, and it is among the most serious offenses possible in either city. When Borlu's murder investigation leads him to conclude that breach as well as murder has been committed, he begins to suspect that he has gotten involved in a situation with far-reaching implications. He is right.

On the surface, then, this is a hard boiled crime drama, but with an element of fantasy or science fiction or magical realism — take your choice — that is central to the narrative, and elevates it over much genre fiction.

The writing itself, crisp and snappy, moves the first-person narrative along with confidence, and the reader is rarely confused in this most bewildering of locations.

But what are we to make of these two cities that fear to look at each other? Are they representative of differing cultures, of east and west? Of past and future? Reality and hope? Are they two alternate paths that a society might choose to take?

The brilliance of this book is that is suggests all of these possibilities, and others, while never forcing the issue. Ultimately, there is a murder mystery that needs to be solved. Happily for Beszel's citizens and this novel's readers, Borlu is just the man for the job.

The City and the City
By China Mieville
Ballentine Books,
ISBN 978-0-345-49752-9
312pp. $15