The city & the city
Behind the scenes of sci-thriller the city And the city…
David Morrissey in a tale of two cities.
Halfway through interviews about BBC Two’s four-part adaptation of China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City And The City, both star and screenwriter pause to reflect. Conversation with writer Tony Grisoni has touched on impossible cities, interstitial states and Dante’s Virgil when he quips, “Does this make any sense? I sound like some kind of nutty professor!” David Morrissey’s summation, meanwhile, is nicely on-point. “So,” he offers, invitingly, “it’s trippy.”
That’s one word for Miéville, the ‘New Weird’ author whose mind-warping output includes the gargantuan Bas-Lag trilogy, monster-quest novel Railsea and squid-cult brain-thriller Kraken.
In its tireless imaginative reach and bracingly dense literary invention, the British writer’s work would test any screenwriter’s adaptation skills – which might be why no one has adapted him before. Happily, Grisoni’s previous adventures in multi-layered drama/ fantasy include Red Riding, Terry Gilliam’s Tideland and Philip K. Dick series Electric Dreams: all fine practice runs for trips to Miéville’s cities.
Mounting resonant feats of altworld-building on noir-ish foundations,
The City And The City unfolds between the run-down, multi-cultural Beseź l and the slick, mono-cultural Ul Qoma, two cities which, defying logic, somehow exist in one space. Law forbids each city to interact with or ‘see’ the other; occupants learn from birth to, in Miéville’s semi-Orwellian lexicon, ‘unsee’ their opposite numbers.
But when a foreign student is found killed in Beseź l, Inspector Tyador Borlú (Morrissey) begins an investigation that unpicks his grip on law and landscape. An unsettling prospect emerges: could tales of a mythical third city be true?
To map routes through Miéville’s terrain, the show’s makers needed to set rules. Shooting between Liverpool and Manchester, director Tom Shankland (The Missing) used colourcoding schemes. Morrissey, meanwhile, dug deep to locate Borlú’s inner policeman. “I had to give myself this rule of what I could and couldn’t see, what I couldn’t look at, how that pained Borlú, or whether he’s breaking the law. I would have to drum these rules into my brain all the time.”
hidden reality
Having consulted with Miéville, Grisoni aimed to honour the author’s rigour and his audiences’ intelligence alike. Resisting science-fiction stylings, Grisoni approached his adaptation as a noir-ish play for today, citing The Sopranos and Breaking Bad as examples of stories that stretch TV’s scope from the basis of reality-rubbing worlds.
“It’s like how you didn’t see that guy in the gutter when you came to work this morning,” he says. “It’s like the double cities of Belfast or Jerusalem, or Berlin at one time. It’s like the rich
and poor divide in London – it’s all these things and more.”
To bring the story closer to home still, Grisoni helped tie it to Borlú’s perspective by adding a new character. Joining a cast that also includes Mandeep Dhillon and Danny Webb, Lara Pulver plays Katrynia, the lost wife who haunts Borlú and, for Morrissey, makes the mystery personal. “My approach to him was always emotional. He’s a man who has a past and a love of his life who is no longer around.
As he investigates the case, the parallels with his wife ring inside his brain
– and that’s what drives him forward.”
One thing Katrynia was not, says Grisoni, was an attempt to simplify the story. “My interest in giving Borlú a wife was about further complicating things. I enjoyed the complexity of having those two ideas: the man who has to ‘unsee’ this other city and ‘unsee’ the past – because it’s too painful.”
divide and conquer
Violating these rules has consequences. One of Miéville’s most thrilling inventions is ‘Breach’, the Stasi-like force whose punishment for those accused of ‘breaching’ barriers between cities gives his philosophical pitch a nail-gnawing edge. “Oh, it has thrills,” Grison promises. “No one knows what happens to you if you breach, but you disappear. The penalties are so great, they’re unspoken. And when great powers are so hidden, they take on an almost supernatural quality.”
As Morrissey summarises, “It’s about a man trying to solve a crime and solve a hole inside himself – a classic, broken-man crime drama. But it’s totally unfamiliar in its world and rules – and that’s what gives it a frisson.”
If it also gives audiences an appetite for more, so much the better. Onscreen visits to Miéville’s other leaps of imagination would be welcome. And, just as TV’s The Handmaid’s Tale will go beyond Margaret Atwood’s source novel in Season 2, perhaps a sequel could map further pathways through Miéville’s cities. “When I started, that was one of the questions brought up,” says Grisoni of follow-up potential. “My reaction was: I’m not interested. I’m just going to tell this story. But by the end of the third draft, it was clear to me I wanted to return. I would very much like to know what happens next.” Kevin Harley
THE CITY AND THE CITY STARTS ON BBC TWO LATER THIS MONTH.
‘a man’s trying to solve a crime and solve a hole inside himself’ DAVID MoRRIssEy