Interview with China Miéville, author of Un Lun Dun   

WARNING: THIS DISCUSSION NECESSARILY INVOLVES MAJOR SPOILERS! 

Question: Do you consider Un Lun Dun to be a young adult novel?  It seems to be more accessible to that age-group than your other books.

China Miéville: Absolutely. No matter how much it means to me, no book embeds itself in my mind as deep as the ones I loved when I was young, and I would love to be able to do the same for younger readers. In addition, there's a certain kind of fairy-tale logic you can use in a YA book that you can't in an adult book, or at least not without tipping into a kind of mannered fabulism that, in adult fiction, I don't love. I couldn't use a character with a bottle of ink for a head in an adult book—I can in Un Lun Dun. 

Q: Some writers have turned to the YA market in search of a quick buck, trying to capitalize on J. K. Rowling's success, but others seem genuinely interested in the potential of books that approach traditional YA material from a more adult perspective.  I'm thinking here of Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, the short stories of Margo Lanagan, and others.  Is there something of a movement or trend going on, and if so, why is it happening now? 


CM: I do think this is an astonishingly good time for YA fiction—the books you mention, and also the works of Philip Reeve, David Almond, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker's YA work, Garth Nix, et many al. I honestly can't say why it's happening now. Fantastic fiction in general is going through an incredibly fecund and impressive period at the moment, and this YA boom is a subset of that. There's also an increasing awareness of the possibilities of YA fiction itself, reflected in part by the increasing number of adults reading it. Why now? Dunno, but it's great, isn't it?  
 

Q: You've written about your love of Michael de Larrabeiti's Borrible trilogy.  How did those books influence the writing of Un Lun Dun?   

CM:  They're incredibly important to me. I read them when I was very young and they have been part of my mental landscape ever since. I love the dark urban setting, the lack of sentimentality regarding the characters, the intricate Realpolitik of the stories, and de Larrabeiti's absolute refusal ever to talk down to his readers. They are also, obviously, passionately London books. Read them, you always see London differently—a vivid badland. My London, the London of all my writing, Un Lun Dun most of all, is a post–de Larrabeiti city. 
 


Q: What other writers or books were influential?  Your main character, Deeba, struck me as a worthy successor to Alice (of Alice in Wonderland). 

CM: Far too many to mention, in addition to which, I think writers are rarely systematically conscious of their own influences, so I may not be the best person to answer the question. But certainly the Alice books loom colossally large, so that's very flattering to hear. The London-based alternative history-set YA books of Joan Aiken have been hugely influential on me—there's more than a touch of Dido Twite to Deeba Resham. I loved Philip Pullman's trilogy, but ended up feeling frustrated with certain aspects of the third book, and have ended up "arguing" with them in various ways. Prince on a White Horse, by Tanith Lee. The tradition of "dark/underground London" represented in fiction by writers like Thomas de Quincey, Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, Neil Gaiman. Beatrix Potter, whose fiction might look a bit twee at first blush but isn't—it's dark and unsentimental and scary. The monsters and monstrous in Raymond Briggs’s, Fungus the Bogeyman.  I hesitate to admit it, but the Narnia books, despite my many and fervent problems with them, are pretty powerful presences for me, as often-guilty pleasures to be riffed off and as opposing visions to be argued with. And fairy tales—there are fairy tales and debates with them all over the place in Un Lun Dun, both traditional, as filtered through the likes of the Grimms and perhaps especially Andrew Lang, and more modern, especially those of Hans Christian Andersen. 
 

Q: A lot of the fun in Un Lun Dun comes from watching how you subvert the expectations instilled in readers by authors like Tolkien, Lewis, and, more recently, Rowling.  But notwithstanding the fun, it's clear that you're serious about attacking a whole set of assumptions in fantasy generally and YA fantasy in particular.  Can you address this? 

