Les Bonnes Fees

Un Lun Dun - Written and Illustrated by China Mieville

Un Lun Dun – Written and Illustrated by China Mieville

• Un Lun Dun is the tale of two twelve year old girls, Zanna and Deeba in the strange, backwards, world of UnLondon.
• UnLondon is a twisted version of London, filled with a combination of the unsettlingly almost-familiar and the blatantly fantastic.
• Zanna and Deeba have a great evil to stop and a prophecy to fulfill – if it only it was that easy.
• One of the wonderful few YA novels that can entertain adult readers too.

(More details and mild spoilerage below)

As a preteen reading Lord of the Rings for the first time,  I probably didn’t notice how pivotal Sam was. Without the valiant sidekick, all would have been lost. This aspect became clearer on later rereading and especially as I watched the movie versions. Sam is, in many ways, the hero of the story – he carries the ring (well, he carries Frodo who’s holding the ring) into Mordor without being tempted by its power, he follows Frodo into great danger, not because he needs to, but because he chooses to. The obvious question then is, what would have happened if Frodo had fallen early in the story – perhaps at Weathertop? Would Sam have picked up the ring and taken his place? I’d like to think so: Merrie and Pippin were not adult enough at that point in the story to take on such a responsibility, while Strider/Aragorn probably knew that his internal darkness and human weaknesses would have left him corrupted by the ring.

China Mieville asks this sort of question in Un Lun Dun. What do you do when the obvious hero, the chosen one of which the prophesies speak, falls?

Un Lun Dun is of that strange class of young adult novels that manages to remain interesting even when the reader is an almost-thirty-grad-student-type. It neither talks down to the younger readers, nor is filled with themes that are inappropriate for the sort of preteens who would attempt to read a book of this size (around 470 pages).

UnLondon is a warped mirror image of the real London – the river Smeath cuts a straight path through the city, turning the UnLondon-I, passing under the Battle-Sea and the Towering Bridges. UnLondon contains strange creatures – some wholly fantastic, like the smoglodytes and smombies that serve the Smog and some all the creepier for their almost-familiarity, like the unbrellas and the giraffes (giraffes in our world do not show their true, bloodthirsty, sides) – and amazing adventures.

Zanna is the Shwazzy – the chosen one – who will, according to the book and the propheseers, save UnLondon from the malevolent Smog. As it is written, the Shwazzy and her sidekick/best friend Deeba are pulled into UnLondon. As it is written, they make their way to the propheseers to learn of the destiny that guides them. As it is written, the propheseers are attacked – the first battle, one where the Swazzy is meant to triumph. At this point, what is written and what happens starts to diverge.

Of course, this is good for us – a bunch of kids and hangers-on fulfilling a prophecy would just be another standard kids’ story.  Instead, we get a tense, dramatic tale with moments wonderful wit (and a few moments that made me groan – some of the jokes are aimed more at the “intended” audience) as we are taken on a roller coaster of betrayal, lies, heroic sacrifice and unexpected turns.

Divided into many short chapters, this book reads much faster than it looks on the shelf, and the author’s sketches of the fantastic vistas and strange creatures evoke the creepy almost-familiar or the outright bizarre aspects of his world. Mieville also injects a well written dose of slightly subversive politics into his world, reminding readers not to take everything they’re told at face value and criticizing the easy abuse of the term “terrorist” and security powers we see these days.