Truly a fascinating and challenging book, which pokes and prods at the concept of borders and liminality like nothing else. What is the importance of borders? How and why do we socially construct imaginary borders in our own lives? Are borders the key to law and order, or is law and order itself just as arbitrary as the borders it relies on? These are just a handful of the profound questions that are seep through the pages of this book.

And yet for all the obsession over borders, the world of Beszel and Ul Qoma is not nearly as tightly drawn as might be imagined. The fundamental rules of life in this dystopian universe seem to be always in question - both as a matter of simple confusion (what are the rules of breach? no one seems to be quite sure) and as a matter of active negotiation (what should be the rules of breach? no one seems to agree.) At the beginning of the story, Inspector Borlú’s explication seems to be definite and iron-clad; but as we progress through what appears to be an otherwise routine crime drama, we learn that these rules are constantly in flux.

Borders and liminality are a central obsession of this novel. While it may be a bit of a stretch, I think what is hiding just below the surface is an absorbing exploration of the Hegelian dialectic. The book is presented in the classic tripartite form: thesis (Beszel); antithesis (Ul Qoma); synthesis (Breach). With that reading, the implication is that Breach is somehow the best of Beszel and Ul Qoma together, though I think it’s pretty clear that Miéville doesn’t think so. What I think instead is that this book poses the question “suppose we applied the dialectic to the concept of city states; what would that look like?” and then answers it. The answer is a bit unsatisfying - in the sense that Breach, as it turns out, is not the omniscient, omnipotent force that everyone imagines it to be, but essentially a bureaucracy that is afraid of its own shadow. But I think that’s perhaps the point: that real-world synthesis of this kind is not nearly so satisfying as we’d like. And that perhaps we would all be better off without the socially constructed barriers that set up this odd sort of society.

While I found this book to be fascinating and thoroughly interesting on many levels, I was quite disappointed to finally meet Breach when I did. I very much hoped that Breach would turn out to be a figment of our own imagination, a social construction that’s intangible and entirely at the mercy of a sort of collective decision that can be revoked at any time. Alas. On the other hand, I very much enjoyed the way Orciny flickered on to the scene, just for a minute, in the way that it did.