f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Un Lun Dun [Author] China Miéville [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2007 [Read] 2014/12/24 [Review] 
British urban fantasy; think Gaiman crossed with Pratchett’s humor, but worse than either alone. Miéville thinks he can pull off Gaiman’s bildungsroman mythic double-world shtick with Pratchett’s pun humor and put in a hefty helping of his own Marxist people power politics & environmentalism, but he can’t. The plot, after an initial subversion of the Heroine’s Journey, settles back onto track, and most of the jokes are more wince-worthy than amusing (I did like the ‘binjas’ and the ‘Black Windows’ of ‘Webminster Abbey’, and the alternative city names like ‘Not York’, but that’s about all). There’s also a weird tendency where the story seems like it’s about to deliver a brutal punch to the reader and kill off a character gruesomely to continue the subversion of tropes, but then pulls aside at the last minute - characters tend to die offscreen and not be particularly remarked, and the Smog delivers some very villainous monologues but fails to follow up onscreen with appropriately horrifying actions, to be cleaned up with a plain old deus ex machina which is unusually lazy for Miéville. So, this isn’t a particularly good book for adult fans of Miéville but maybe it’s a good book for young teens? I couldn’t say.
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