Greatpilgrim's Full Review: China Mieville - Un Lun Dun
Do you think a story can be both fast-paced and boring? You only have to check out “new weird” fantasy author China Mieville’s first novel for children, Un Lun Dun, to see proof of this paradox in action.
He starts promisingly enough with an Alice-in-Wonderland-like concept of a parallel city to London, Un Lun Dun, a place where everything is UnLondoned and nothing is what it seems. 12-year-old best friends Zanna and Deeba fall into this weird world of lost and mixed up objects and creatures, where “the book” (a prophecy-like device) decides that Zanna is the long-awaited Shwazzy, come to deliver them from the Smog that threatens to take over both Londons. The book got it wrong. When Zanna gets knocked out early on, Deeba has to rise above her role as “funny sidekick” and lead the quest to find the UnGun that can annihilate the Smog and its minions.
I was willing to accept that this would be a weird and wacky ride through a bizarre and almost morbid fantasy landscape, much like Clive Barker’s Abarat. But I expected much better things from China Mieville’s storytelling. This book, quite frankly, is a mess. It’s not so much a developing story as it is an unending sequence of spasmodic flashing images, told with choppy scenes that lack connection and flow. I kept waiting for a cohesive plot to emerge, and it never did.
Instead, Un Lun Dun goes on for far too long, taking more than 400 pages to tell its minimal story. Did Mieville think that the Power of Rowling has inured children – adults, too, I suppose – to long rambling adventures? Sure, we can read 400+ page novels…when they’re interesting. This one confuses a rapid tempo for excitement and artistry, and colorful grotesque inventions for a strong and engaging story. The childish elements of the story (really, 200 pages searching for the UnGun?) weren’t as detracting as the lack of a reason to *care* about what’s happening or the ability to follow the randomness in a unfolding and climactic way. Basically, Mieville came up with a cool idea that he was unable to support in a full-length novel.
He could have made us care with strong empathetic characterizations…no such luck in the messed-up world of Un Lun Dun. It *was* a great idea to play with our expectations and the idea of a Chosen One prophecy that turns out all wrong. In actuality, though, the characters feel cartoonish and shallow, deprived of humanizing development or really any screen time besides racing from one crazy scene to the next.
This mood seems to be what Un Lun Dun is going for – unpredictability, chaos, and instability. In that sense it succeeds in creating an eerie and unsettling parallel dimension, yet his world-building (for all its inventiveness) is haphazard and confusing. There are only so many people-with-things-like-birdcages-or-pincushions-for-heads that you can take before the concept gets old. And really, any kid with the perseverance to wade through this interminable episodic nightmare is probably past the stage of being fascinated by creepy monsters or anthropomorphized umbrellas.
I get the feeling China Mieville is an author you either love or hate. I’m not going to judge his writing abilities by his first stab at a younger genre, but I’m not impressed either by the way he assumes that kids just want non-stop action with no true storytelling. His essential style is fine – vivid and edgy in fact – and with proper execution of the other literary aspects I could imagine him being quite an impressive writer of surreal fiction. And he has some original and subversive ideas about how fantasy should play out. It just didn’t come together here. At. All.
~Bottom line~
After checking Un Lun Dun out from the library, I was very excited to read it thanks to lavish praise of Mieville’s works and one list that even claimed this book was nearly the best fantasy of 2007. I was not only disappointed by the disjointed narrative and unsophisticated plot but thought it was one of the WORST fantasies of 2007, for adults or kids. I can’t imagine many young readers who’d have the patience to sit through an overlong story about characters they don’t care about. I myself had to force myself not just to finish the story but keep reading period...this was about 30 pages in! Confusion or bizarre elements in themselves are not bad, but in combination with barely-there character development and a story that has little direction, it left me fighting to even stick with it for more than a page or two at a time.
This would have made a much better graphic novel, as it relies heavily on the shock value of strange creatures and pictorial action, or maybe a recorded version would help the random scenery come alive with more emotional significance. It would even make a great movie or animation (Miyakazi, anyone?), as long as the characters were given more depth. But a children’s novel…no way.
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