China Miéville - Un Lun Dun

Miéville's first foray into "childrens' literature", and very nicely done it is, too. Un Lun Dun has the weirdness of his other work, but it's less dark and more whimsical, and also less dense, all of which works well (not least given the book's intended audience). It doesn't have the darkness of the Borribles books or the creepy unnervingness of Coraline, say, though I think it has some affinities with both, but neither is what Miéville is shooting for here. One thing that the novel does have is an endless inventiveness - as always with him, there are countless images to savour which appear fully-formed in the mind's eye (not to mention the generous number of illustrations, drawn by Miéville himself, which appear throughout) and, in this one in particular, he really goes to town with verbal invention as well. The explorer with a birdcage containing a bird for a head (actually, the bird is the explorer, using a human torso and limbs as a vehicle), the super-strong diving suit-enclosed school of fish (named "Skool", of course), the heroic bus conductors (and buses with feet), the killer giraffes, the binja, the words-come-to-life ("utterlings"), the intelligent broken umbrellas ("unbrellas"), and Curdle the milk carton, to name just a few...