Paranoia, Conspiracy, and Illicit Knowledge Theme Analysis

In the authoritarian world of The City and the City, knowledge is subject to strict control. As a detective, protagonist Tyador Borlú’s job is to discover the truth in order to solve crimes, yet in the case of Mahalia Geary’s murder, this duty ends up coming into conflict with Borlú’s duty as a Besź citizen to stick to the official version of the truth. The result is that Borlú feels gripped by paranoia and conspiratorial thinking, leading others around him to doubt him and even making him doubt himself at times. However, the novel ultimately shows that paranoia and conspiratorial thinking are often signs that one is actually accessing the truth—particularly in an environment where powerful authorities control knowledge.

Over the course of the novel, Borlú realizes that conventional ways of thinking will not help him solve the case of Mahalia’s murder, and that what he originally dismissed as paranoid thinking is actually necessary to access the truth. Because he is an experienced detective, Borlú is initially confident that he will be able to solve Mahalia’s murder through his existing knowledge, sources, and assumptions. Yet this is all upended when each of these sources and assumptions turns up nothing, and it is eventually revealed that Mahalia was not even a resident of Besźel, but rather of Ul Qoma. Even this fact is illicit in the sense that solving the crime suddenly involves thinking about Ul Qoma, which counts as Breach and is thus illegal. As a result, Borlú must learn to embrace illicit, dissident, and conspiratorial sources of knowledge in order to effectively access the truth.

Borlú’s initial confidence in approaching Mahalia’s murder corresponds to the role he plays in explaining Besźel/Ul Qoma and their history to the reader. In the beginning of the novel, Borlú positions himself as an authority and dismisses the conspiracies that dissidents such as the unificationists favor. For example, when he learns that Mahalia frequented the Besź unificationists’ library in order to read about the mythical third city of Orciny, he comments dismissively: “Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing.” Yet as time goes on and it becomes more and more clear that people with knowledge about Orciny are in danger, Borlú is forced to challenge his own assumptions about the world in which he lives. His authority is undermined as it is revealed that he actually knows far less about the cities than he originally thought.

The character most closely associated with paranoia, conspiracy, and illicit knowledge is Mahalia herself, who shows the importance of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake—even if that pursuit comes at great personal risk. Unlike many other characters in the novel, Mahalia was not gathering knowledge for a particular purpose, but rather as an end in itself. This provokes the ire of a large variety of people, from Besź and Ul Qoman nationalists to unificationists. All of these different groups are united by the fact that they choose to pursue knowledge in order to advance their own causes. While causes like theirs can provide an impetus to gather information (an idea Borlú expresses when he observes of the Besź unificationists: “Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists”), this information is inherently limited by the fact that it is designed to serve a certain political purpose. Such political bias limits the pursuit of knowledge as it leads people to disregard knowledge that doesn’t suit their aims.

In contrast, Mahalia’s desire to learn the truth regardless of what that truth is proves effective: thanks to her relentless research and willingness to embrace seemingly conspiratorial ideas, she discovers the sinister reality behind the myth of Orciny. The danger of illicit knowledge is underlined by the fact that Mahalia is killed for knowing this information. Yet at the same time, the novel also shows that truth itself cannot die so easily. Mahalia’s death sets off a chain of events that in turn allows Borlú to discover the truth for himself.

Because the corporation behind the Orciny myth is never properly brought to justice, it might be tempting to interpret the end of the novel as indicating that the pursuit of illicit knowledge is not worth it: Mahalia and Yolanda end up dead, and the sinister powers that killed them remain in operation. Yet the novel also indicates that the illicit knowledge Mahalia accessed has had an impact on the world, the ultimate effect of which remains unclear. Although both Besźel and Ul Qoma rush to return to the status quo and hide the evidence of the rupture that Mahalia’s revelations caused, the novel ends with an ambiguous feeling of potential change. Indeed, Ashil himself expresses this when he observes to Borlú, “Times are changing.” This ambivalent ending confirms the idea that the genuine pursuit of knowledge cannot be done in service of a particular goal, but rather must be done for its own sake. The ultimate consequences of revealing concealed truths will always be impossible to predict or control, but pursuing the truth will inevitably alter the world in some way, and this makes it worth it.