Un Lun Dun

London has been the inspiration for strange tales for as long as street lamps have cast their eerie light. China Miéville continues the tradition with Un Lun Dun, an urban adventure story that's both dark and light and shows off a verbal acuity so playful it could only be British.

Yet only a very small portion of the book actually takes place in the London that you and I know, and that's where the story begins. Teenagers Zanna (short for Susanna) Moon and her best friend Deeba Resham from the apartment building across the estate keep noticing strange things. First there was the cloud that looked just like Zanna, and then animals began watching her with a weird kind of reverence.

The two do some investigating that leads them to the cellar of a nearby highrise late at night. Impetuous Zanna nudges a large wheel on a pipe there and keeps turning it until the girls are no longer in a creepy earth-bound basement but "somewhere very else," a fantastic version of the city they live in. It's not London, but its bizarre upside-down self: UnLondon. Other cities have a funny flip side too, they soon learn: Parisn't, Helsunki, No York, Lost Angeles.

To say that a book or a piece of music is like such-and-such on acid is pretty corny, but the loony appearance of UnLondon, and the things that happen there, do make you wonder about Miéville's diet. Everything in UnLondon is like something in London, only not at all. Different neighborhoods have different personalities; there's Wraithtown, where the ghosts live, and the Rogueday Market, attended by creatures like giant lobsters wearing clothes and a tailor who uses his own head as a pin cushion.

Even the sun and moon are different: the former looks like a donut with its center missing, and the latter is spindle-shaped, "like the slit in a cat's eye." "Our way will be lit by the light of the loon," says one UnLondoner, and her serious delivery of that silly line is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's shoes and ships and sealing wax. Other iconic English writers who come to mind are Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, whose encouragement and novel *Neverwhere* (also set in an otherworldly London) are mentioned in the book's acknowledgments.

But Miéville is his own writer--his book is too clever, too likably odd to be a mere Frankenstein's monster made out of the parts of others. I even thought I detected a whiff of the socially aware punk rocker. After all, the book's central drama relates to The Great Smog of 1952 and Britain’s resulting air pollution legislation. Besides, Miéville is obviously a lover of obsolete and misfit things. UnLondon is made up of old junk from Zanna and Deeba's world, which makes the novel read like the secret life of city things. Trash talks, disused typewriters make building materials for eccentric-looking houses, and an army of animated broken umbrellas ends up playing a vital role in protecting the "abcity" against a toxic intruder.

But it's oddball words that take center stage. I could hardly get through a chapter without without letting out a laugh of genuine surprise and pleasure at the puns, like the name for an intrepid librarian who repels down sky-high shelves to retrieve books: a bookaneer. At one point Deeba meets the Speaker, who belches out words in the form of critters called utterlings ("cartography" has spidery legs and a fox's tail, and wears a bowler hat). He insists that Deeba teach him new words, and when "diss" and "bling" pop out they're strong and vibrant because of their newness--and they go on to help save UnLondon.

The uncity is populated with wordplay that often propels the story forward, which was enough to keep me reading when the story started to drag. I should amend that--the action didn't drag, it just didn't let up. Many young readers will no doubt find the adventure compelling, but it was a bit too drawn-out for my taste. In a way the novel feels like a screenplay, ready to have its delightful ideas translated to the purely visual, the action condensed. Either that, or it's a good choice for reading aloud to younger kids, doled out in cliffhanging doses like an old-school radio drama. Sounds like something Miéville himself would enjoy.