Book review: China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun

China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun is classic”New Weird” writing. At nearly every page there’s a new bizarre image or discombobulation that keeps your mind struggling to keep up with the text.

This is not the first time when reading Mieville that I’ve found myself thinking things along the lines of “Hmmm… a man with a bird cage for a head… what?”

It’s what makes the New Weird so refreshing. While some fantasy books are essentially just genre fiction that are designed to fulfill expectations rather than challenge them, the New Weird seeks to make fantasy just that – fantastic, unexpected, and often deeply disturbing.

However, as a book for younger readers, Un Lun Dun has a more innocent feel to it than many of Mieville’s other works without losing the manic dream quality that is so central to his style.

The book is set in two London’s. The one we know and love and another distorted, magical place where the rubbish has life and your Oyster gets you on to the buses that fly. This other London, the Un Lun Dun, is threatened by an ever growing smoke that feeds off the industry of our London that has, through shady government deals, been pumped into their city from ours.

However, unlike the air pollution here, over there the smoke has desires, has emotions and most importantly, it has a plan.

The writing chops along at a neat pace although I often found myself torn over the frequent punning. It’s a good tradition going back to Alice in Wonderland and beyond where things take on the literal meanings of their names, which in turns amused or slightly grated.

However, the one aspect of the book that did annoy me at the start of the book was brilliantly turned on its head, for which Un Lun Dun deserves all kinds of medals and awards. Let’s just say it revolves around the hackneyed and ubiquitous idea of a “chosen one”, which gets delightfully subverted. For that alone the book’s worth reading, but add on the prose and the deliciously inverted London it’s got to be a recommended read.

China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun