China Miéville, Un Lun Dun (part 3)

Shares this week: The Dawn of Unions, by J.P. Corwyn, a page-turning fantasy adventure; and also The Magic Land, from The Blacksword, a short YA fantasy, apropros of this ongoing series of entries.

Speaking of which…

Continuing with discussion of China Miéville’s masterful punk YA fantasy Un Lun Dun. This time, let’s get analytical and try to figure out how it works.

A couple of years ago, when my son was in sixth grade, he got assigned to write an essay on a YA fantasy novel. There were a few restrictions, the main one being that it had to be stand-alone, not part of a series. He’d read about half of Un Lun Dun when this assignment was handed down, so he chose it. Teacher said yes, no problem—major published novel, YA fantasy stand-alone, check. So my son does all the pre-writing exercises: protagonist(s), conflict, arc, villains, whatever. And then comes the main chunk of the assignment itself, which amounts to an examination of how the more common tropes play out in the story (not that the teacher put it in those terms, of course).

Uh oh.

In effect, he’d chosen a novel that is actively undermining this very assignment. You can’t set up the little boxes and sections the way they’re laid out in the assignment, because each one is torn apart from within.

Now if my son had been extremely good at writing English-class essays, and had a lot of fascination with this particular assignment, it could’ve been done well. But it’s all or nothing: you either turn the assignment against itself, or it’s going to look like you can’t read (or can’t write, or both). He sort of managed, but it wasn’t great, and unfortunately the teacher was so overburdened with huge numbers of students that she didn’t have time to sit down and try to figure out why this wasn’t working.

I’m not going to write that essay myself, but I did end up sketching some notions of how it could’ve gone.

First principle: Un Lun Dun is a punk YA fantasy. It’s an assault on the norms and standards of the genre. It does this not only implicitly, by taking the tropes and turning them in new directions, but also explicitly, making the clichés into literal points of discussion and argument among the characters. One could talk about this as meta-fiction.

Second principle: Un Lun Dun does not dislike, disrespect, or sneer at YA fantasy. There are many occasions at which the meta-fictional elements of the novel could comment overtly on the genre tropes in other novels. (“It’s like in Harry Potter, innit?” “Nah, that’s a lot of bollocks.”) But apart from a tangential and anodyne note about searching for ways from London to UnLondon through the backs of wardrobes, Miéville doesn’t do this. Indeed, if you read reviews of the book, most reviewers don’t seem to see that it levels a challenge at all.

So if I were going to write that essay, I’d take these two principles and examine how they shape and are manifested through a few examples of tropes turned inside-out or against themselves. But I won’t, because (a) I’ve sort of already done all this in these columns, and (b) what’s the point? You don’t actually gain anything by writing or reading an essay like that.

To my mind, the interesting conclusion is that Un Lun Dun affords a great opportunity to consider how to revitalize a tired genre (or sub-genre). The novel manifests many stock tropes (more of them than I’ve listed, by a huge margin) in a more or less classic, recognizable form. Miéville doesn’t just reinvent, but ensures that these elements, however weird, fit smoothly into an expected pattern. At the same time, he subjects each to a more or less drastic weird-ification, as it were, making the tired seem new. Consider:

Portals and Passages

Magic portals are essential in much YA fantasy, because they facilitate not only travel from mundane Here to magical There but also allow plot complexity to be simplified. You don’t have to go on a quest to get to the Magical Destination, you just use Floo Powder. In Un Lun Dun transportation to UnLondon isn’t consistent, but:

TROPE: Magical windows are portals, in that the places onto which they open are not necessarily contiguous. By climbing through such a window, you can enter a different space, but if the window gets closed—especially if it’s then broken—the link can be destroyed and you might not be able to get back.

MANIFESTATION: Deeba and her friends need to acquire the UnGun, and it’s on the other side of such a window. The window is one of hundreds or thousands, so she also needs to find the right one. Once she enters, she’s got to grab the UnGun and get out quick, before she gets trapped.

WEIRD: These windows are alive, the bodies of gigantic spiders living in Webminster Abbey, and they eat their prey by shoving them through the window portals. So Deeba must catch the right spider, hold it fast, prop it open, and get in and out quick—all the while there are other spider-windows attacking.

Literalized Wordplay

From Terry Pratchett to J.K. Rowling to Neil Gaiman, we find mundane elements altered whimsically by means of wordplay. Miéville does the same thing, but with characteristically weird results.

TROPE: An object or place in the magical world is effectively a literal-ized pun or play on words with reference to something in the mundane world. This goes right the way back to the beginning of the genre, with Alice in Wonderland; to choose but one famous example, the Mock Turtle—a reference to the famous late-Victorian creation “mock turtle soup,” a beef-based substitute for the wildly expensive turtle soup (note that in the Tenniel illustrations, the Mock Turtle has a bull’s head).

MANIFESTATION: The double-decker buses in UnLondon—the iconic red London buses now long since phased out but still missed—are staffed (as the originals were) by a Driver and a Conductor. In the intermittently (and freakishly) hostile UnLondon, the Conductors are in charge of defense… and are armed with powerful electrical weaponry. (They conduct electricity, get it?)

WEIRD: Here one can’t really distinguish between the trope’s manifestation and its weird-ification, as was also already true with Lewis Carroll. Alternatively, you could read this backwards, such that the troped item is the double-decker bus itself (symbolic of London but not extant) made into a flying or crawling or otherwise bizarrely-moving alternative; then the weird-ification would be that the Conductors conduct electricity. Either way, the point stands.

Prophetic Verbiage

Perhaps the oldest of the tropes, as witness already the oracles of Delphi and Thebes: “the judgment given to Croesus by each of the two oracles was the same: namely, that if he should send an army against the Persians he would destroy a great empire” (ἢν στρατεύηται ἐπὶ Πέρσας, μεγάλην ἀρχὴν μιν καταλύσειν)—Herodotus, Histories I.53.3.

TROPE: There is language in the prophecy that everyone interprets one way but which is susceptible to an alternative reading which is the true one.

MANIFESTATION: In the book prophesying about Zanna the Shwazzy, it says that defeating the enemy will require “nothing and the UnGun.” Everyone figures this means “nothing but the UnGun,” but ultimately it is only once the UnGun is emptied and fired again (with nothing in the chambers) that it defeats the enemy.

WEIRD: The book of prophecy and the Propheseers are explicit about this problem, and reflect on it. What’s more, in the end, Deeba cheers up the (largely failed) book by noting that although everyone misread (indeed, amended) this passage, in fact it was exactly correct.

Before going on to the fourth and final part of this very extended essay, let me just recap briefly. 

Un Lun Dun takes standard trope elements and presents them in more or less expected form, inflected by Miéville’s imagination and sense of humor. At the same time, he deliberately imposes a weird-ification that is not simply cosmetic, destabilizing the trope. The effect is to make the familiar deeply strange and at the same time to make the strange oddly familiar (to borrow a different cliché). In some cases, this weird-ification is effected at a meta-level within the text, so that the book unfolds itself against the genre.

Next time, I’ll meditate on what we ought to learn from this.

As always, thanks for reading!