(Originally posted 18 June 2013 at trenchkamen.livejournal.com.)

Mieville is a world-builder extraordinaire. If you have read his Bas-Lag novels (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council, as of this writing), I need not try to sell you this. New Crobazon is a city. It is sprawling and grew up organically from various small clusters and crashes up against boundaries of other enclaves. He describes the alleys, the low-hanging power lines, gutters and landfills. This isn’t something he weaves in as an aside, to add grittiness, which one reads as a bright, parallel thread in a tapestry, but is part of the most basic fabric. There is no backstage-frontstage romanticism, and that is one of the major reasons New Crobazon feels like a cohesive whole, and, therefore, a real city, a city you encounter out behind your apartment. Despite this and its overt Industrial Revolution-era London roots, New Crobazon is utterly fantastical and original. I remember the city in far more detail than most of the characters.

UnLondon is no exception. Alternate versions of London have been done before, and some to delightful effect, but Mieville’s refracted London is of singular quality. This man’s imagination slips around possibilities so fluidly, and he can evoke the same feeling of the absurd I assume original readers of the Alice books felt, before the imagery had become iconic in of itself. The world and its components are clever. New, truly new, and clever. The mechanics of the UnGun is a good example of this. The inhabitants are as bizarre and macabre as those found in Bas-Lag. Deeba is delightful.The flavor of imagery will be familiar to many people, pseudo-Victorian, Lovecraftian, bizarre, the sort of place you imagine with a sickly copper sky. Black coats and brick warehouses and docks, all elements of dark London, are there. It is a strong environmentalist message, which is no surprise to anybody familiar with Mieville’s political stances, blunt but not preachy. Might piss off some parents who don’t want their kids indoctrinated with Socialist propaganda and tree-hugger bullshit or whatever. I will say, though, that the sociopolitics of Un Lun Dun are far more muted than in the ‘adult’ books, and this is appropriate for the length and narrative style.

That being said, “original” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in SF/fantasy, and me being the jaded old fan I am, I don’t get to use it in full honesty very often. Those in glass houses, I well know, and if and when I do publish anything this review will come back to bite me in the arse when somebody is accusing me of being derivative, but I don’t much care. Mieville’s writing is more of a kick than that of other fantastical writers. There’s a new edge to it, details; concepts aren’t just ‘turned around’, they are shot off sideways.

Zanna and Deeba are young enough to be in a school that has a playground (I’m going to assume primary/elementary school), so I don’t expect them to be particularly foul-mouthed, cynical, and worldly (the reality being most sixth graders I knew outside rural Texas could swear fluently), especially during the current era when children are treated as children and not as little adults. Well, the back copy says they are twelve, which puts them on the cusp of middle school and adolescence, both of which really fucking sucked in my experience, but they’re not quite there yet. Still teetering. It’s a fascinating age to write about. And Mieville is nothing if not a feminist writer; the two main characters are female, and they are people, full stop, not people conceived first as women and then poorly retro-fitted with some semblance of ‘spunk’, as so many writers do. It is a sad commentary on our current state that it is noteworthy when female characters are ‘fully-realized’ or ‘real’. But there it is. Books with female leads sell perfectly fine; movie and television executives seem to ignore this. Maybe they think kids who read are smarter than the average ticket-buying Joe, I have no idea.

I did notice that Zanna, the “chosen” is a blonde-haired-blue-eyed Aryan poster child, and Deeba, her ‘sidekick’, is dark-haired and dark-skinned. This becomes more integral if you’ve read the story; you know what I mean, in other words. The entire story is about underdogs doing extraordinary things, and not in a way that feels contrived. This is never explicitly stated, but if you notice it, you notice it, and if you’ve lived in this world, you know it. I am glad this subtlety remained in the final cut of the book. While descriptive, Mieville is not condescending to his readers, and truly does show, not tell, to the fullest extent that he can. This means it is the sort of book kids will come back to as they get older, and notice new things, and new realizations will hit them. I love those books. Well, the white kids might not notice it until they get older–I assume children of color notice inequalities very, very young, even if they can’t articulate them.

Having read his “adult” books, I can see how he not only had to sanitize his story, but his very basic writing style changes, drastically. It makes me wonder if he originally turned in a manuscript that, albeit already ‘clean’ knowing this was going in the YA section, was written in his signature, lucid style. And then an editor came in and said the prose was too difficult, too metaphorical and abstract, so he would need to add some adverbs, and some epithets–basically redundantly state what should have been obvious from context, such as tone-of-voice, ‘he retorted’, ‘she responded’, etc, in places where ‘said’ or nothing would service. We KNOW somebody is replying to somebody when they are… replying to somebody. It’s inherent in the dialogue. There isn’t any need to state it. It’s kind of like seeing William Gibson write like J.K. Rowling.

This is something I have noticed with ‘young adult’ books, and I find it discouraging. While the content may be rich and winsome, the writing style is always dummed down, and I am now even more convinced this is a a common editorial decision coming from higher up. This reads more like a children’s book (and there are some gems of children’s books; in no way is that a slight), but it’s too long, I suppose, and too dense, to be considered such. But I often saw the Redwall books marketed as children’s books, and those were full-length novels, and, while quite straightforward and puply, dense, so I don’t know what’s going on there. Word on the street (and by street I mean internet) is that YA novels of any considerable length (200+ pages) only started being accepted after it became evident through the later Harry Potter books that kids can and will read longer stories.

Anyway, one could argue that he is trying to write in this style to mimic and deconstruct the classic children’s down-the-rabbit-hole novel (a la C.S. Lewis). I have the post-modern fetish for deconstruction and homage (I’m of that generation that communicates primarily in pop culture references, often ones that are parodies of other pop culture references). And this would fit the theme quite well. I wonder if anybody else considered that.

Overall, highly recommended.