2021/026: The City We Became -- N K Jemisin

I am Manhattan, he thinks again, this time in a slow upwelling of despair. Every murderer. Every slave broker. Every slumlord who shut off the heat and froze children to death. Every stockbroker who got rich off war and suffering. It’s only the truth. He doesn’t have to like it, though. [p. 81]

Cities of a certain size, a certain density, evolve into conscious entities. In The City We Became it's already happened to London, Paris, Sao Paolo, Hong Kong, almost to New Orleans -- and now it's time for New York to awaken. But there is an Enemy that preys on newborn cities, and it defeats the avatar of New York, who is young, queer, black and male. Time for the five boroughs, personified, to find one another and work together to preserve their city. Manny has forgotten his life before becoming the avatar of Manhattan, though he has a notion that he used to be hard-edged and ruthless. Bronca, an elderly Native American woman who works at an arts foundation, is the Bronx; Brooklyn, named for her borough, used to be a rap artist but is now a city councillor; Padmini Prakash, an immigrant maths student, stands for Queens; and Aislyn, daughter of an Irish-American cop, represents Staten Island. As the only white person of the five, she may also represent other things: racism, xenophobia, the worst of Trump's America. (Though I don't believe this novel concerns itself with anything as mundane as Presidents.)

Against them is the Enemy, who presents as a Woman in White and who claims that every city which achieves sentience destroys multiple universes. Is this true? Hard to say. The Woman in White -- whose name, revealed late on, will resonate with genre fans -- is horribly persuasive, and her power runs through New York like a fungus, or a virus, Lovecraftian tentacles infecting people and buildings, vehicles and roads, alike. It helps to be familiar with New York topography: unlike fantasy novels set in secondary worlds, The City We Became doesn't have a map at the front! Luckily, the Internet provided me with maps galore. (I'm still not sure how to pronounce the 'Americanised' version of the name Aislyn, though.)

This is a novel which embraces the multi-cultural diversity of New York. It's not as simplistic as 'white bad, black good', though sometimes I felt the narrative was gleefully mocking white fragility. There's certainly a sense that kindness and cooperation beat cruelty and exploitation, and Jemisin shows us a real feeling of community, attuned to the spirit of each borough. The crowded layered history of New York is very much on display, and the ways in which the Enemy attacks the city are firmly rooted in our reality.

This feels like a love letter to New York (Jemisin says something of the sort in her afterword: "I have hated this city. I have loved this city. I will fight for this city until it won’t have me anymore. This is my homage to the city. Hope I got it right.") Despite not knowing NYC well, I have more appreciation of it after reading The City We Became. I'm also aching, a bit, for the hinted tragedy of London's becoming ... and I'm very interested to see where this trilogy goes -- geographically and metaphorically -- next.