Books: Un Lun Dun, The Hunger Games

[liv]

Author: China Miéville

Details: (c) 2007 China Miéville; Pub Del Rey Books 2007; ISBN 978-0-345-49723-9

Verdict: Un Lun Dun is a timely update to classic children's fantasy, but not quite outstanding for an adult reader.

Reasons for reading it: I've heard good things about Miéville, and I loved the idea of a book about an alternate London written partly in response to Gaiman's Neverwhere

How it came into my hands: I pretended to Books on Board that I'm American.

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Author: Suzanne Collins

Details: (c) 2008 Suzanne Collins; Pub Scholastic Ltd 2009; ISBN 978-1407-11168-1

Verdict: The Hunger Games handles an unpromising theme well.

Reasons for reading it: Everybody has been raving about Collins' trilogy, so I was intrigued to try it.

How it came into my hands: jack lent it to me.

I actually read Un Lun Dun a while back, but hadn't got round to reviewing it, and it occurred to me when I was planning my review of The Hunger Games that there are enough similarities that it makes sense to review them together.

The thing is, both are almost aggressively modern takes on very traditional stories. Both follow a teenaged protagonist suddenly thrust into fighting to save the world and herself, both present real dangers and frequently kill off characters, both do a lot of background wordbuilding around the adventure arc, and both have a lot of personal growth alongside conquering the external dangers. I think most interestingly, though, both protagonists are female, dark-complexioned (though their exact racial identity is carefully ambiguous), and decidedly working-class – and fighting against corrupt, decadent, spoiled rich folk. So there's something very zeitgeisty about this. Miéville does class issues reasonably subtly; he mostly avoids heavy-handedness, he just casually mentions Deeba living on an estate and attending a comprehensive and her language is very much contemporary inner city teenager, without being exaggerated mockney. Collins seesaws a bit between allegories of modern working class / underclass oppression, and fairy-tale tradition romanticized poverty, so it's hard to tell if she's challenging tropes or repeating them. Katniss speaks like people in books, but I suspect this reflects the fact that Collins isn't much of a wordsmith, rather than a deliberate attempt to make her acceptable to middle-class readers. I do think it's telling that Un Lun Dun has the city, rather than the protag, on the cover, and none of the illustrations (which are totally gorgeous and one of the best aspects of the book) show any human being at all. And The Hunger Games has the secondary character pictured, not the protag; it's hard to believe that it's a total coincidence that he just happens to be male and blond.

Both books are doing interesting things with the archetypal character relationships genre expectations would predict. tHG has a female protagonist who is pragmatic and focused on her task, and a male love-interest who is hopelessly in love with her and spends a lot of the time pining after her and needing to be rescued. Not exactly radical, but particularly in otherwise rather formulaic YA stuff that's nice to see. The more so as the book is blurbed by Stephanie Meyer, so it's clearly marketed to, and designed to provide an antidote for, Twilight and its clones. In general I really liked the presentation of the romance and sexuality related issues here; even though the setting is bizarre and extreme, there's a level of realism to the portrayal of two teenagers being pressured by adults around them to act out being adorably in love, while at the same time having complicated feelings for eachother that don't necessarily fit into romance trope boxes.

ULD kind of won my heart straight away by presenting the story from the point of view of the sidekick. I've always identified with sidekick characters, from a really young age. It's a cliché that everyone is the hero of their own story, but I'm not sure I am, I think I'm the sidekick of my own story. I relate very much to characters who hang about in the background organizing practical things so that the Chosen One can follow their dream without having to worry too much about inconvenient reality: Sancho Panza, the serving girl in fairy stories, Sam in LotR, and especially Diana Barry in the Anne books. So I'm a complete sucker for a story where the sidekick has to save the day because the prophecy about the Chosen One goes wrong. I think the only thing that would have made me like it better would be if the actual Chosen One, Zanna, didn't get written out of the story fairly early on, because I love love love hero-sidekick relationships, and leaving Deeba on her own deprived me of that.

tHG has a lot of story momentum, but the characterization and worldbuilding are a little weak. The idea of reality TV where contestants actually get killed isn't very original, and the whole set-up made most aspects of the ending rather obvious. That said, the first two parts, introducing Katniss as a character and then her preparation for the Games turned out to be surprisingly emotionally powerful. I expected to be disappointed once we actually get to the Hunger Games arena, since it was perfectly obvious that Katniss would defeat the other contestants by a mixture of luck and cleverness, and I didn't really care about the details. However the story definitely did keep me engaged, and the exact machinations of Katniss' success had a few surprising twists. If I were actually a teenager who hadn't read much in this sort of genre, I would probably have found it more surprising, too. Although it's partly just setting up for the sequels, I appreciated the way that the ending acknowledges that Katniss winning the games doesn't change the underlying situation.

