China Miéville, Un Lun Dun (part 2)
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Sherif Guirguis, The Chronicles of Agartha: Book 1 The Green Boy. Description:
Enter Inner Earth, Agartha, a land where the color of your soul's Aura defines you. Ethan, a fourteen-year-old young man, discovers he has a green aura, the last of an extinct race. He leaves the secret school of Nafoura in search of the truth of his own origins, in a desperate search to find a home to call his own. Joined by a girl from our earth, Mara, and an exiled shapeshifter, Darren; Ethan must seek the Chronicler of Agartha, a mythical being rumored to have all the answers. But there is another who is chasing them doggedly, the woman who killed off the green nation, Ethan's people, and she has placed a huge price on Ethan's capture. Unaware of the reward for his capture, Ethan rushes forward to his destiny, inadvertently stepping into the web on an ancient prophecy, one that might spell salvation or doom for his and our world. Will Ethan achieve his goal, or will he doom two worlds in his quest? If you liked the Golden compass, you will love The Green Boy
Continuing discussion of China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun — WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
The setup of Un Lun Dun, which is about a quarter of it, give or take, establishes all those classic YA tropes I mentioned last time, in rapid-fire manner. UnLondon is a deeply weird Parallel Magical World into which come London council estate dwellers Zanna and her pal Deeba. UnLondon is at war with the Smog, which is unrelievedly evil, but Zanna is the Shwazzy—the choisi, the chosen one—and there’s a self-explaining prophecy book that details the quests she needs to undertake to save UnLondon. Zanna is tall and blonde and a little vague but brave; Deeba is short and dark and roundish and loyal but not very interesting. The denizens of UnLondon are humorous, whimsical spins on ordinary people and things: the tailor who makes clothes from newspapers and books so you can read and learn from your clothes, and whose head is essentially a giant pincushion; the little forgotten milk carton which joins our heroes as a sweet and loyal pet; the conductor of a classic red London double-decker bus (although this one flies) who fights a brave and lonely battle to ensure that his passengers get to their destinations safe and sound….
So far, so usual, albeit it’s a lot weirder than usual because Miéville is weirder than usual.
But
In the first real battle, Zanna gets whacked on the head and poisoned by the Smog, which isn’t supposed to happen according to the prophecy, and to save her Deeba carts her back to the normal London where she does get mostly better, but remembers nothing. And Deeba, who turns out to be cleverer than we’d realized, starts to figure out that pretty much the whole story they got told in UnLondon is a tissue of lies. Something is seriously wrong in UnLondon, and nobody knows about it. Yet the Shwazzy is out of action—permanently.
So what about Deeba, who’s not the Shwazzy and doesn’t have special powers and isn’t apparently all that important or interesting? She decides she’d better pull up her boots and deal with this, because UnLondon needs help, and it seems there’s nobody to do it but her.
Wait, what? What about the prophecy?
Oh yeah, the prophecy. Well, turns out the bad guys have read it too, you see. I mean, it’s been around a while, right? So they know that X and Y are crucial turning-points, and they lay up to interfere. Which works. So the prophecy is broken, the Chosen One is hors de combat, and the bad guys are definitely going to win.
Except for short, dark, round Deeba.
Three glorious moments (among many) stand out to me for the point of this column.
1. Deeba is digging through the book of prophecy to figure out what was supposed to happen, and discovers, to her shock and humiliated rage that she is mentioned… as the Shwazzy’s “funny sidekick.”
2. After Part 1 of the Saving The Day Quest™ Deeba realizes they don’t have time for the whole set of seven steps. There’s just no way to do all these bits, which are essentially (1) get key A, (2) find and open door B, (3) infiltrate complex C, and so on and on. So she just skips to the last step, because we know the prophecy isn’t correct in the first place, and besides, why go through all this nonsense when you know where the endpoint is? I mean, what, because it’s the usual thing, it’s a trope, it’s the way it always works? Right—which is BS within this book and it’s also Miéville calling BS on the genre of which this book is a part.
3. At the end, Deeba has to say goodbye to all her friends in UnLondon. It’s time to make the choice: she can stay, or she can go home to her family, but not both. So sad, so moving… so BS:
“Come on,” she said, smiling. “What you even talking about, Mortar? It’s easy to get from London to here. I got here by turning a tap, then by climbing shelves. Jones is here, Rosa got here, all the conductors got here. The police came in a digging machine. For God’s sake, Unstible and Murgatroyd put an elevator in. People are always going between, and you don’t see either universe collapsing, do you?
“You just think it’s hard to go between the two ‘cause you’ve always thought it must be. You’re just saying that ‘cause you sort of think you should.”
And there it is in a nutshell. Everybody knows that you can’t just cross back and forth between the worlds, and there’s the prophecy that always works, and the Chosen One will save the day, and yadda yadda yadda. Except it’s BS. That’s what the narrow-minded authority types who police and patrol borders and lives want you to think. They of course have special powers or permission or whatever, but we mustn’t break the rules. But why not? I thought the whole point of the Parallel Magical World was that it does break rules!
And while we’re at it, shouldn’t YA fantasy empower young people to make their worlds for themselves, not obey authorities who tell them who and what they must be?
Un Lun Dun: punk YA fantasy, raging against the machine with wit and imagination.
Up to this point, we’ve seen that Un Lun Dun undermines the standard tropes of its genre (YA fantasy), and I’ve hinted at some of the humor and weirdness that so typify Miéville’s creations. But what I haven’t done is actually to analyze, to explain how any of this works at a deeper level. For me as a writer, that’s the interesting part: it’s where I begin to figure out what Miéville is really up to, and how I can derive inspiration and ideas from his achievements without just cheaply aping his work.
So next time, I’m going to start drilling down, and we’ll see what we find.
As always, thanks for reading!