Come Un Dun

I read only about 100 pages of China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun before I had to take it back to the library to fulfill someone else’s request. (All the more reason to put off reading new books for a year or three, I say.)

I was most impressed by Miéville’s combination of verbal and visual imagination. Often authors seem to have one or the other. AUTHOR%20Alan Snow, for instance, has striking character images but flat prose. Cliff McNish creates terrific descriptions of moods and relationships, but I’m not always sure what things look like. Miéville, who also illustrated his own novel rather well, takes punnish inspiration from both verbal and visual cues. Inventive details pop out of every page, practically every paragraph.

I have trouble understanding Miéville’s approach to section breaks within a chapter. Most authors use those to elide from one scene to another, signaling the passage of space or time. But Miéville often plops section breaks within scenes, with the action and conversation taking up just an instant after it left off. They seem more like especially emphatic punctuation (“Think about that now!”) than like storytelling conveniences.

Details and blank lines aside, the story in Un Lun Dun is conventional--so far. Two young people, wisecracking Zanna and loyal best friend Deepa, are sucked into a strange world. It’s like London, but--get this!--everything is different.

Well, not everything. It’s not as if in this universe water contracts when frozen, thus becoming denser and ending up on the bottom of the ocean where it's never thawed, giving water-based life no chance to form on the planet. It’s not as if the weak and strong nuclear forces don’t apply, fundamentally changing the nature of matter. No, things in UnLondon are different in a picturesque, occasionally disturbing but usually entertaining way, with dangerous giraffes and affectionate milk cartons and double-decker buses sprouting wings and legs.

The people of that society have all sorts of rules and customs and expectations by which they live. But--wouldn’t you know?--our heroes don’t know what those rules are! Laughs galore ensue. And here’s the kicker: everyone in UnLondon treats Zanna and Deepa as special, as Chosen visitors whose Coming has been Prophesized because it is Very Important to the Future of Both Worlds.

And did I mention the huge, malevolent, disembodied force of evil, here called the Smog? You were already expecting one of those, I bet.

I understand from reviews of Un Lun Dun that Miéville’s book ends up deconstructing those modern fantasy clichés. Which could be a lot of fun, especially with his imagination and his prose, so I look forward to snatching the book away from some other library patron and finishing it. But that shift hasn’t happened yet.

China, Tall Tales, and a Sense of Hope

So the night after I brought home Un Lun Dun from the library, Roger Sutton's post directed me to author China Miéville's recent essay in the Guardian:

There's nothing like the constant sage cliché that polemical politics has no place in fiction to make a person hanker for a bit of agit-prop. The cruder the better. Of course a lot of agitproppy art is crap, true, but then so's a lot of everything.

Irritated by the insipid and disingenuous separation of politics and art? Be reassured that it's never too early to corrupt young minds with tendentious reasoning smuggled into narrative. Fortunately, there's no shortage of political discussion in children's and YA fiction, sometimes camouflaged, often not.

In fact, I'll go further and note that children's and young-adult fiction is often judged by the values it imparts, far more often than serious adult literature. And what are politics if not values writ large?

Miéville went on:

The worst propaganda works aren't those (relatively few) books that actually do what the critics of political fiction claim it does (foreclose discussion and replace it with hectoring): they're those books which pretend -- perhaps to their authors too -- that they are above and unsullied by political concerns. What better way to naturalise all sorts of unexamined prejudices?

Unexamined prejudices like, say, the need to leave readers with a sense of hope. Which brings me to Mitali Perkins’s interview with our friend Karen Day, whose Tall Tales has just come out. Speaking of her editor, Wendy Lamb, Karen said:

She thought I left the family too vulnerable and wanted to see a happier outcome. She said she’d look at the novel again if I made these changes, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to be realistic. I couldn’t see how to change it and stay true to my realistic conception of the novel. I fretted over this for months until finally I found a solution that satisfied me but also, I hoped, would satisfy Wendy.

As I've said before, there's nothing wrong with giving young readers a sense of hope. Tall Tales is a hard-hitting picture of a troubled family, so it's natural to want better for those kids. But it's worth examining whether our culture has a prejudice about how children's books must end. Does our model of the modern "problem novel" function like the books Miéville discusses, which claim not to be political yet reflect and reinforce unexamined political beliefs?