China Miéville, Un Lun Dun (part 1)

Four shares this week!

Three very different fantasies in classic styles, plus some space opera. Check ‘em out!

Many years ago, I read a pretty terrible novel, a scifi-fantasy thing set in an alternative New Orleans, centering around the police. It included some heroic police brutality, a few embarrassingly-badly-written graphic sex scenes, and loads of unnecessary vampires. Point is, I became convinced that the bad novel I’d read was China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.

Fortunately, a friend insisted that I actually read Perdido Street Station and convinced me that I’d misremembered. After a jarring period of instability and confusion, I came to love that book (which wasn’t the New Orleans thing, in case you didn’t realize). Then I read a lot more of Miéville, and loved them all almost without exception.

Now I read somewhere that Miéville came up with a list of genres and decided to write one of each, in his own peculiar way. Reading that, and thinking about the various novels I’d read, I realized something about him: he’s not just writing genre novels in his own way, but consciously and deliberately standing each genre on its head, effectively rewriting the genre at the same time as he contributes to it. And for me, writing the Swords In Darkness books, this has been amazingly influential as an idea. I don’t pretend to be anywhere near as successful as Miéville at it, but the project of rewriting genres that have become a little tired and clapped-out seems to me one of the most exciting ideas in speculative fiction for a long time.

So let’s talk about Un Lun Dun. This is straight-up YA fantasy, with all the trimmings. As you’d expect from the master of the New Weird, the book is exceedingly odd, full of whimsy and weirdness everywhere. But it’s actually a great deal stranger than it seems—which is the point of this (multi-part) column.

YA fantasy these days is dominated by a considerable number of tropes that have all too often drifted into being clichés. The enormous commercial success of J.K. Rowling and Rick Riordan, among others, is probably the main driver of this ever-increasing failure of imagination. Authors want to write what will catch on, so they emulate successes, and publishers (like Hollywood producers) are at base cowards who just want to publish the same damn thing over and over again under different covers. So there’s a huge number of what amount to re-skins of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and so on and on.

The most obvious trope here is the Parallel Magical World. We poor normals (Muggles, mortals) don’t perceive the much more interesting world of strangeness hiding just around the next corner, through that funny doorway, along that railway platform. Only special people know about it, and they live lives of rich adventure and meaning which aren’t available to the ordinary. In that Parallel Magical World, colors are brighter, threats are bigger and yet less likely simply to kill anybody, and the whole sense of existential angst—that nothing you do matters and you can’t change anything anyway—is eliminated. There’s a lot of nostalgic reinvention in this, propped up by a constant flow of sly jokes about what’s silly or stupid about the normal world and how it all makes proper sense if you know the true story.

There’s nothing wrong with this inherently, and it’s generated good books as well as bad ones. But it is a little tired. It’s particularly popular in YA, not only because of Rowling and Riordan and so on, but also because it appeals to young readers. There’s an innocent wonder about the Parallel Magical World, after all, and because almost without exception the protagonist is new to the world, all its smallest details can be explained and explored and reveled in.

Now along with the Parallel Magical World come a number of closely-intertwined tropes. The protagonist is the Chosen One, there’s a secret war in the Parallel and the protagonist is going to win it, there are a set of prophecies to tell the good guys what they’re supposed to do, and there’s a cast of colorful weirdos who help or hinder but ultimately don’t have much personality or impact. The Parallel Magical World is dense with whimsical alternative forms of people, places, and objects from the mundane world, spun out for humor and wonder and thrills. And in the end, the protagonist will make a choice: go back to the ordinary world (and probably not remember the Parallel one at all), or stay in the weird forever.

So this is where China Miéville comes in with Un Lun Dun. He writes exactly this novel, with more weirdness and whimsy and humor than you could shake a stick at, and more colorful characters and more prophecy and more more more… and at the same time he takes the whole pile of tropes and jumps on them with spiked boots.

If you haven’t read Un Lun Dun yet, you may want to stop reading this now, because I can’t go on without spoilers. Up to you, but from here on, definitely SPOILER ALERT. Since I’ve already reached about 1000 words (my rough cut-off for a blog post), I’ll stop here for the week and let you catch up with your reading. You’re in luck: Un Lun Dun is wonderful, in every sense. And starting next week, I’ll dig into why I admire the work so much.

As always, thanks for reading.

ReviewC. Ian LehrerSeptember 30, 2020China Miéville, reviews & criticism, YAComment