‘The Sentence’ review: Murder and morality meet sci-fi
Gautam Bhatia's The Sentence is a murder mystery that wears its erudition and examination of justice lightly
In speculative fiction writer China Mieville’s novel The City and The City (2009), a police inspector in the fictional East European city-state of Besźel investigates the murder of a student involved in political turmoil between his nation and its "twin city", Ul Qoma—two separate social, cultural and political entities that exist parallelly, often occupying the same geographical space, but divided by harsh, unbreachable laws that ask residents of both cities to ‘unsee’ the other. It is a fantastical, heartbreaking novel that examines the idea of how people who occupy the same physical space may often experience it in spectacularly different ways, to the extent that they seem to exist in parallel universes.
The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia—lawyer, constitutional law expert and the author of the science-fiction duology The Wall and The Horizon, both set in a walled city-state bound by rigid rules—is, at first glance, about a world similar to Mieville’s. Here, too, there are two city-states that once made up the great city of Peruma before it was partitioned into two distinct political entities—the Council and the Commune—who struck a deal to co-exist in a sort of limbo for 100 years before deciding their individual and collective futures. Here, too, is a murder, which took place 100 years ago, at the time the cities were divided, and must be investigated.
There may be other echoes of Mieville’s novel here, but The Sentence feels painfully urgent in a way that The City and The City doesn’t. It also feels like an ironic, even hopeful, look at how humanity can create—and someday resolve—differences that arise out of shared but separate spaces, cultures, and ideologies: India, Pakistan, Kashmir, Red America, Blue America, Israel, Palestine…
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“Our ancestors were wise. They knew that if they tried to solve everything, they would solve nothing. So they agreed to postpone their gravest disagreements to another day," says the head of the Council at the beginning of The Sentence, at the cusp of events that will decide the cities’ fates. “They trusted their descendants to accomplish, in a quieter time, what their generation could not." The author almost hints: here’s a blueprint for humanity, can you make it work?
The Sentence is a fascinating, complex work; a novel about the nature of politics and power itself rather than their more obvious manifestations of utopia and dystopia, that binary so beloved of speculative fiction. At the centre of it is Nila, a member of the Confederation of Guardians, an apolitical, non-partisan body set up by both cities at the time of their division, tasked with resolving disputes without taking sides, whose edicts are binding on both the populations. Nila is hoping to make it to the tribunal that will decide a new arrangement—reset the clock and start from the point of partition as if it had never happened, or forge a fresh path—but to her disappointment, she is not chosen.
As it turns out, Nila may have a yet larger role to play. She is approached by a member of the public to reopen the investigation into a murder that set the ball rolling towards the current point in Peruma’s history; a murder for which a young man, Jagat, was convicted and sentenced, not to death, because capital punishment has been abolished, but to cryogenic preservation for a century.
The idea is to leave space for doubt and re-examination; to not inflict state-sanctioned violence. Nila has to go back in time (not literally; this is not that kind of novel) to unravel the case and prove Jagat’s innocence or guilt beyond any doubt. The events unfold over seven days—the two cases, one being judged by the tribunal of guardians, and the seemingly smaller, more personal case being investigated by Nila, nestled within each other as they hurtle towards a point of crisis.
There are several science fiction novels seemingly preoccupied with solving a murder mystery—Malka Older’s The Mimicking of Known Successes (2023) as well as Richard Morgan’s classic Altered Carbon (2002), a mind-bending novel about humans practically achieving immortality by transferring their consciousness to new bodies. Then there’s James SA Corey’s sprawling, multi-novel space opera Expanse (2011-22) that begins with a murder investigation. The Sentence would fit right into this micro-genre-within-a-genre, and the book has sly easter eggs throughout that seem to nudge the somewhat astute reader towards making these delicious connections.
A murder mystery is, after all, an extremely convenient, delectable device to hang any novel on. Its very existence provides a structure and a clear moral core to any work that wants to dig deeper into human frailty and its consequences as, The Sentence does, and doesn’t want to take itself too seriously. Surprisingly for all the questions it raises about politics, justice, the law and the morality of statecraft—a character at the beginning talks about ‘moral luck’, a philosophical concept about morally right decisions still ending up with a harmful outcome—this is an immensely fun book to read.
This is why: The scene above takes place at an ‘Urumi’ contest (a fencing-like game taken up as high art in the world of the novel) and the craft of fencing is clearly a metaphor for the jousting and parries of politics in the novel — but it is also a clever way to foreshadow the events that will take place later in the novel; the moral conclusion that the fast-paced plot is briskly moving to reach. A quick Google search tells me that the author is an enthusiastic fencer himself, and if this is a clever way to make fencing cool, he’s got it.
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