"Nowhere Else Works Like the Cities”: Liminality in The City and the City

Abstract

China Miéville’s novel, The City and the City (2009) introduces a detective story in Besźel and its topolganger, Ul Qoma. The relationship between the two cities is a strange one: even though they occupy the same place physically, they work as two separate autonomous states. By following the main character’s investigation of a young girl’s murder, the reader also gets to inquire the true nature of the cities. The narrative was adapted to screen in 2018 (The City and the City, BBC2), and thanks to the difference between the two mediums, painted a different picture about the liminal nature of the two cities. In this paper, I am going to examine how these two platforms represent the liminal nature of Besźel and Ul Qoma, and how they depict Borlú’s liminal transgression.