Un Lun Dun
by China Mieville
In Un Lun Dun China Mieville has created the story of an alternative London, accessible only with difficulty from the familiar one but living in a kind of symbiotic relationship with it. UnLondon is a surreal place, where people may travel on wheels instead of legs, or have a birdcage instead of a head. It is a place where carnivorous giraffes wander the streets (I wish Mieville had done more with these), where a whole section of the city is populated only by ghosts, and where buildings boast names such as Webminster Abbey, with inhabitants to match.
Like Ariosto?'s moon, UnLondon is also the place where lost things and obsolete technology from our own world end up: a major character in this book is the conductor of a Routemaster double-decker bus, for example. There are many such 'abcities' scattered across the world, including Parisn't, Lost Angeles, No York and Sans Francisco.
This is a rather heterogeneous conception, perhaps overly so and for about the first eighty pages I was afraid that this would turn out to be a rather self-indulgent book. Matters weren't helped by the fact that (for what turns out to be a good reason) the first section is also a kind of deliberate false start, which offers us a strangely unengaging heroine. But it's worth persevering, because the 450 pages that follow offer an exciting and entertaining tour of Mieville's imagination, which is never less than inventive and often splendidly original.
Having said that, Mieville's originality is very firmly grounded in existing literary traditions. Un Lun Dun is a book that acknowledges its debts openly (in an afterword) and tacitly through its many allusions to Lewis Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Joan Aiken and others. Some of the references are likely to be missed by the intended audience (my favourite is the library book entitled 'Oh, All Right Then': Bartleby Returns - riffing on Mieville's near namesake Melville), but such in-jokes are not obtrusive, and the book?'s playfulness is evident and open to all.
Mieville's larger literary concern is to interrogate the cliches of fantasy writing. UnLondon is under threat, from the Smog that used to hang over London before the introduction of the Clean Air Act. The Smog, now conscious and banished to UnLondon, threatens to consume both the abcity and eventually, it is suggested, will make its way back to destroy its birthplace too. To counter this threat, Mieville assembles many of the standard parphernalia of the fantasy quest: a Chosen One, an infallible prophecy, and a series of hard-to-find plot tokens that need collecting in order to defeat the enemy (?a featherkey, a squid-beak clipper, a cup of bone tea, teeth-dice, an iron snail).
He then happily subverts them. The Chosen One is rendered hors de combat early in the book, meaning that the saviour of UnLondon has to be an unchosen one, or rather the Chosen One's friend and sidekick, Deeba. The prophecy will turn out to be mistaken in other ways, too, and the collecting of plot tokens impractical in the time available. As a dig at lazy plot construction this is funny and effective, but the wider didactic intent is also plain: Deeba must learn to trust her own intelligence and the reality she finds around her, and not to succumb to a kind of genre-fantasy false consciousness.
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