of the three YP alternative-london fantasies i've read this year, china mieville's un lun dun is by far the most fertile, surreal, pun-filled and sophisticated. (skulduggery pleasant fell far below expectation - it wasn't at all thoughtful, and felt artificial (like a poorly-made movie) and conventional and unconvincing. darkside was quite good - the unseen london within london, ruled over by the descendants of jack the ripper, where there are still hackney coaches, taverns and inns, street urchins, pickpockets, beastiaries, freak shows, and beautiful women assassin/kidnappers with bright pink punk hair. atmospheric and frightening but not quite fully conceptualised and still too full of loose ends.

un lun dun, or un-london, is an abcity, a mirror city of london where all broken and (mildly) obsolete things go. (there's also a parisn't (quite the best one, i thought!), hong gone, no york, lost angeles, etc.) the city bureaucrats, the prophseers, have a talking book prophesising the coming the saviour, the shwazzy (pun: choisi), who will cross over from london, bringing them the secret weapon of the "klinneract" discovered by the london "armets," to help them fight the war against smog (in un-london, a thinking, animate, malevolent entity with a unappeasable hunger for burnt offerings.) as it turns out, klinneract = clean air act 1956, armets = royal meteorological society (RMetS). a quest story follows, but not what you expect from the premises. i loved it especially when the child protagonist defeats its captor (mr speaker of talklands, the owner of the only three telephones that can connect unlondon to london) by giving it a lesson on speech acts. and the vividness of images! a cathedral of black windows - web-spining window frames with black mirrored glass and eight legs, opening and shutting and climbing in and out of each other, man-eating giraffes from whose mouths corpses dangle like flags, broken umbrellas which have seeped through to un-london to beecome an army of un-brellas - commanded by an unbrellissimo called brokenbroll, and a house within which a primary forest exists - moss and lichen on the walls, brambles and thickets underfoot, creepers plaited through stair railings, sentient vines hanging from old gnarled trees, the distant gurgle of streams, and appearing from the undergrowth, tree frogs and snails, birds hidden in foliage.