CM: I want to stress that while I am interested in that sort of thing, absolutely, I always try to make it so that if the reader isn't; the stories have sufficient narrative weight to pull the reader along. In other words, you really don't have to care about this stuff to enjoy the book. That said, yes, certain bugbears of mine are dealt with. Two linked things, above all—the question of "fate" and the question of "chosen ones." Ever since I was a little kid, the arrival of prophecies and fate in a book deflated me—if someone was Written In The Stars, then it more or less (with a very few exceptions) meant that I knew how it was going to turn out . . .  and how was that fun? It gave away the ending, and it undermined my interest in the characters, because they appeared to me like marionettes tugged along by this Fate thing. Precisely my respect and love for these characters made me strongly desire that their actions not be forewritten, but worked out by them. Linked to that was the whole question of the Chosen One, the hero who is a hero just by virtue of the fact that it is Fate that they will be a hero—this struck me as unsatisfactory and undeserved. Not to mention, where did that leave their friends? As also-rans, that's where—as sidekicks. The sidekick is a stock figure in fiction, and even when I was very young, I was really troubled by the notion of a character who is existentially defined by their subordination to another. It's a pretty terrible disrespectful way of conceiving of someone—they're not a friend, they're a subordinate. They exist in American fiction too, of course (who is Robin without Batman?), but there is a particularly vivid nostalgic English representation, like army officers pining for their loyal manservants. So Dan Dare has his Digby, Bulldog Drummond has his Tenny, and so on. And you can see it in modern versions. One problem I had with the first couple of Harry Potter books was the Wishing Hat's laudatory description of Hufflepuff as "loyal and true"—here are an entire group of people whose positive quality is that they are subordinate to—loyal and true to—other people. This is a dream representation of a butler class. I always thought sidekicks deserved to make the running for once. I was kind of a sidekick myself, you see. 
 


Q: Some novels are born in a flash; others accrue bit by bit out of small moments of inspiration and insight.  What was the genesis of this one?

CM: I'd been thinking about this book for a long time. Like most of my books, it was sort of accreted out of several images, which got strung together according to their prevailing mood, which then got linked by some sort of narrative. There are ideas in here I had literally 20 years ago and have been looking for a place for ever since. There are others that were invented in the moment. But the basic idea of doing a classic children's story, of finding your way into a magical realm, and doing it in a kind of messed-up alternate London, was something I'd been wanting to do for several years, and slowly layering. 

Q: Did you approach the writing of Un Lun Dun differently from your other work?  Was it difficult to find the right narrative tone?

CM: I was certainly nervous, because having never written a YA book before, I didn't know if it would work. Simply, I didn't know if I'd be able to do it. In the end it proved to be reasonably simple. I got up momentum very fast—I wrote, very fast—and didn't have to second-guess myself too much, once I'd got into a sort of particular mode. There were certain moments of self-policing, particularly with vocabulary. I indulge myself in fairly arcane words in my adult novels, and with Un Lun Dun I restrained myself rather more. I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often. Other thematic constraints—sex, cussing, etc.—were easy, because once you'd got into that zone, they sort of took care of themselves. I was still nervous—I didn't know if it would work—but it wasn't as hard as I'd feared.  

Q: Another delight of the novel is its plethora of strange and wonderful characters, from Brokkenbroll to Yorick Cuvea to the binja to Mr. Speaker and his utterlings.  It's this aspect of the book that reminded me most of your other work.  You seem to have an affinity for imagining bizarre yet compelling characters.   

CM: Well, thank you. Of all aspects of writing fantastic fiction, the one that never causes me tremendous difficulty is the grotesquerie, the strange figures, the monsters, basically. It's that Weirdness that is my biggest draw to the field by a long way, and it's something I indulge with great joy. The other stuff—narrative, characters, etc.—I sweat over as much as anyone, but the weird comes quite easily to me. The problem is the opposite—it's not putting in stuff just for the sake of it. I normally have to cut at least one or two encounters, because I realize they basically serve no purpose except for me to have another monster, so even though I love them, if they serve no plot purpose, I save them for another book. One of the great things about Un Lun Dun for me is that it's given me the excuse to use several monsters I've not been able to find a place for in other books. 
 

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the influence of surrealism on this book, and on your work in general? 

