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Mi\u00e9ville is a British fantasy writer, who — according to this Wikipedia entry<\/a><\/strong> — is fond of describing his work as “weird fiction (after early 20th century pulp and horror writers such as H.P. Lovecraft), and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird who consciously attempt to move fantasy away from commercial, genre clich\u00e9s of Tolkien epigons.” Known for his Arthur C. Clarke<\/a><\/strong>, Hugo<\/a><\/strong>, Nebula<\/a><\/strong>, British Fantasy<\/a><\/strong>, and World Fantasy<\/a><\/strong> award-winning or nominated adult novels (King Rat<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, Perdido Street Station<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, The Scar<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, and Iron Council<\/a><\/strong><\/em>), this is his first YA novel. According to Library Journal<\/em>, the major alteration made to this novel for the young adult crowd was that he omitted the eroticism evident in his other works.<\/p>\n The story begins with two London friends, Zanna (short for “Susannah”) and Deeba, both age twelve. Bizarre things start happening to Zanna, including animals greeting her with an awed reverence, her name appearing in graffiti (“Zanna For Ever!”), and strangers stopping her to excitedly gush over finally<\/em> meeting her, calling her “the Shwazzy.” There is no question for the two girls that something is awfully awry when a very broken but very-much-alive umbrella starts crawling up Zanna’s windowsill. Chasing the umbrella to the basement of the housing complex where she lives, the girls turn a wheel and end up in UnLondon, “London through the looking glass,” as the publisher likes to describe this title. Zanna soon figures out she is, indeed, the Shwazzy. Having already figured out the meaning in her high school French class (\u201cChoisi. Shwazzy. Chosen”), she sees in the surreal, fantastical UnLondon — where everything broken or discarded from London ends up (remember that umbrella? Once broken in London and no longer possessing a purpose, an item seeps through and becomes something else; hence, the “unbrellas,” as Mi\u00e9ville seems to be remarking on our disposable-everything society) — that she is “the chosen one” for the people of UnLondon, what Publishers Weekly<\/em> called “a Gaiman-esque wonderland of ghosts, zombies, walking garbage cans and sentient umbrellas.” <\/p>\n UnLondon is one of many “abcities” (some of the others being Lost Angeles, No York and Parisn’t). As someone explains to the girls upon their arrival, \u201c{a}bcities have existed at least as long as the cities . . . Each dreams the other. There are ways to get between the two, and a few people do, though very few know the truth. This is where the most energetic of London\u2019s discards come, and in exchange London takes a few of our ideas\u2014clothes, the waterwheel, the undernet.\u201d They are told that “{i}deas seep both ways” from London to UnLondon, but unfortunately, something else<\/em> seeps from one to the other: lots of nasty pollution from London to the abcity. That pollution has become a living, breathing, animated enemy of the town, The Smog. When the girls meet The Propheseers, the intellectuals of the abcity who own a talking book, which claims to have the prophecies and the fate of the Shwazzy all spelled out, the book tells them: <\/p>\n \u201cBack in your old queen\u2019s time . . . London filled up with factories, and all of them had chimneys. In houses they burnt coal. And the factories were burning everything, and letting off smoke from chemical sand poisons. And the crematoria, and the railways, and the power stations, all added their own effluvia . . . Add all that to the valley fog, and what you get\u2019s a smoke And the Smog? Well, it’s just damn scary. That’s about all I can say. You just need to read and experience it yourself. There are even terrifying Stink-junkies, the Smog\u2019s “addict-slaves.” There is also an unforgettable fructbot; the UnGun; a character with a bird cage for a noggin; the UnSun, shaped like a giant doughnut and floating all over the sky (“the bit missing from the middle of the UnSun was what became the sun of London . . . what lights your days got plucked out of what lights ours,\u201d Deeba is told); Puzzleborough, a housing development not unlike a game in which a picture is chopped into squares, one is taken out, and all the pieces slide around; The Black Window in Webminster Abbey, the plu-perfect predator; a pet milk carton (“Curdle”); a half-boy-half-ghost named Hemi; and the delightfully creepy yet hysterical Mr. Speaker and his utterlings. <\/p>\n
stew . . . Yellow-brown and sitting on the city like a stinking dog. . . . At first, it was just a dirty cloud. Nasty but brainless as a stump. But then something happened. There were so many chemicals swilling around in it that they reacted together. The gases and liquid vapor and brick dust and bone dust and acids and alkalis, fired through by lightning, heated up and cooled down, tickled by electric wires and stirred up by the wind\u2014they reacted together and made an enormous, diffuse cloud-brain. The smog started to think. And that\u2019s when it became the Smog.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a>Mr. Speaker is a man with a misshapen and extended head, an astonishingly loud voice, and an enourmous mouth from which living “animal-things” slip with each of his words, \u201cscuttle like a millipede down his shirt, and disappear
. . . {they} seemed to coalesce and drop from behind his teeth. They were small, and each a completely different shape. They flew or crawled or slithered into the room, where, Deeba realized, hundreds of other creatures waited.” Our hero — in an attempt to get past Mr. Speaker — pays<\/em> him in words he hadn\u2019t heard before (\u201cbling,\u201d whose animal-thing slipping from Mr. Speaker’s mouth is \u201c{a} big silver-furred locust”; \u201clairy,\u201d \u201ca baby-sized thing with one staring eye\u201d; and “diss,” a \u201csix-legged brown bear cub”). Mr. Speaker cries in delight over the “slang utterlings,” and our hero secures her escape. “Words,” she further tells him, “don\u2019t always mean what we want them to . . . you could only make words do what you want if it was just you deciding what they mean. But it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s everyone else, too. Which means you might want to give them orders, but you aren\u2019t in total control. No one is
. . . So, you might think all these words have to obey you. But they don\u2019t.” It is an unforgettable scene that is, at turns, dark, hysterical, thought-provoking (what with Mi\u00e9ville’s commentary on the ephemeral nature of words), and wholly original and clever. {One of Mi\u00e9ville’s illustrations from the novel, an image of Mr. Speaker, is pictured here, used with permission from Random House. Mi\u00e9ville sparsely populates the book with some illustrations of his own, but they never overwhelm; in other words, thankfully, he leaves a lot to our imaginations. To see other illustrations from the book, visit this Random House page<\/a><\/strong> for the novel and click on “illustrations”} . . . <\/p>\n