ULD has almost the opposite problem; it's very inventive, there are fantastic descriptions of the parallel dimension London and its wacky inhabitants and situations. Really delightful to read. But story-wise it kind of drags; there's an awful lot of Deeba just wandering around encountering cool stuff. Still, the cool stuff is very cool; I particularly loved Mr Speaker and the Utterlings, and the original way the story deals with the time-old issue of what happens back home when the protag disappears to a parallel reality for weeks on end, as well as the more modern problem of how to have adventures in an era of smart phones. Having a literal personification of industrial pollution as the antagonist is very clever, and again contributes to making the book very much the thing of the moment. I think both books over-explain stuff, which is partly just YA genre conventions, but I find it even more annoying now than I did as a teenager. I couldn't decide whether I loved or hated Miéville's cute language games and subtle allusions for the older or wider-read audience, but anyway, they are there.

I might well have passionately loved Un Lun Dun if it had been written when I was the right age for it. And if I had been desperately thirsting for a story of a (probably British Asian), working class, not particularly beautiful female protagonist succeeding through her wits rather than her amazing sparkliness, I could well have glommed on to it hard. Reading as an adult, I'm definitely interested in the way that both these books so clearly belong in a world where their intended audience can be assumed to have read both Harry Potter and Twilight, and provide something with more depth but still accessible to people who haven't read much else. I think Scott Westerfeld is probably doing this kind of thing better, but these books do go a long way to convince me that the next generation of readers will have classics to feed their future nostalgia!

Comments

[simont]

By coincidence I got Un Lun Dun out of the library a few weeks ago, so it's fresh in my mind too.

The thing that struck me most about it was the fact that the prophecy was wrong, or at least large parts of it were. In my experience of fantasy it's a pretty much unbreakable rule that in a magic-supporting universe, prophecies must come true once made. Of course there are a number of common get-outs for not having it work out quite as you expect: it only told a half-truth or a cryptic truth, it was literally true but people read the wrong implications into it, it happened and then something else happened that nullified its effect, etc. (E.g. there's one book in my collection where the evil bad guy prophesies that one of the heroes will come to him and kneel at his feet – which she does indeed do, but as a means of ducking an attack just before stabbing him to death. And in another, the prophecy says that you have to bring the three plot coupons together if disaster is to be averted – but turns out to have been addressed to the bad guys, so when the good guys duly follow the instructions they suddenly have a real problem on their hands.) On rare occasions a prophecy is explicitly tagged as a might-be rather than a will-be, in which case it's fair game to anticipate the train of events which will lead to the prophesied event and disrupt it somehow, but any prophecy not so tagged is something you can bet on happening by the end of the book or series.

I'm actually not sure I can bring to mind any other work of fantasy in which a prophecy doesn't come true at all and the response is "oh, well, it must just have been wrong then, there you go".

[liv]

I agree that the wrong prophecy is very surprising. I spent most of the book expecting that the prophecy was going to turn out to be right after all, just in a twisted way, such as referring to events later than the ones they thought it was referring too. I did love the bits where the Book sulks about being found at fault, though!

I concluded in the end that Miéville is doing Pullman-style propaganda with this device: not only do you not have to be tall, slender and blonde to save the world, but you don't always have to do what The Book says. There's a very prominent theme about challenging authority, whether politicians or Propheseers. And you can't write a story about an ordinary person triumphing because she's willing to stand up to authority, but then spoil it by saying that she must absolutely obey everything that's written down.

[simont]

True, although prophecies need not be things to be obeyed. In fact they're often at their worst when they are, since that's when they turn into an excuse to introduce random plot twists without having to think up any actual motivation. (I think The Malloreon is the worst case of this I know, since it basically stretches that principle out into a whole five-book series, but there are plenty of others.) The best kind of prophecies are the ones that say "this will happen whether you like it or not, perhaps even as a direct consequence of you trying to avoid it", which is much more about straight foreknowledge than moral authority.

[rmc28]

I agree with you that Miéville is doing propaganda, or at least pointing up the issues with assuming Prophecies Are Always True. I read Un Lun Dun 2.5 years ago and most of the details have blurred, but I remember really loving the subversion of the fantasy quest tropes.

[liv]

Yes, I totally loved the bit where Deeba is supposed to find seven magical objects, and she says, to hell with this, let's skip to the bit where we use object seven to save the day! It's a beautiful dig at lazy plotting as well as protags who just do whatever they're told without applying any independent thought.

[simont]

but I'm not sure I am, I think I'm the sidekick of my own story

That's reminding me strongly of gnimmel's post from this time last year, http://gnimmel.livejournal.com/101710.html .