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Active Citizenship > All Fiction Has an Agenda:
Political Activism in China Miéville's Un Lun Dun and Other
Great Works of Young Adult Literature
All Fiction Has an Agenda: Political Activism
in China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun and Other
Great Works of Young Adult Literature
By Chris Schluep
Young Adult literature is experiencing
an upswing in popularity among readers and publishers these days.
Authors like Stephenie Meyer, Christopher Paolini, and J. K. Rowling
are blazing a hot path for the genre, and as the field expands,
interesting questions are being raised about YA’s role in
the culture and in the marketplace. While the main goal in publishing
YA books will always be to entertain, is it possible to aim toward
a higher purpose as well? One of the questions that I’m
particularly interested in is whether YA books are an appropriate
vehicle to promote activism among younger readers.
Since Young Adult books span the gap between childhood and adulthood,
it seems like the perfect genre in which to focus on elevating
minds. But activism in fiction is a tricky subject. No one likes
being preached to, and we all know that a book can be easily closed
and set aside, never to be opened again. Still, as China Miéville,
author of the New York Times bestseller Un
Lun Dun, put it to me: “If people are concerned
about so-called ‘activism’ in writing, they might
remember that all fiction, whether it knows it or not, comes with
agenda.”
Although I couldn’t agree more with this statement, I know
that many people see fiction as just another form of entertainment.
In their eyes, nonfiction is the natural arena for promoting activism—recent
nonfiction titles like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth
and Bill Clinton’s Giving:
How Each of Us Can Change the World certainly add to
that conviction. Giving also highlights the work of one Dr. Paul
Farmer whose work providing medical care to the world’s
poor is unprecedented and inspirational. Paul Farmer’s full
story is covered in the bestselling and widely college-adopted
book Mountains
Beyond Mountains. But it’s possible to have your
cake and eat it too, in my opinion, and there are numerous examples
of fiction titles whose stories have managed to transcend their
time, make a dent in popular culture, and help to create a new
language of activism among readers—books like Fahrenheit
451, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath,
and even Huckleberry
Finn are some of the more classic examples. These are
books that manage both to entertain and aim their readers toward
a higher purpose. In my opinion, that’s the best of both
worlds.
And indeed, there’s a surprising amount of activism in Young
Adult literature. According to my quick review of Wikipedia, the
1950s presented the advent of YA literature—or, as it was
known back then, “teen literature”—with the
publication of Lord
of the Flies and Catcher in the Rye. These are
not light books, and there are clear messages presented within
the pages of both of these fine novels. Fast forward to the present,
and you’ll not just run past Judy
Blume’s books, but also books on rape, incest, drug
use, physical abuse—the list of difficult subjects seems
endless. Surely, these books are making a positive difference
in young people’s lives.
While China Miéville’s first foray into the Young
Adult market doesn’t address such disturbing subjects as
those listed above, as his editor, I was very interested in seeing
how he weaved his messages into Un Lun Dun. I’m
well aware that he’s a socialist—in fact, he ran for
the British Parliament a few years back. (While he didn’t
win, he did get declared “the sexiest man in British politics”
by the Guardian, a compliment that China attributes to a lack
of any serious competition.) When China writes his adult fiction,
his politics are always teetering at the edges of his story, motivating
both characters and plotlines. But Un Lun Dun seemed
much more subtle—and that, to me, is the best way to handle
things in the YA field.
Two of China’s main messages revolve around environmentalism
and that eternal mainstay of fantasy fiction, “the Chosen
One.” In Un Lun Dun, a girl named Zanna is prophesied
to save both London and its shadowy, through-the-looking-glass
twin city of UnLondon from a dark Smog that is slowly trying to
take over. When I asked China about the Smog and its obvious relationship
to pollution in our own real world, he admitted to me that he
only created the Smog because he thought it would be “a
cool monster.” Any environmental message was strictly secondary
to his desire to write a good story with a scary threat. That
sounded good to me, and I can’t help thinking that young
adult readers, who are undoubtedly smarter than we give them credit
for, would quickly pick up on whether a book was trying to force-feed
them an environmental message. When message gets in the way of
the story, it’s a surefire recipe for disaster.
But on the subject of the Chosen One, China had a real agenda.
He himself admits to being “kind of a sidekick” during
his youth, and it was very important for him to send the message
to young readers that there’s no need to feel helpless if
they’re not the typical alpha, always waiting for a savior,
but rather that it’s possible to test fate and make decisions
for yourself regardless of whether you’re more like Robin
than Batman. In Un Lun Dun, the Chosen One doesn’t
have all the answers; for once, the prophesies turn out to be
wrong—and in the end it’s the sidekick that saves
the day! This seems like an essential lesson to teach young readers:
that of independence and self determination no matter your assumed
lot in life. It’s the kind of message that shouldn’t
wait until adulthood.
My favorite moment in the book comes well into the story, in chapter
thirty-six, when the sidekick, Deeba, is safely back in London
where she could easily forget about the problems over in UnLondon.
She isn’t the Chosen One—she’s just someone—and
no one is counting on her to help:
It’ll be fine, Deeba thought, You
saw how Brokkenbroll and Jones and the binja got on.
But she was never a hundred percent convinced.
Besides. . . she found herself starting to think. She got ashamed
of herself then. Because the thought that had been creeping out
was Besides, even if something terrible does happen, you don’t
need to know about it.
How many of us have had that thought before? I know I have. But
Deeba fights the impulse to ignore someone else’s problems
(otherwise the book would only be 141 pages long), and she makes
up her mind to get back to UnLondon and do her best to help. It’s
a moving piece of narrative and a wonderful message to send to
readers—not just young ones, but adults as well.
That’s activism in the strictest, most important sense,
and we can only hope to see more of that kind of message in the
future.
CHRIS SCHLUEP is an editor
at the Random House Publishing Group.
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