Well that was certainly, um, interesting. I feel like despite the fact that I finished the novel, I'm still very unsure as to what it really meant. I get what happened on the surface, but I really hope the discussions tomorrow will unveil a little more, since I feel sort of empty about the whole thing. That being sad, I really liked the concept and the challenges it presented in trying to figure out the plot and upcoming twists.
I think my favorite part of the end was that because (spoiler alert) Orciny didn’t actually exist, it was a little more plausible/applicable to my life in a unified country. It wasn’t that some crazy, mystical, unseen group was controlling everything—it was just selfish people like the ones that exist everywhere. It’s far more interesting, to me, to read about people that are familiar to me than people that are foreign (in the sense that they’re “unseen” like a secret society would be here). The dynamics of understanding why someone more like myself than the unseen “other” would do this type of thing made the conclusion more interesting and perhaps more relevant to me.
This reminded me a lot of Dan Brown’s novels, most specifically Angels & Demons. In the same way Bowden, Buric, and the others use Orciny as a veil for their crimes in tC&tC, the criminals in A&D use the ancient Illuminati and pin their actions on a nonexistent organization. It makes for a compelling plot, I think, because not only is the reader asking him or herself, “Who is committing all these crimes and why?” but also, “Does the organization I’m possibly attributing them to even exist in the first place?” There’s a double uncertainty that adds to the suspense of a mystery novel.
That being said, my favorite part about tC&tC wasn’t the murder mystery aspect at all, but imagining life as a citizen of Beszel or Ul Qoma. There is so much nuance in this fake city that I couldn’t help constantly picturing myself there, which led to a lot of interesting questions even past the classic, “Whodunit?”
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