CM: Surrealism is a huge influence on me—particularly pictorial surrealism, especially the works of Max Ernst, but also Hans Bellmer, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Wilfredo Lam, and others. I think at its basic level, the weird that we were talking about earlier is a kind of pulp iteration of the estrangement that surrealism tries to create from everyday life. In fantasy for younger readers, the relationship is even more pronounced than for "adult" fantasy, because the dream-logic of surrealism doesn't have to be mediated by a self-consciously coherent "rationalist" or "internally consistent" logic of the world of the setting: an alien in an SF book may be very influenced by surrealism, but it also tends, at least to some extent, to obey certain rules of biology, to work within its own world. Even a traditional "fantasy" setting may justify things by some vague muttered reference to "magic," but that magic generally tries to be internally consistent according to this imagined world. By contrast, a YA book can simply actualize a surreal image without apology, because the logic is fairy-tale and/or dreamlike. Surrealism's notion of "convulsive beauty" was about the juxtaposition of objects and images in shocking new configurations (the classic quote from Lautréamont was about the "chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table"). To take the same example I used at the beginning, in a YA book I can just literally configure a human body with a bottle of ink, or a birdcage, as a head—that's "convulsive beauty" that doesn't have to explain itself, as it would even in SF or most adult fantasy. 
 

Q: You ran for election to the Commons as a socialist in 2001, and your Ph.D. thesis was about Marx and international law.  How do your political convictions intersect with your literary and artistic ambitions? 


CM: Both completely and not at all. Completely because my political convictions are an inextricable part of how I see the world, of which the stories I write are also an expression. Not at all because I know that my job when I write fiction isn't to make a certain political point but to keep the reader interested enough in the story, the characters, the weird, that they keep turning the pages whether they agree, disagree, or couldn't care less about my politics. There's actually, I think, no necessary contradiction there at all. I explore political ideas in my fiction, but because it is fiction, those ideas can never subordinate the story. And if you succeed in not subordinating the story, that politics will also be more sophisticatedly explored for those who are interested—and not hectoring for those who aren't. So the paradox is—and this is something that the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret wrote about very persuasively—a key to successfully writing political fiction is precisely to make it good fiction—if the politics are great but the fiction doesn't work, then it fails as fiction, and therefore as political fiction too. Which is great because if it succeeds as fiction, then even if you aren't interested in the politics, it's still (hopefully) worked for you. So yes, I do want to explore certain political ideas, and anyone who wants to find them in my books can—Un Lun Dun touches on the privatization of public services, the question of social agency versus overarching structure, the reactionary comforts of narrative, the ecological crisis and government complicity with that, and so on and on and on—but if you're not interested, then that's no problem because it is also a ripping yarn with lots of chases and fight scenes and cool monsters. And that's not a compromise—it makes the whole thing work better, I hope.  
 

Q: Will you be writing more about UnLondon? 

CM: Let's just say there are plenty of other stories I'd like to tell set in this universe, in UnLondon—and perhaps in some other places too. After all, UnLondon's not the only place in this universe. 
 

Q: Can readers look forward to a return to New Crobuzon and Bas-Lag? 


CM: Yes. I love Bas-Lag, and don't want to set more work there until I have a very clear idea that isn't derivative on the earlier books, but doesn't undermine them. There are several more Bas-Lag books I have in various degrees of planned-ness. I suspect it's a setting I'll be returning to at various points throughout my life.  
 


Q: Your latest collection, Looking for Jake, featured a graphic short story.  Do you have plans to do any more work in this medium, perhaps at longer length? 

CM: Certainly. I have several comics ideas I'd love to pursue. As with all these things it's a question of time! Finding time, making time, clearing time, etc. But once I've got one or two other projects out of the way, I'd love to pursue some comic writing more vigorously. I love comics passionately, and there are two things in particular I'd like to flesh out which I think readers would really enjoy. I've always wanted to write for comics, and now I'm thinking maybe I'd even give drawing them a try. I'm doing a lot of artwork at the moment—most importantly, I'm illustrating Un Lun Dun. 
 

Editor’s Note: Visit www.unlundun.com to view some of China’s illustrations from the world of Un Lun Dun.